Never wish ill will on anybody. Don’t hold grudges. Be positive. If someone wronged you in years past, forgive them. Wishing them unhappiness means that you still have bitterness in your heart. Let it go. You will be happier for it.
Category: mindset
Reading vs experiencing
Reading about something is not the same as experiencing it. A lot can be learned from reading, so this is not trying to discredit reading at all. But being a part of something/experiencing it is completely different than looking at it from the outside-in.
For example, I can read about D-Day, but I will never know what a soldier experienced during that battle. Or I can read about Yellowstone National Park is, but I can only imagine what it’s like to see it in person.
Read often and read broadly. It’s nice to have a good knowledge base of many subjects. But be humble enough to know that just because you’ve read about something doesn’t mean that you truly understand it. Go experience things as often as you can. When it comes to trying something new or going somewhere you’ve never been before, say yes. Because there is no substitute for experience.
Maturity is doing what is best for you, not necessarily what feels good
Prioritize what is important to you. Every decision you make has short-term and long-term consequences. Most of the time, if you can do what’s best for the long-term, you will eventually win. Sometimes that means delaying gratification (not doing what is fun/feels good right now). Dave Ramsey calls that maturity.
Work smarter, then work harder
Work smarter, then work harder. It takes both to become the best at your profession.
Take the 80/20 rule first. 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your effort. This is where the “work smarter” portion comes into play. If you ignore the 20 percent of the work that is getting the most results, you’ll be working tirelessly and seeing almost nothing in return. So make sure you are smart about where you are focusing your attention.
From there, you have to work harder if you want to achieve excellence. The first 80 percent of the results should come relatively easy just by doing the right things. But if you truly want to be in the top 1 percent, you’re going to have to work really hard in addition to working smart.
Make sure you are working in this order though (smarter then harder). You don’t want to work really hard and feel like you’re going to burn out because you’ve wasted all of your time and money…Once you get 80 percent of the results, you will have stabilized your income enough so you can afford to take on greater challenges.
The key to greatness
To be great, you have to be consistent. You have to be disciplined. You may have natural talent/ability, but without nurturing it and growing it through consistent effort, you will never achieve true greatness.
Do you think LeBron James or Michael Jordan were born with gifts that you and I don’t have? Yes. That’s how the world works. Everyone is different. But they also worked tirelessly for years on end, spent millions of dollars investing in their bodies to help strengthen them, honed their craft with hours in the gym, etc. They had natural ability, but so do a lot of other guys in the NBA. It was their consistent, focused effort over many years that helped them become the greatest of all time.
While it is easy to think of sports as the best analogy here, it applies to everything we do in life. Want to be better at your job? What actions are you taking daily to train to become the best? Do you role play scenarios with other team members? Do you take continuing education classes? Do you read about specific subjects to help you or watch “how to” videos?
You don’t improve the most by going to a weeklong seminar once per year and then not doing anything else until next year’s seminar. You improve the most by taking small, focused actions every single day, always building upon the previous day.
What actions are you willing to take to achieve greatness – not today, and not tomorrow, but five, ten, or twenty years from now? Are you able to look at the big picture and base your decisions on that instead of what feels good today? Do you have the discipline to repeat the monotonous actions (slightly/slowly improving over time)? If you want to be mediocre, that’s fine. You can live a good life coasting through it. But if you want to achieve greatness, you have to endure many unheroic days to reach some heroic decades in the future…