Your guide to a healthier perspective of life
“A fool thinks himself to be wise, yet a wise man knows he is a fool.”
Smart people ask great questions, they don’t pretend to have all the answers. You have to be willing to listen and to be open to the possibility that you’re wrong in order to understand more. Learn when to talk and when to listen…
Confidence is key to selling. If you lack confidence and are meek, it doesn’t matter if you have the best product and it’s at a great price. If you leave any doubt or confusion in the buyer’s mind, you’ll lose them to more confident competitors.
When you lack confidence in your own product, people will find reasons (real or made up) as to why it’s not a good purchase.
Know your product inside and out. Know the competition’s product. Understand the market in general. Be positive, talk clearly and concisely, and be energetic (but not annoyingly so). Dress according to what is expected of the product you’re selling and the people you’re selling to. When in doubt, slightly overdress as opposed to being underdressed for the occasion.
Work on making BETTER decisions FASTER. If you can quickly grasp concepts, see the big picture, and make sure that your decision aligns with your goals and values, you will go far in life. GREAT leaders can make quick decisions that consistently are the correct decisions (or, at least, mostly correct and move themselves/the team in the right direction).
How can you do this?
1) Practice making decisions quickly on trivial matters. Don’t waste a bunch of time on a decision that doesn’t really matter (like what you’re eating for dinner, what movie you should watch tonight, etc). Practice making small decisions quickly and it will become easier to make bigger decisions quickly. If your decisions come with unintended negative consequences, at least it was over something trivial and you can easily recover from your “mistake.”
2) Be well-read. The more you read about many subjects, the better you can understand and relate concepts. If you have a great base knowledge over many subjects, you should be able to “pick up” a concept quickly. It’s incredible how many concepts overlap.
3) Know who you are. Know what you stand for, what you value, and what your core beliefs are. You should change over the years, but your core values should not. If something doesn’t align with how you believe you should act/behave, then don’t do it. It’s a rules-based system that automatically eliminates certain decisions for you, reducing your choices and making it easier for you to make better decisions quickly.
4) Know what you want/what your goals are. If you know you want six-pack abs, then you probably know you should workout everyday, eat healthy foods, drink plenty of water, and get plenty of sleep. You also probably know that means you shouldn’t binge on pizza and ice cream. When you know what your goals are, it will make it easier for you to make decisions which align with your goals. Make sure you review what it is that you want frequently to keep it top of mind.
It doesn’t matter how much information you acquire if you don’t use it. “We would all be rockstar millionaires with six-pack abs” if information was the answer to all of our problems (paraphrased from Derek Sievers).
We all kind of know what we should be doing financially, physically, mentally, etc, but what are we doing with that information? How are we putting it into practice? Many of us know we should save and invest, but instead we indulge. We know we should eat clean, drink plenty of water, and exercise daily, but instead we eat too much fried food, drink too much alcohol, and skip our workouts. We know we should continue to read and expand our mind, but instead we waste time on social media or binge watching tv.
We all have an idea of what we should be doing. More information isn’t the answer – acting on the information we know to be true is.
“The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.” John F. Kennedy
You don’t know what you don’t know. I used to think I was relatively smart, then I began reading more and realized that there is so much I don’t know.
We will never know everything. We can’t even know everything that we think we know, let alone use science, math, and other information/data to break through to understand new answers and technologies.
As long as you remain humble, keep an open mind, and always try to learn something new, you’ll be in a good spot. Don’t talk down to others because you think your idea of “the truth” is more complete than theirs. Over time, you’ll come to realize that your truth today is only a partial truth. It’s your truth, but then there is also the other person’s truth (their perspective of the same event/situation) and the objective truth (what happened, with no thoughts/opinions of why something was said/done, without assigning intent or judgment, etc). And what really plays with your mind is when you realize that your truth today gets twisted/altered so that when you look back at the event in five, ten, or twenty years, you have yet another version of the truth.