Success is created through the performance of a few small daily disciplines that stack up over time to produce achievements far beyond anything you could of ever planned for. Failure, on the other hand, is just as easy to slip into. Failure’s is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of a few small acts of daily neglect performed consistently over time so that they take you past the point of no return.
| The comfort challenge. Get in line at a coffee shop. One that’s got like a five minute line or ten. Calmly lie down on the ground and cross your hands on your belly. If someone asks if you’re alright reply yup just taking a rest. Then get up after ten seconds and go about your day. |
| In diagnosing your own weaknesses, commit to the Five Whys. When identifying a weakness, ask why it exists. Once that reason is uncovered, ask yourself again why. Continue on until you uncover your own issues or failures or weaknesses. Design fixes based on this root diagnosis to eliminate the weakness. |
| A practice to follow: Take the 5-10 people in the world you admire most, and form an imaginary Council. Call them “The Invisible Counselors.” Every night, hold an imaginary council meeting. In bed, shut your eyes and enter the roundtable, and sit among greatness. But, serve as the Chairman. Build the council over time. |
| I have found, for example, that if I have to write up some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity, the greatest intensity of which I am capable – for hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution on the sooner for the worry, and the intervening month were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits. |
| Tip for remembering information: if you have learned a great tip, put it into practice, ideally within 1-2 days; then refresh your memory at 2 week and 2-month intervals (go through your notes). |
| Close your eyes and try to imagine that through some coincidence you were born as the person standing next to you. Try to imagine what the world looks like through their eyes. |
| Have walking meetings rather than meetings in a conference room. |
| What to do in the First 5 Minutes of Meeting Someone 1. Show genuine enthusiasm for meeting (and focus on them exclusively) 2. Offer a compliment If you notice something about the person you’ve just met that you can compliment them about, do it right away. Or if you know of a recent accomplishment of theirs. If nothing else, ask a question or two that can lead to information you can later compliment them on. 3. Ask questions (at least 2 or 3) that are open-ended Conversations die or turn into monologues when they aren’t propelled forward by good questions 4. Find something you share Makes it easier to connect with someone. Sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper to find it 5. Say their name before you leave, and commit key facts to memory Sprinkle their name throughout conversation. Especially when saying hello and goodbye Key facts are for next time. It’ll help you stand out in their memory, and make them look forward to connecting with you again – because for some reason or other, they find that they just like you. “Most people love to talk about themselves and will like anybody who will earnestly listen. So do not be tempted to be that person, natural as it may be. Treat the first five minutes as a quiz, and that at the end of five minutes, you have to write about that person in an essay. This is CHARM: consideration of others. Their feelings, desires; and needs. All above your own.” |
| Wim Hof Breathing method Get comfortable Sit in a meditation posture, whatever is most comfortable for you. Make sure you can expand your lungs freely without feeling any constriction. It is recommended to do this practice right after waking up since your stomach is still empty or before a meal. 30 Power Breaths Imagine you’re blowing up a balloon. Inhale through the nose or mouth and exhale through the mouth in short but powerful bursts. Keep a steady pace and use your midriff fully. Close your eyes and do this around 30 times. Symptoms could be light-headedness, tingling sensations in the body. Then Hold, retention after exhalation After the 30 rapid successions of breath cycles, draw the breath in once more and fill the lungs to maximum capacity without using any force. Then let the air out and hold for as long as you can without force. Hold the breath until you experience the gasp reflex. Recovery Breath Inhale to full capacity. Feel your chest expanding. When you are at full capacity, hold the breath for around 10 seconds and this will be round one. The breathing exercise can be repeated 3 rounds after each other. After having completed the breathing exercise take your time to enjoy the feeling afterward. This feeling will be more and more like a meditation. When you start doing these exercises we recommend to take your time recovering from the breathing exercise. After doing the breathing exercise and you feel good, you can start with taking the cold shower. |
| Writing each step you do on paper, while doing it. I simply write what I’m doing (the current step, or the next step), on paper. If for a step (which I have already written on paper), I find that I must first do a sub-step, then I write the sub-step. The result is a log of what I’ve done and what I’m doing. The great advantage of this is that if I get distracted, I can return to just where I left off, by just reading the last line or the last few lines I written on paper. |
| Narrate everything you do as you do it. |
| Concentrate your thoughts for 30 minutes per day, thinking of the person you intend to become, thereby creating in your mind a clear mental picture of that person. |
| For something you are passionate, find a KPI you can improve week over week. |
| Act under the presupposition that people have something interesting to reveal. If you can get people talking they are so interesting you can hardly stand it. Because they have these idiosyncratic experiences that are only theirs. No one else can tell the stories from within the walls of their heads, and those are the stories you want to hear. You can treat the landscape of strangers as an endless vista of things you didn’t know. |
| The secret to talking to everyone: simply let them into your inner monologue. |
| Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored for. |
| Minimize your variables. Minimize choice. |
| Keep your suffering to yourself. Pain and complaining is contagious. |
| Don’t focus on not taking the shot. He focuses on making the shot. The idea being it is all about how you frame the task at hand in order to create a frame for success. |
| You are an energy wasting machine. You are not operating at full efficiency. Find a way to optimize this before going further (like poor technique before time to finish). Efficiency isn’t natural but it is leamable for anyone. And you can improve continually. |
| Waking up early and training puts you in the mentality that you are working harder than your enemy. |
| Have a lifestyle that is less input addictive. Be aware of how we fill space in life addictively. Whenever we have empty space, we fill it. But that empty space is where we notice the clarity and perception of our self. Find the silence. Because you need to listen to the silence. |
| If you really pay attention to what people say, they will tell you everything. If you reflect back to them something they did not know about themselves, you can help them in more than one way. |
| Write for 10 minutes how you can be 1% better tomorrow. Do this every day. |
| Tim Ferris challenge: Have to keep to a promise. If you don’t, you have to donate $100 to your anti charity, and make it public (like donating to the American Nazi party and have your name listed as a donor). |
| Practice gratitude with everything you do. We can think about the same experience in many different ways. It is our choice to choose our perception of our experience. |
| “Act as if”. In everything you do act as if you are already the incredibly confident man you want to be. If you’re not sure what action to take, think to yourself “What would someone with supreme confidence do right now?” and then do that. |
| Premeditatio malorum, in which you imagine misfortunes that could befall you and think about how you will meet them with strength and grace, as they are “indifferent,” are not up to us, and are therefore not evils. |
| When suffering, allow the suffering to persist for 90 seconds. Then let go and find the beauty in the moment, or just something beautiful that exists in front of you in that moment. A person in a beautiful state cannot do harm to another person. Suffering begets more suffering. |
| To start, try a zen “100 breaths” approach I learned in Japan – Take deep breaths while counting to 100 (count breaths, not seconds). If you lose count, start over. Continue until you reach 100 breaths or a total of 5 minutes. |
| Two exercises: Catch excuses and reframe. Use a small notebook or your phone to write down every time you find yourself making an excuse. Reframe the excuse into an actionable point. (“I’m hot and life sucks.”-> “Maybe I can slow my heart rate down with breathing exercises and it won’t be so hot… “) Track your day. Reflect. Spend an hour tracking everything you do in a single day. Every minute of it-what you ate, where you shit, what people you met. Let it sit for a few days, then review it as if you were looking at another person. How in line is that person’s behavior with their goals? |
| For the next week observe yourself. Do you say “yes” when you would rather say “no”? Do you agree to do something to avoid conflict? Do you avoid doing something because someone might get upset at you? Do you tolerate an intolerable situation, hoping that it will just go away? Write these observations down. |
| What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales? If you do not know, you are either doing something wrong or not doing enough. |
| Ask people in a casual conversation: What are the open tabs on your browser right now? |
| Make a weekly inventory of what you learned that week. |
| When you wake up in the morning, get outside as quick as you can. Getting the eyes under the sun enables photo receptors at the bottom of the eyes to recognize that it is now day, and set the circadian rhythm accordingly. Get 2-10 minutes, and avoid your phone at all costs. False dopamine hits set a tone for the day as well. If possible, get 5-10 minutes of light exercise in. Jog, walk, jump rope. Get moving. |
| Breathing technique: Two breathes in, one out. One breath, pause, one more in. Then out. |
| Lucid dream to ask your subconscious Dream characters what they are looking for or trying to solve for or What kind of information they were trying to convey. Knights of King Arthur look for the holy grail Real is the container of the redemptive substance. Where do you look when you don’t know where to look for something you need desperately that you have lost? Each of the nights go into the forest to the darkest point or the point that looks darkest to him. And that’s Jungian psychoanalysis in a nutshell. That which you fear and avoid and that which you hold in contempt. That which disgusts you and which you avoid, that’s the gateway to what you need to know. Deliberately evoking Fantasy in a waking state Into it as a drama. These Fantasies might be understood as a form of dramatized thinking in pictorial form. The question that was posed with what might take place if you switch off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity and Jung wanted to give this a possibility of emerging just as One does when taking mescaline. Jung describe this is a voyage or what he described as the voyage of discovery to the other pole. Jung believed we were dreaming all the time. During waking life the pressure of external images were as such that the unconscious fantasy imagery was of insufficient magnitude to be conscious. We were always situated in a dream in relationship to the world. Tapping into a lucid dream may help find answers to problems your conscious self may not even be aware of due to them being suppressed in the awakened state. Seek out these problems and these answers. Write about them. |