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75+ one‐page summaries of the best books on personal productivity
By Nathan Lozeron
www.ProductivityGame.com
Copyright © 2019 Lozeron Academy LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be used or reproduced in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the author.
eBook Edition: January 2019
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Table of Contents
New summaries (not in previous eBook editions) are highlighted in red
Introduction
Section 1: Success Mindset
Page Book
8 Mindset
9 Productivity Principle: Growth vs. Fixed Mindset
10 SuperBetter
11 One Small Step Can Change Your Life
12 The Compound Effect
13 Barking Up The Wrong Tree
14 Ego is the Enemy
15 12 Rules for Life
16 The ONE Thing
17 Essentialism
18 Productivity Principle: Positive ‘No’
19 Your One Word
20 The Dip
21 Grit
22 The Upside of Stress
23 Decisive
24 Smarter Faster Better
25 Principles
26 Designing Your Life
27 The Code of the Extraordinary Mind
28 Born for This
29 So Good They Can’t Ignore
30 Mastery
31 The Talent Code
32 Originals
33 Give & Take
34 How to Win Friends and Influence People
35 The Coaching Habit
36 Never Split the Difference
37 Productivity Principle: The Five‐Minute Favor
38 Extreme Ownership
Section 2: High Performance Habits
Page Book
38 Atomic Habits
39 High Performance Habits
40 The Rise of Superman
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41 Productivity Principle: The 4% Zone
42 Spark
43 Are You Fully Charged?
44 The Willpower Instinct
45 The Power of Full Engagement
46 Performing Under Pressure
47 10‐Minute Toughness
48 10% Happier
49 The Happiness Advantage
50 Drive
51 Rethinking Positive Thinking
52 The First 20 Hours
53 Make It Stick
54 A Mind for Numbers
55 Peak
56 The 4‐Hour Chef
57 How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
58 The Charisma Myth
59 Made to Stick
60 Presence
61 The 5 Second Rule
62 Hooked
63 Your Brain at Work
Section 3: Business Strategy
Page Book
64 The Personal MBA
65 Rework
66 Zero to One
67 Blue Ocean Strategy
68 Competing Against Luck
69 The Lean Startup
70 Sprint
71 Perennial Seller
72 To Sell Is Human
73 The E‐Myth Revisited
74 Anything you Want
Section 4: Execution
Page Book
76 The War of Art
77 Measure What Matters
78 Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
79 The 4 Disciplines of Execution
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80 When
81 Deep Work
82 Productivity Principle: Work = Intensity x Time
83 Productivity Principle: Predict to Perform
84 Productivity Principle: Process vs. Product
85 Little Bets
86 Eat That Frog!
87 Getting Things Done
88 The Checklist Manifesto
89 Productivity Principle: Batch Buckets
90 Tribe of Mentors
91 The 4‐Hour Workweek
92 How to Have a Good Day
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Introduction
“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” – Albert Einstein
With a desire to thrive in a highly competitive marketplace, I’ve read dozens of books on personal productivity
and distilled my insights into a series of one‐page PDF summaries. Each summary contains a list of proven
principles and methods that you can use to reach your career goals.
This Productivity Game PDF Package is a comprehensive guide on personal productivity that includes more
than 75 one‐page PDF book summaries and productivity principles.
The one‐page PDFs are organized into four sections:
Success Mindset
High Performance Habits
Business Strategy
Execution
As you read through the various book summaries and productivity principles, you will gain a clear
understanding of what it takes to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace.
To aid the learning process, I’ve created a YouTube video playlist to match the sequence of book summaries
presented in this package: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL38v62je9cXZuHv6WixrJr2zA2LJU0dYu
(the YouTube playlist contains a video for each book summary, but not for each productivity principle – many
productivity principles are exclusive to this package).
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7
Insights from Mindset by Carol Dweck
Do you feel like you are constantly being judged? Do you go out of your way to ‘look smart’?
If so, you’ve adopted what author Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset sees himself or herself and everyone around them as
possessing a set amount of cognitive and physical ability.
A fixed mindset thinks: “If I appear to be bad at something (school subject, sport, business skill, etc.), I’m haven’t been blessed with the
gifts to do it well.”
This belief seems innocent, but it ultimately leads to a life of fear, avoidance, and low interest for anything outside of your comfort zone.
Why?
If something is uncomfortable or hard, then you just don’t have the mental or physical capacity to do it. If it's hard and uncomfortable now,
it will always be uncomfortable and hard for you.
Luckily, you can change your mindset and learn to be more curious than afraid and sustain your interest and effort when things get hard.
The first step to going from a fixed mindset (believing challenges are a threat) to a growth mindset (believing that challenges are a chance
to grow your mental and physical abilities) is to realize the truth about your brain.
Over the past 40 years scientists have shown that we can change our brains and grow our cognitive abilities in
three fundamental ways:
You can physically grow sections of the brain
Several years ago, before taxi drivers used GPS, brain researchers took brain imaging scans of
experienced London taxi drivers. Researchers (Maguire, 2011) noticed that the more times a London
taxi driver had spent driving a taxi in London, the larger a region of the brain associated with spatial
awareness and memory (the hippocampus) had become. The brain scans revealed that the more
demands London taxi drivers put on their brains (the more they had to navigate the challenging
London road system), the more they were able to expand a region in the brain and do their job more
effectively.
You can speed up your brain circuits
However, not all brain regions can physically expand, therefore, other brain regions need to make brain
circuits faster. This is achieved through a process called 'myelination.' As I briefly touched on in my
'Deep Work' book summary, when you focus intensely on a single subject for a period of time, you start
forming white sheathes on your brain cells call myelin. This myelin is like the insulation on the copper
wires inside your home. A brain circuit with myelin can transmit information ten times faster than a
brain circuit without myelin.
You can re‐wire your brain
One peer reviewed study (Taub, 1995) showed that when a person practices the guitar for thousands
of hours, they activate more of their brain than novice players. When novice guitar players play the
guitar, they only activate a region in their brain associated to a finger in their left hand (the hand they
use to play different notes). However, when experienced guitar players play the guitar, they expand
the activation of their brains to include regions associated with the fingers and palm of the left hand.
It's like re‐wiring a house to make a light switch that used to only turn on a lamp in your living room,
and now it turns on two or three additional lamps in the house.
Once you know the truth about your ability to grow, it makes sense to change the way you think about challenges:
When a fixed mindset person approaches a challenge, he or she thinks: “Will I look smart or stupid while doing this?”
When a growth mindset person approaches a challenge, he or she thinks: “How might I learn and grow?”
After a difficult challenge, a fixed mindset person will think, “I’m not smart enough to do this.”
After a difficult challenge, a growth mindset person will think, “I’m not smart enough to do this, YET.”
By making the transition from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset your story goes from: "I am who I am. My personality, my intelligence,
and my talent are fixed." To “I am a constant learner. My abilities are constantly evolving and growing.”
“Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?” If so,
he says, “You may be outscored but you will never lose.” ‐ Carol Dweck
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Productivity Principle: Growth vs. Fixed Mind-set
Inspired by the book Little Bets by Peter Sims
Fixed mind-set people believe: “I am who I am, no amount of effort will change that.”
Growth mind-set people believe: “With enough focused effort I can learn anything. My ability and intelligence can grow.”
We adopt a fixed mind-set when we identify with the praise that people give us (ex: “you’re so smart!”).
Psychologist Carol Dweck gave a group of fixed mind-set students and growth mind-set students the
choice between an easy task and a challenging task. She discovered that 90% of growth mind-set
students chose the difficult task and a majority of fixed mind-set students picked the easy task.
When we adopt a fixed mindset, “we block ourselves psychologically and choke off a host of
opportunities to learn. In placing so much emphasis on minimizing errors or the risk of any kind of failure,
we shut off chances to identify the insights that drive creative progress.” – Peter Sims
Those who believe that ability and intelligence can improve with effort (growth mind-set) are less likely to
experience these three side-effects because failure doesn’t mean they are doomed. It just means they need to
improve.
2. Recall:
Science has proven that our intelligence and our ability are NOT fixed. With enough focused effort, we
can dramatically change our brain. But it all starts by adopting growth mind-set.
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Insights from SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal
“When we play a game, we volunteer to be challenged. No one forces us to try to solve a game’s puzzles, or
defeat another team, or reach a certain score. Because we are fully in control of whether we accept a game’s
challenge, we don’t experience anxiety or depression when we play— despite the very real possibility of loss or
defeat. Our primary experience is of agency, not of threat.” – Jane McGonigal
Keep score
"Keeping score will highlight your progress …and to get a deeper understanding of your own play. This has been
true of games as long as humans have played them. In fact, my favorite argument in favor of personal
scorekeeping was written over one hundred years ago, in a 1914 issue of Baseball Magazine. “The Pleasure and
Profit of Keeping Score” was an editorial that strongly encouraged baseball fans to fill out their own scorecards
during professional games. Track every run, hit, and error, it argued, in order to better understand, remember,
and enjoy the game:
Most spectators watch a great play with an interest, which, however intense, is forgotten in the thriller of the next
inning. They leave the grounds with a hazy idea of a rather enjoyable afternoon, whose main features are scarce refreshed by reading press
accounts of them some hours later. Keeping score remedies all this. It burns the play into memory. It greatly increases the spectator’s
knowledge of the game. . . . And, best of all, it is a pleasure in itself.” – Jane McGonigal
Keep track of the experience points that you gain throughout the day (i.e. the relative difficulty of the tasks that you complete). For
example, journal in the morning: 10XP, read 10 pages of a book: 12 XP, draft a proposal: 25 XP (XP = experience points).
Recruit allies
“Having social support makes it easier for us to achieve our goals. It’s not just that our friends and family help us
directly by offering their time, advice, or resources. Medical research shows that our bodies respond to social
support in dramatic ways, getting stronger and more resilient every time someone helps us.” – Jane McGonigal
Call a co-worker to ask for help. Ask a friend to join you at a coffee shop to brainstorm ideas for your next
project. Tell your spouse about the challenges you’re facing at work.
“You are stronger than you know. You are surrounded by potential allies. You are the hero of your own story.”
- Jane McGonigal
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Insights from One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer Ph.D.
“Kaizen is an effective, enjoyable way to achieve a specific goal, but it also extends a more profound challenge:
to meet life’s constant demands for change by seeking out continual—but always small—improvement.”
– Robert Maurer Ph.D.
What is kaizen?
A Japanese practice of taking small steps to continuously improve a process or product.
“Improve by 1% a day, and in 70 days you’re twice as good.” – Alan Weiss, Ph.D.
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Insights from The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
“The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. What’s
most interesting about this process to me is that, even though the results are massive, the steps, in the moment,
don’t feel significant. Whether you’re using this strategy for improving your health, relationships, finances, or
anything else for that matter, the changes are so subtle, they’re almost imperceptible. These small changes offer
little or no immediate result, no big win, no obvious I-told-you-so payoff. So why bother?”
– Darren Hardy
Resist the urge to see immediate results and receive short-term payoffs. Instead, construct a daily habit of constant improvements to
generate the compound effect in your life and produce incredible results.
Most of us are sleepwalking through our daily choices. We make choices that align with the demands of others
without realizing those choices don’t align with our ultimate goal.
“The first step toward change is awareness. If you want to get from where you are to where you want to be, you have to start by becoming
aware of the choices that lead you away from your desired destination. Become very conscious of every choice you make today so you can
begin to make smarter choices moving forward.” – Darren Hardy
Be conscious of your choices by keeping a pad of paper and pen nearby to write down every choice you make in a particular area of life
that you want to improve.
At the end of the day, look at the list and ask yourself: Are these choices consistent with my core values? Are they in alignment
with who I want to become?
Cross out any choice that didn’t move you closer to where you ultimately want to be. Over time, you’ll gain awareness of your
moment-to-moment choices and consistently make choices that move you towards your ultimate goal.
Why Power:
Most of use wouldn't walk a plank between two high rise buildings for $20 dollars. But Darren says: "If your child
was on the opposite building, and that building was on fire, would you walk the length of the plank to save him?
Without question and immediately—you’d do it, twenty dollars or not." – Darren Hardy
Your ‘WHY Power’ is the internal drive you need to get started and take massive action. Your WHY can take two
forms: what you love and what you hate. Your why doesn't have to be noble, it just has to move you.
"America had the British. Luke had Darth Vader. Rocky had Apollo Creed. Twenty-something’s have ‘The Man.’" – Darren Hardy
Bookend Routines:
"The key to becoming world-class in your endeavors is to build your performance around world-class routines. It
can be difficult, even futile, to predict or control what will show up in the middle of your workday. But you can
almost always control how your day starts and ends. I have routines for both." – Darren Hardy
The moments after we wake up and the moments before we go to bed are within our control – we must use
these moments to direct our lives.
Morning Routine: Review your vision/mission, set the top priority for the day, read something positive and instructional, and do
work to advance your most important project.
Nighttime Routine: Reflect on the choices you’ve made throughout the day, be grateful for the wins you experienced, and get
curious about how you can improve tomorrow by asking yourself: How could I have made today even better?
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” - Albert Einstein
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Insights from Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker
“We all know the good life means more than money…but none of us is exactly sure what those other things are
or how to get them…We all know love and friends and other stuff are important too…but they’re a heck of a
lot more complicated and we can’t just have them delivered to our house by Amazon Prime. Evaluating life by
one metric turns out to be a key problem. We can’t use just one yardstick to measure a successful life.”
‐ Eric Barker
If money isn’t the only measurement of success, what else should we be measuring?
4 Subjective Measurements of Success
Achievement: Do you feel like you’re winning?
To feel like you’re winning you need to consistently accomplish meaningful goals. Start by setting and hitting small but
meaningful goals each day. I find that writing 500 words for my next video script or reading three chapters of a book gives me a
feeling of achievement and sense that I’m winning. Hitting small goals like this every day leads to a larger achievement (like
writing a book or running a successful YouTube channel) that I can look back on and be proud of.
Legacy: Do you feel like you’re influencing others in a positive way?
To feel like you’re influencing others in a positive way you need to pass on your values and help others find success. If you’re a
parent, you might generate a feeling of influence by taking the time to teach and instill your values in your children, who go on
to pass their values on to their children.
Significance: Do you feel like you’re needed by the people closest to you?
To feel like you’re needed you need to be there for the people that matter most to you. You want to find a way to be valuable to
the people around you so that you will be missed when you’re gone. I felt needed in my previous career when I refined my
organization and presentation skills so that my team could rely on me to provide clarity on the project we were working on.
Happiness: Do you feel like you’re enjoying life?
To feel like you’re enjoying life you need to find a way to enjoy the day‐to‐day experience of life and be grateful for what you
have. Make a habit of stopping during the day and appreciating one small thing that’s going well. Be playful and listen to music
during the day to experience happiness without the needing to attain specific results.
What can you do to consistently generate a feeling that you’re winning, influencing, needed, and enjoying life?
Put yourself in environments that leverage your intensifiers. Intensifiers are qualities that, on average, appear to be negative but
become strengths in specific environments.
Winston Churchill’s paranoia and stubbornness are negative qualities in a peacetime environment, but signature strengths
in wartime.
Michael Phelps’s body is far from perfect. His short legs and long upper body make him an awkward runner on land. But in
the pool, his awkward physical qualities enabled him to become the most successful swimmer of all time.
Asperger’s is a typically a negative condition in most work settings, but a strength as a tech entrepreneur. A person with a
mild form of Asperger’s is more likely to challenge social norms and not feel intimidated by other people, two qualities that
every successful tech entrepreneur needs.
To identify your intensifiers, create a mind‐map of your so‐called flaws; a list of attributes that most people find odd and negative. After
you've generated a collection of attributes, try to identify specific contexts where each attribute could be considered a strength. Some
flaws, like chronic procrastination, won't be very useful in any situation. However, a few so‐called "flaws" can become your signature
strengths in the right environment.
When you develop and leverage these signature strengths, you maximize the rate of progress you can make towards meaningful goals and
will often feel like you're winning. By developing and leveraging your signature strengths, you'll stand out and have a better opportunity to
influence others. Your signature strengths will make you uniquely valuable, which will ensure that you always feel needed. And according
to a recent Gallup study, when you routinely leverage your signature strengths, you'll smile more often, be less stressed, and enjoy life. All
of which leads to a satisfying and successful life.
“What’s the most important thing to remember when it comes to success? One word: alignment. Success is not the result of any single
quality; it’s about alignment between who you are and where you choose to be. The right skill in the right role. A good person surrounded by
other good people.” – Eric Barker
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Insights from Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
What is Ego?
“It’s that petulant child inside every person, the one that chooses getting his or her way over anything or anyone
else. The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility—that’s ego. It’s the
sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.” – Ryan Holiday
14
Insights from 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
Over the course of my career, I've experienced long periods of uncertainty and self‐doubt. To prevent these chaotic periods in my work
life, I picked up Jordan Peterson's book to find rules I can rely on to regain order and a sense of certainty.
Here are two rules that I find to be the strongest antidotes to chaos:
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday Tell the truth ‐ or at least, don't lie
You and I have an innate need to compare ourselves to other people. The amount you can improve on yesterday will be limited by how truthful
you are willing to be today.
If you notice that you're more skilled and successful than others around
you, your brain will release a hormone called serotonin. When you have Until you face the truth, any improvement you make on who you were
serotonin in your blood, you feel confident and in control of your life. yesterday will be meaningless. Instead of moving forward, you'll just be
moving sideways. To make forward progress you need to acknowledge
But the instant you mind notices someone who threatens your status in what truth you're avoiding and what uncomfortable conversations you
society and makes you look incompetent, your brain restricts serotonin. need to have with yourself and others.
You start doubting yourself and feel a low sense of self‐worth.
Author Tim Ferriss once said, "A person's success in life can usually be
Now that you are connected to billions of people online, it doesn't take measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is
long for your brain to notice ways in which you compare unfavorably to willing to have."
other people.
Having an uncomfortable conversation is like having a controlled fire to
You think you're a good guitar player? There are dozens of exceptional burn off the deadwood in a forest so that the deadwood doesn't build up
guitar players on YouTube that will make you look completely and lead to a larger fire that destroys all the trees in the forest and ruins
incompetent...You're proud of graduating from that local college with a the soil.
business degree? Your friend just posted a photo on Facebook of him
graduating from Harvard with an MBA. After reading this chapter in Peterson's book, I now ask myself a second
question when assessing who I was yesterday. Each morning I ask myself:
When you're exposed to so many people that are better than you, and the "Did I do my best to tell the truth yesterday?"
gap between you and someone else is huge, you're more inclined to lose
hope, stop taking action, and let your life slip into chaos. If I agreed to do something just to avoid an uncomfortable conversation
or pretended to know something when I, in fact, didn't know what I was
The best way to prevent this from happening is to stop comparing talking about, I'll rate myself a 1 or a 2 on a scale of 1‐10.
yourself to who someone else is today and start comparing yourself to
who you were yesterday. Enough 1’s or 2’s in a row provide me with the motivation to speak up,
have uncomfortable conversations, and stop my downward spiral into
I like to see every day that I've lived as a different version of myself (like a chaos.
separate person living out each day), isolate who I was yesterday and ask
myself: "Was I the best possible version of myself yesterday?” “If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling
desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If
I then rate yesterday's version of myself on a scale of 1‐10 (10 being my you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the
ideal self). If I'm slightly better than who I was yesterday, I'll know that truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it
I'm improving my skills and increasing my status in society. This realization Paradise.” ‐ Jordan Peterson
will provide me with a steady dose of serotonin and stop my downward
spiral into chaos.
“Even a man on a sinking ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a
lifeboat! And who knows where he might go, in the future. To journey
happily may well be better than to arrive successfully...” ‐ Jordan Peterson
“So why not call this a book of “guidelines,” a far more relaxed, user‐friendly and less rigid sounding term
than “rules”? Because these really are rules. And the foremost rule is that you must take responsibility for
your own life. Period.” ‐ Dr. Norman Doidge, MD
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Insights from The ONE Thing by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan
“Success demands singleness of purpose. You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of
doing more things with side effects. It is those who concentrate on but one thing at a time who advance in
this world.” – Gary Keller (all quotes below are by Gary Keller)
astery
What can I do to continuously improve?
“When you can see mastery as a path you go down instead of a destination you arrive at, it starts to feel accessible
and attainable. Most assume mastery is an end result, but at its core, mastery is a way of thinking, a way of acting, and
a journey you experience. When what you’ve chosen to master is the right thing, then pursuing mastery of it will make
everything else you do either easier or no longer necessary.”
ccountability
What am I committed to?
“Taking complete ownership of your outcomes by holding no one but yourself responsible for them is the most
powerful thing you can do to drive your success. As such, accountability is most likely the most important of the three
commitments. Without it, your journey down the path of mastery will be cut short the moment you encounter a
challenge. Without it, you won’t figure out how to break through the ceilings of achievement you’ll hit along the way.”
assion
What result would I do anything to achieve?
“When you’re in search of extraordinary results, accepting an OK Plateau or any other ceiling of achievement isn’t okay
when it applies to your ONE Thing.”
Recall what you’re trying to master, what you’re accountable for, and what big audacious goal drives you to identify your ONE thing amidst
a sea of many ‘things.’
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Insights from Essentialism by Greg McKeown
“Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying ‘yes’ too quickly and not saying no soon enough.”
- Josh Billings
Warren Buffett became the most successful investor of all time by being hyper selective. He owes 90% of his wealth to just 10
investments. For every 100 opportunities that comes his way, he says no to 99 of them.
Peter Drucker, the greatest management consultant in the last 100 years, once said, “People are effective because they say ‘no,’ because
they say, ‘this isn’t for me.’ ’’
We are all presented with ‘good opportunities’ during our lifetime, but which of those opportunities are truly essential to our lives?
“A non-essentialist thinks almost everything is essential. An essentialist thinks almost everything is non-essential.” - Greg McKeown
“You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.” - John Maxwell
Set boundaries
“Nonessentialists tend to think of boundaries as constraints or limits, things that get in the way of their hyperproductive life.
To a Nonessentialist, setting boundaries is evidence of weakness. Essentialists, on the other hand, see boundaries as
empowering. They recognize that boundaries protect their time from being hijacked and often free them from the burden of
having to say no to things that further others’ objectives instead of their own.” - Greg McKeown
Create black and white rules, like “I don’t take calls between 7-10am, sorry,” or “I don’t check email after 6pm. If it’s
something urgent, you’ll need to call me.” People will initially challenge your boundaries, but overtime, people will respect
your boundaries. With the right boundaries in place, you can prevent the non-essential from creeping into your life.
Develop the courage to say ‘no’ by remembering what you are saying ‘yes’ to:
“No, I don’t want to take on another project because I want to ensure my current project is a huge success.”
“No, I don’t want to go out for drinks because I want to spend time with my family.”
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Productivity Principle: The Positive ‘No’
Inspired by the book Essentialism by Greg McKweon &
the co-founder of the Harvard Program on Negotiation, William Ury
B. When we say ‘No,’ we’re actually saying ‘No’ to a request, not a person.
“Everyone is selling something— an idea, a viewpoint, an opinion— in exchange for your time. Simply being
aware of what is being sold allows us to be more deliberate in deciding whether we want to buy it…we forget
that denying the request is not the same as denying the person. Only once we separate the decision from the
relationship can we make a clear decision and then separately find the courage and compassion to
communicate it.” – Greg Mckeown
C. When we say ‘No,’ we’re trading short-term popularity for long-term respect.
“(W)hen the initial annoyance or disappointment or anger wears off, the respect kicks in. When we push back
effectively, it shows people that our time is highly valuable. It distinguishes the professional from the
amateur... learn to say no firmly, resolutely, and yet gracefully. Because once we do, we find, not only that our
fears of disappointing or angering others were exaggerated, but that people actually respect us more…I have
found it almost universally true that people respect and admire those with the courage of conviction to say
no.” – Greg Mckeown
What’s the best way we can say ‘No’ without damaging a relationship?
We need to frame our ‘No’ as a ‘Positive No’:
1. Start with a personal ‘Yes’ by stating a personal priority.
“I’m currently working hard to finish ____” OR “I’ve set the ambitious goal of
completing ____, within the next ____.”
3. Finish by showing that we still care and offer to help out in a small way.
“Here are a few resources that I found to help your ____ succeed.” OR “Although I can’t assist you with
this project I can introduce you to someone who can.”
18
Insights from Your One Word by Evan Carmichael
"There is one word that defines who you are, connects all the things in your life that make you come alive, and
will help you escape the chains of mediocrity." – Evan Carmichael
Your One Word is what you stand for. It’s a core value that you use to make important decisions.
Discovering your One Word is essential if you want to build a great company or product.
Why?
Your One Word is a steady source of motivation
Anytime you try doing something great, you'll encounter a dip. It’s a time when you feel like giving up because you're not
getting the results you expected, and you’re no longer getting encouragement from others. What pulls you through
these dips is remembering why you do what you do, the reason for your struggle. Your One Word is that reason. And
because it's so short, it's easy to remember when times get tough.
Your One Word makes it easy for people to talk about you
“It's a noisy world. We're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. And so, we have to be
really clear on what we want them to know about us." – Steve Jobs
While Steve Job's was running Apple, his focus on "elegance" was apparent. It made it easy for people to tell the
difference between an Apple computer and every other computer on the market.
When you build your business around One Word that is NOT ‘money’ or ‘profit’, you develop a competitive advantage by
establishing an emotional connection with a select group of people who identify with your One Word.
"When you stand for something important, something people feel connected to, something people are proud to be a part of, and you make
it easy for them to share because they only have to remember One Word, then referrals start to flow." – Evan Carmichael
Personality Traits
Of the people I enjoy being around, what
personality traits do they have in common?
____________________________________
____________________________________
____________________________________
19
Insights from The Dip by Seth Godin
“If You’re Not Going to Get to #1, You Might as Well Quit Now” - Seth Godin
There is a high opportunity cost of not investing your time and effort in becoming the best .
“We reward the product or the song or the organization or the employee that is number one. The rewards are heavily skewed, so much so
that it’s typical for #1 to get ten times the benefit of #10, and a hundred times the benefit of #100. WHY? People don’t have a lot of time and
don’t want to take a lot of risks. If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer of the navel, you’re not going to mess around by going to a lot of
doctors. You’re going to head straight for the “top guy,” the person who’s ranked the best in the world. Why screw around if you get only
one chance?” - Seth Godin
Being the BEST in the WORLD is more accessible than you think.
“Best as in: best for them (a customer or an employer), right now, based on what they believe and what they know. And in the world as in:
their world, the world they have access to. So if I’m looking for a freelance copy editor, I want the best copy editor in English, who’s
available, who can find a way to work with me at a price I can afford. That’s my best in the world. (And) the world is getting smaller because
the categories are getting more specialized. I can now find the best gluten-free bialys available by overnight shipping. I can find the best
clothing-optional resort in North America with six clicks of a mouse.” - Seth Godin
Now let's say you quit most things and focus your time on becoming the best in a niche field or micro-market. At first it’s exciting: you’re
getting lots of positive feedback and seeing results. But eventually your “beginner” technique stops generating results and you’re forced
to endure the long slog of learning “expert” techniques. Your results DIP and the excitement wears off. At this point you want to quit and
try something else.
“Quitting when you hit the Dip is a bad idea. If the journey you started was worth doing, then quitting when you hit the Dip just wastes the
time you’ve already invested...The people who set out to make it through the Dip—the people who invest the time and the energy and the
effort to power through the Dip—those are the ones who become the best in the world.” - Seth Godin
nfluence a market
The odds of successfully influencing an individual (changing the mind of a manager or client) are quite low. After a few
failed attempts at influencing an individual, persistence turns into pestering and the individual will resist all future
influencing efforts.
However, the odds of successfully influencing a market are quite high. Although some people will ignore you (or even
reject you), there are still people in the market who haven’t heard of you. You can you use your failed attempts to
improve your solution and influence another area of the market.
20
Insights from Grit by Angela Duckworth
21
Insights from The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal
“It turns out that how you think about stress is one of those core beliefs that can affect your health, happiness,
and success. Your stress mind-set shapes everything from the emotions you feel during a stressful situation to
the way you cope with stressful events. That, in turn, can determine whether you thrive under stress or end up
burned out and depressed. The good news is, even if you are firmly convinced that stress is harmful, you can still
cultivate a mind-set that helps you thrive.” – Kelly McGonigal
Greg Walton, a psychologist at Stanford University, published a paper in Science magazine that showed the power of adopting a new
mind-set. Greg had African American freshmen at Stanford University read the following message: ‘Everyone struggles with social
belonging, but this changes over time’. Afterward, they were asked to write an essay on that message and develop a supportive message
for next year’s freshmen.
“Walton tracked its effect on African American students, who have typically struggled the most with the feeling of not belonging. The
results were astonishing. The one time intervention improved the students’ academic performance, physical health, and happiness over the
next three years, compared with students who had not been randomly selected to receive the intervention. By graduation, their GPAs were
significantly higher than the GPAs of African American students who hadn’t participated. In fact, their GPAs were so high that they had
completely closed the typical GPA gap between minority and non-minority students at the school.” – Kelly McGonigal
i. Make the mind-set simple and concrete: “Thinking _____ will lead to _____”
ii. Allow yourself a trial period (1-2 weeks) to apply the new mind-set in the real world and determine its worth.
iii. Find an opportunity to share your experience with others.
Changing your interpretation of stress has been shown to release powerful chemicals in your body that boost performance. Based on
saliva samples from a 2013 study at Yale, participants who adopted the mind-set that ‘the feeling of stress enhances performance’ released
more DHEA and oxytocin into their body (natural chemicals that the body produces).
“The best way to manage stress isn’t to reduce or avoid it, but rather to rethink and even embrace it. New
science shows that changing your mind about stress can make you healthier and happier.” – Kelly McGonigal
22
Insights from Decisive by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
“Sometimes we are given the advice to trust our guts when we make important decisions. Unfortunately, our guts
are full of questionable advice.” – Chip & Dan Heath
When we trust our gut when making decisions, we encounter three decision pitfalls:
We will rarely consider more than two options.
In 1993, Ohio State University researcher Paul Nutt examined 168 decisions of big organizations. Nutt found that 69% of the decisions only
had one alternative. These two options decisions led to an unfavorable result 52% of the time.
We will be blinded by short‐term emotion.
Take a moment and look back on some of the worst decisions you’ve made. Any chance you sought short‐term pleasure over your long‐
term interests?
We will have a false sense of certainty.
A study found that when Doctors feel “completely certain” about a diagnosis, they are wrong 40% of the time! In another study, when
university students believed they had a 1% chance of being wrong, they turned out to be wrong 27% of the time.
To avoid these three pitfalls, we need to go to W.A.R. each time we need to make a significant decision.
iden your options
Pretend you rubbed a magic lamp, and instead of the beloved Genie in Aladdin, you got his evil brother. This
evil genie takes your current options away. Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath call this the "Vanishing Options
Test".
By running this test, you pretend there are no good options left on the table. Now you need to come up with a
new set of options. When you take a moment to imagine a situation where both options you were considering
are off the table, you will find other promising solutions.
ttain distance
In a 1999 study, students were asked to choose between two jobs: job A would pay well but not be very
fulfilling, and job B would pay less but make them feel very fulfilled. 66% of students said they would take job
B.
When the researchers asked the students to advise their best friend on their job choice, 83% recommended job
B. Asking “What would I tell my best friend to do?” allowed the students to gain a clear perspective, attain
distance from their short‐term emotions, and make a wise long‐term decision.
eality‐test
It’s not wise to buy a new vehicle without test driving it. Why do we make other big decisions before giving
them a test drive? Authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath recommend that we reality‐test every big decision we
make.
If you’re deciding to move to a new city, don’t make the decision based on online reviews and
recommendations from friends. Take a two‐week vacation, rent an Airbnb in the city you want to move to, and
pretend as though you are living there (do typical day‐to‐day activities).
If you’re buying a new vacuum, buy three. Test them out for two weeks, and then return the two you least like.
Only commit to a big decision after you’ve reality‐tested your assumptions by running a small trial.
In the book, they use the acronym W.R.A.P., with the P standing for prepare to be wrong. Reality‐testing partially prepares you to be
wrong by testing your assumptions before you leap.
Here is a quick summary of the section ‘prepare to be wrong’: The future is uncertain, and we never know what the future will have in
store. We must consider a plausible worst‐case scenario, take out insurance, install a tripwire (an early warning system), or a pre‐
established exit point (like a stop loss on a stock purchase).
23
Insights from Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
“The choices that are most powerful in generating motivation are decisions that do two things: They convince
us we’re in control and they endow our actions with larger meaning.” – Charles Duhigg
Generate meaning by choosing to see the connection between what you do and how it:
"Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook… Productive people and companies
force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people
push themselves to think differently.” – Charles Duhigg
24
Insights from Principles by Ray Dalio
Ray Dalio’s philosophy in life and business, is PAIN + REFLECTION = PROGRESS.
“Just as long‐distance runners push through pain to experience the pleasure of “runner’s high,” I have largely gotten past the pain of my
mistake making and instead enjoy the pleasure that comes with learning from it.” ‐ Ray Dalio
Pain is the signal that there is a gap in your knowledge, and you have the opportunity to learn a principle to solve similar problems and
avoid similar failures. Don’t run from pain. It’s nature’s way of telling you it’s time to learn, grow, and be prepared for the future.
“Whatever success I’ve had in life has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know. The most
important thing I learned is an approach to life based on principles that helps me find out what’s true and what to do about it.” ‐ Ray Dalio
Here is a 3‐Part Process for adopting a principled approach to life:
PART ONE: Be Radically Open‐minded
“If you can recognize that you have blind spots and open‐mindedly consider the possibility that others might see
something better than you—and that the threats and opportunities they are trying to point out really exist—
you are more likely to make good decisions.” – Ray Dalio
When you adopt a mindset of radical open‐mindedness, you genuinely want to hear others’ honest opinions of
you. You want to know how badly you’re failing, how flawed your thinking is, or how weak your skills are.
You ask questions like “How might I be wrong?” and “How can I get more honest feedback?”
Opening yourself up to critical feedback is painful. But by letting the pain pass and putting your ego aside, you can find truth in people’s
opinions and use it to get better.
“Learning to be radically transparent is like learning to speak in public: While it’s initially awkward, the more you do it, the more
comfortable you will be with it.” – Ray Dalio
PART TWO: Find the Root Cause
“Distinguish proximate causes from root causes. Proximate causes are typically the actions (or lack of actions)
that lead to problems, so they are described with verbs (I missed the train because I didn’t check the train
schedule). Root causes run much deeper and they are typically described with adjectives (I didn’t check the train
schedule because I am forgetful).” – Ray Dalio
I often experience the pain of failing to show up on time for important events. While I frequently blame
external factors like traffic, the truth is I lose track of time. I don’t properly factor in the time to get to my
appointments.
Finding the root cause often leads to a personal weakness. However, you don’t need to feel ashamed and surrender to your weaknesses –
you can find principles to overcome them.
You can find principles to build a system that works around your weakness (ex: I developed a system of putting every event in my calendar
with two default alerts so I am less likely to lose track of time), learn principles to build a new skill and eliminate the weakness, or
outsource the weakness in one area of your life to someone who has a strength in that area.
PART THREE: Write Your Principles Down
"To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained." – Ray Dalio
The easiest way to develop principles you can clearly explain is to write them down and refine them.
I often refer to my set of ‘book summary principles’ – a Google Doc of the most effective methods for
deconstructing a book and creating these summaries. I’ve found that having my principles written down has
allowed the process of summarizing a book to get progressively smoother.
“My hope is that reading this book will prompt you and others to discover your own principles from wherever you think is best and ideally
write them down. Doing that will allow you and others to be clear about what your principles are and understand each other better. It will
allow you to refine them as you encounter more experiences and to reflect on them, which will help you make better decisions and be better
understood.” – Ray Dalio
25
Insights from Designing Your Life by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett
“In America, two‐thirds of workers are unhappy with their jobs. And 15 percent actually hate their work.” ‐ Dave
Evans and Bill Burnett
How can you be one of the rare few who is happy at work?
Step #1: Design Your Lives
“We know you’ve got at least three viable and substantially different possibilities in you. We all do. Every single one of the thousands of people
we’ve worked with has proved us correct in this. We all have lots of lives within us. Of course, we can only live out one at a time, but we want
to ideate multiple variations in order to choose creatively and generatively.” ‐ Dave Evans and Bill Burnett
Life #1: Your Optimized Life
In your ‘Optimized Life’ you find a way to optimize your current career path so that you are doing more activities that make you feel
engaged and energized, and fewer activities that make you feel bored and exhausted.
To find the building blocks for this life you need to start a “Good Time Journal.”
The goal of your “Good Time Journal” is to uncover the (A.E.I.O.U.) activities, environments, interactions, objects (i.e., tools you use to
perform tasks), and users (i.e., people you help) that make you feel engaged while working. At the end of the day for the next three
weeks, reflect on the times you were focused and lost track of time. Write down the A.E.I.O.U. components of those experiences. Then,
next to each item, rate the energy you felt afterward on a scale of ‐5 to 5. For example, a client meeting might be engaging but it drains
your energy and makes you feel exhausted afterwards.
After three weeks you'll start to see a consistent set of experiences that make feel engaged and energized. How could you craft your
current career so that you can have more of these experiences (more training, new assignment, remote work arrangement, etc.)?
Take out a piece of paper, draw five boxes to represent the next five years, and do simple sketches for each year (use stick‐men, basic
objects, and keywords to illustrate what each of the next five years might look like).
Live #2: Your Alternate Life Live #3: Your Fascinated Life
In your “Alternate Life,” the career path you were on In your “Fascinated Life,” you are doing what you would do if money
vanishes. Either your market collapsed (ex: the phonebook and image were no object.
market in the 90's), or Artificial Intelligence can do your job
better than you. Is there something that you're fascinated with and always wanted to
do but were afraid you wouldn't make enough money or people
What industry would you transfer your skills to? Go back to would laugh at you for doing it?
your "Good Time Journal" and see what engaging and
energizing experiences you could experience while working Take out a piece of paper and sketch out the next five years of "Your
in another industry. Complete a five‐year sketch for this life. Fascinated Life." It's OK if it seems a bit crazy. The more you design it,
the more realistic it will appear.
Step #2: Sample Your Lives
After you've sketched out your three lives, you might discover a life you want to commit to. Don’t! Hold
back and test your assumptions first. Most common assumption: “You’ll enjoy the day‐to‐day experience
of your future life.”
The most efficient way to test your assumptions and have a sample experience of a future life is to
conduct prototype conversations. Prototype conversations include reaching out to people on LinkedIn
or finding someone at a conference which is doing what you want to do and asking them if you could buy
them coffee or have a 15‐minute Skype call so that you can hear their story.
There are hundreds of people online who are living a life similar to the life you're considering. If you can
get them to meet for a 15‐minute video call or a 15‐minute coffee, ask about their story, and absorb the
good and bad parts of their life, you're far less likely to commit to a life that you’ll later regret.
The most important principle to remember when 'designing your life' is that you don't know what you want until you experience it.
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." – Steve Jobs
26
Insights from The Code of the Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani
“Have big goals—but don’t tie your happiness to your goals. You must be happy before you attain them.” ‐
Vishen Lakhiani
In the book “The Code of the Extraordinary Mind”, author Vishen Lakhiani outlines a goal setting method to maximize personal growth
and fearlessly pursue big goals.
PART 1: Set Self‐Fueled Goals
Self‐fueled goals are entirely within your control, and you can achieve them at any time during the day to experience a reliable burst of
happiness.
To establish a set of self‐fueled goals, identify 2‐3 goals that you need to feel joy in your life consistently. Then identify the base experience
you seek from each of those goals. Reframe the base experience so it is entirely within your control.
Author Vishen Lakhiani identified three goals that consistently gave him joy: being loved by his wife, reading a book a week, and
experiencing new adventures. Then he distilled those three goals into base experiences he could control: being surrounded by love, always
learning and growing, and having amazing human experiences.
"They are all directly within my own power. No one can take these away from me. This means no failure can stunt me. I could be homeless
and alone, sleeping on the streets of New York City—but I can still be surrounded by love because my love comes from within. I can learn and
grow as long as I can find an old newspaper or a thrown‐away book to read. I can even have beautiful human experiences because I can see
the joy in everyday life, even just walking through Central Park.” ‐ Vishen Lakhiani
Take a moment to think of small ways you can internally generate feelings of love, growth, and amazing experiences in your life.
To feel loved, I can: __________________________________________________________________________________________________
To feel a sense of growth, I can: ________________________________________________________________________________________
To have an amazing experience, I just need to: ____________________________________________________________________________
By having a set of self‐fueled goals to generate happiness reliably, you reduce your fear of failure and free yourself to set big, bold goals
that will stretch your abilities and lead to extraordinary results.
PART 2: Ask Three Important Questions
By asking these three questions, you can set your sights on goals that are exciting, maximize personal growth, and lead to extraordinary
results.
If time and money were no
object, and I didn't have to seek How will I need to grow to have As a result of growing, how will I
anyone’s permission, what those experiences? be able to give back to the
experiences would I want to world?
have? See yourself growing physically,
intellectually, and spiritually to See yourself having an impact on
See the environment you want to become your best self. See the your family, your company, and
live in, the adventures you want skills you need to develop to have your community. See the ways
to have, and the things you want the experiences you desire. you are able to share your
to experience with your friends creative self with the world.
and family.
Example: You want to speak on the TED conference stage (prestigious event with world leaders). To speak on the TED stage, you need to
push yourself to have remarkable life experiences and extract valuable lessons worth sharing. After hearing your speech, people will be
inspired by your message and use your lessons to achieve success in their life.
“Safety is overrated; taking risks is much less likely to kill us than ever before, and that means that playing it
safe is more likely just holding us back from the thrills of a life filled with meaning and discovery.”‐ Vishen
Lakhiani
27
Insights from Born for This by Chris Guillebeau
Actively Listen
While working on your side hustle and developing soft skills, you’ll come across specific problems
people need help solving.
Identify these problems by searching for common questions in your email inbox, social media feed,
and during daily interactions.
Ask yourself: “How might I address these questions using my unique skill set?”
The best questions to solve are questions related to specific problems people struggle with on a daily
basis.
“Here’s the core principle: when you’re not sure what your “thing” is—when you don’t know quite where
to look to find that job or career that brings you joy, flow, and a good income—the people you talk to
every day can help you find it. “ - Chris Guillebeau
If you can’t find a question worth devoting your time to answering, start interviewing and surveying people.
Set up 15 minutes Skype calls with 100 people and find out what they’re struggling with that relates to your current skill set.
28
Insights from So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport
In 2010, author Cal Newport received a PhD in Computer Science from MIT. Before starting his career, he became obsessed with the
question: “Why do some people end up loving what they do (for a living), while so many others fail at this goal?”
Cal Newport interviewed people who loved their work to find out how they got there. The people who loved what they did for a living had
a craftsman mindset, not a passion mindset.
The Passion Mindset:
The passionate mindset thinks: “What can the world offer me? What job can sustain my pre‐existing passion?”
“First, when you focus only on what your work offers you, it makes you hyperaware of what you don’t like about
it, leading to chronic unhappiness. This is especially true for entry‐level positions, which, by definition, are not
going to be filled with challenging projects and autonomy—these come later. When you enter the working world
with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can
become too much to handle.
Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly
love?”—are essentially impossible to confirm. “Is this who I really am?” and “Do I love this?” rarely reduce to
clear yes‐or‐no responses. In other words, the passion mindset is almost guaranteed to keep you perpetually unhappy and confused.” – Cal
Newport
The Craftsman Mindset:
The craftsman mindset thinks: “How can I improve and have something uniquely valuable to offer the world?
Am I willing to stick with this, despite how boring and tedious the process may be?”
“It (the craftsman mindset) asks you to leave behind self‐centered concerns about whether your job is “just
right,” and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great
career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy.” ‐ Cal Newport
“Regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset will be the foundation
on which you’ll build a compelling career. This is why I reject the “argument from pre‐existing passion,” because
it gets things backward. In reality, as I’ll demonstrate, you adopt the craftsman mindset first and then the
passion follows.” ‐ Cal Newport
Why a ‘Craftsman Mindset’ is prerequisite for passion
People who love what they do for a living consistently experience these three work traits:
Impact: the quality of your work has a noticeable and positive impact on people you care about (teammate, customer, etc.).
Creativity: you have an opportunity to improvise your work and implement your ideas.
Control: you have some say over how, when, where you work.
“The things that make great work great (creativity, impact, and control), are rare and valuable. If you want them in your career, you need
rare and valuable skills to offer in return.” ‐ Cal Newport
The process of developing rare and valuable skills is hard, and this is why having a craftsman mindset is so critical. Unless you find a way to
stick to the process of improvement, despite how much your passion dips, you’ll fail to develop skills that are rare and valuable, and you
won’t have enough leverage to demand these rare and valuable work traits.
How to become rare and valuable
Start volunteering for challenging projects at work, and start initiating challenging projects at home. Select your projects based on the
skills they force you to develop. Here are three questions to find the rare and valuable skills you need to develop:
What particular skill does my team, company, or industry lack at the moment (ex: specific domain knowledge, software program, etc.)?
What technologic expertise is in high demand in my industry (ex: SQL programming, Facebook advertising, etc.)?
What skills do the people at the top of my profession seem to have (ex: clear business writing, public speaking, time management, etc.)?
When you’ve found a skill you want to develop, use the principles of deliberate practice to develop that skill:
Carve out periods of undistracted focus.
Push yourself to the edge of your ability; cycle between comfort and discomfort.
Seek immediate feedback and mentorship.
Always be asking: Am I becoming increasingly rare (how long would it take me to train a college graduate to do what I do) and incredibly
valuable (how badly would people miss my contribution if I quit)?
“If you’re not putting in the effort to become, as Steve Martin put it, “so good they can’t ignore you,” you’re not
likely to end up loving your work—regardless of whether or not you believe it’s your true calling.” – Cal Newport
29
Insights from Mastery by Robert Greene
How can we hope to survive in today's harshly competitive, technology centered, globalized marketplace?
Companies are outsourcing work to people thousands of miles away, who produce high quality work for a fraction of the cost.
Soon artificial intelligence will be powerful enough to replace all truck drivers, bank tellers, and language translators. Eventually AI will do
all work that doesn't require a great deal of creativity.
To become irreplaceable in this harsh marketplace, we need to attain Mastery. If we can attain Mastery, we will unlock a higher intelligence
and creative ability that will be hard to outsource and difficult to automate.
Three essential mindsets to Mastery:
Primal Curiosity
When Albert Einstein was five, his father gave him a compass. As he examined the compass, he was completely
mesmerized by the invisible force that moved the needle. It made him wonder “What other undiscovered or
less understood forces exist in the world?”
This early experience hinted at a primal curiosity for Einstein that would fuel his obsessive drive for the
remaining decades of his life. The first mindset we must adopt is to re‐discover and stay connected to our
primal curiosity as we navigate our career decisions.
Spend a few weeks journaling 20 minutes a day to better understand and reconnect with your primal curiosity. Remove yourself from
distraction and write fast and freely for twenty minutes. Repeat the question “What did I naturally gravitate to before social pressure?”
“Your primal curiosities are like your DNA, they are unique to you. But we lose touch with it as we get older. Many schools and universities
kill curiosity. We forget what once captivated us.” – Robert Greene
Learning Above Everything Else
The master boxing coach, Freddie Roach, started a coaching apprenticeship at night while working as a
telemarketer in Las Vegas during the day. Without being asked, he began to hang around a boxing gym every
night and show the young boxers some tips he picked up as a boxer in his late teens and early twenties.
Roach gave up common comforts and balance to maximize his learning. Eventually, with enough 1‐on‐1
personalized training at the gym, he had sufficient skill and trust from young boxers to set up his own business.
He became a renowned boxing coach and would go on to work with and train great boxing champions, like
Manny Pacquiao.
The second mindset of Mastery is learning above all else even if it means taking lower pay, getting zero recognition for your work, facing
harsh criticism, and enduring long hours of tedious work.
“Eventually, the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful. Instead, you must value
learning above everything else. This will lead you to all of the right choices.”‐ Robert Greene
Unique Combination
Robotics engineer Yoky Matusoka reconnected with her fascination of the human hand. With a base level of
skill and the help of her robotics professor, she could manifest her primal curiosity. After years of work,
Matsuoka designed the most advanced robotic hand of its kind.
But she didn’t stop there.
Connected to her primal curiosity, she was eager to understand how the brain commanded the hand to move.
Matsuoka turned her attention to getting a doctorate in neuroscience.
Having advanced knowledge, skill, and experience in two fields: robotics and neuroscience, she combined the two and created a new field
in the science community called neurobotics. This is the third essential mindset to Mastery.
By combining seemingly different skills and experiences in a unique way, you can carve out a niche field where you are considered a one of
kind.
“Ultimately you create a field that is uniquely your own...you have found a niche that is not crowded with competitors. You have freedom to
roam, to pursue particular questions that interest you. You set your own agenda and command the resources available to this niche.
Unburdened by overwhelming competition and politicking, you have time and space to bring to flower your Life’s Task (your primal
curiosity)" – Robert Greene
30
Insights from The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
In 2008, Author Daniel Coyle traveled the world to understand how a select few places on Earth seem to produce an extraordinary amount
of talent.
How can one tiny indoor tennis court in Moscow (Spartak tennis club) produce more top‐ranked women tennis players than the
entire United States between 2005 and 2007?
How does one school system in the United States send 400% more low‐income minority students to college than any other
school system in the United States?
Coyle calls these mysterious pools of talent: “talent hotbeds.”
When he visited talent hotbeds around the world, he saw students operating on the edge of their ability and frequently making mistakes.
Every human being on the planet, however, instinctually hates struggling and making mistakes.
Why are people in talent hotbeds enthusiastic about putting in the thousands of hours of struggle necessary to build extraordinary talent?
Here are three “talent boosters” that talent hotbeds leverage to fuel students:
Talent booster #1: Revelatory moment.
At KIPP schools, where more low‐income students go to college than any other school in America, students
start visiting college campuses as soon as they’re enrolled.
A set of new fifth graders students at KIPP school in California will go to USC, Stanford, and UCLA and talk
with KIPP alumni who look like them and have a similar background. After the trip, young KIPP students
believe that even though no one in their family has attended college, they can be the first ones to go to
college.
Create revelatory moments for your children. Expose your child to amazing performances and help the see the similarities between
themselves and their heroes. The goal is to leverage moments that make your children believe they can do great things.
Talent booster #2: Environmental reinforcement.
KIPP teachers know that a child’s dream of going to college can fade. Therefore, KIPP teachers remind every
child that they are going to college 100 times a day.
One KIPP English teacher says, "We say college as often as people in other schools say um."
“Each homeroom is named after the college the teacher attended: math classes are in Berkeley; social studies
in USC; special education at Cornell Graduate School. KIPP teachers are skilled at slipping references to college
into conversation, always with the presumption that all the students are destined for those golden shores… Even
the lettering above the classroom mirrors inquires, ‘Where will YOU go to college?’” – Daniel Coyle
Create an environment around your children that constantly reminds and reinforces what’s important and what’s possible.
Talent booster #3: Primal cue to belong.
When looking back at the fastest runners in history, Coyle found that the fastest runners in the world were
either the youngest or second youngest in their family. On average, Olympic champion sprinters were fourth
in families of 4.6 children.
"Speed is not purely a gift, but a skill that grows through deep practice, and that is ignited by the primal cue
that ‘you're behind, keep up.’" – Daniel Coyle
We all receive primal cues to catch up and belong to a desirable group, like an older group or a prestigious club.
Talent hotbeds purposely inject primal cues to belong to fuel students.
In the 1980s, the Spartak tennis school in Moscow took primal cues to the extreme. Spartak invited a class of 25 seven‐year‐olds to join the
Spartak team and then cut one kid from the group every two weeks.
When you focus on these “talent boosters,” you create an inner drive for your child/student to routinely push themselves to the edge of
their ability and put in hours of deep, difficult practice that is necessary to becoming exceptionally talented.
“Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that all the world's parenting advice can be
distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their
effort.” – Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code
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Insights from Originals by Adam Grant
“Ultimately, the people who choose to champion originality are the ones who propel us forward. After spending
years studying them and interacting with them, I am struck that their inner experiences are not any different
from our own. They feel the same fear, the same doubt, as the rest of us. What sets them apart is that they take
action anyway. They know in their hearts that failing would yield less regret than failing to try.” – Adam Grant
Procrastinate on purpose
Adam and his team conducted a study to determine which participants could come up with a creative solution to a complex problem:
those who started and finished a task in a single sitting or those who started a task then procrastinated and completed it later.
The reason our creativity increases when we procrastinate on purpose is due to the ‘Ziegarnik Effect’: “Once a task is finished, we stop
thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.” – Adam Grant
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Insights from Give & Take by Adam Grant
There are three reciprocating styles you can adopt when interacting with other people:
Taker (give only when you expect to receive more in return)
Matcher (give only as much as you expect to receive)
Giver (give more than you expect to receive)
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Insights from How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
“Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.” – Benjamin Disraeli
The tools you need to build robust friendships, strengthen your network, and make people eager to help you succeed can be found in an
80‐year‐old book called 'How to Win Friends and Influence People.'
The principles in 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' are as applicable today as they were when the book was published in 1936 and
will continue to be relevant for centuries.
The principles in this book can be distilled down to two fundamental behaviors.
Be Genuinely Interested in Others
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in
two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie
When you meet someone your mission is to discover what subject fascinates them and then find a
way to be equally fascinated.
For example, if someone is interested in collecting stamps (a subject that you might think is boring),
research stamp collecting. In your research, you could discover a fascinating fact about stamps, like
the most valuable stamp in the world is worth $9.5 million.
When possible, ask people for advice on a topic that interests them. For example, “If I were to start
a stamp collection, how do you recommend I get started?"
When you give someone the opportunity to share their interest and expertise on a subject they enjoy, they will associate their joy with
your presence.
Give Frequent Praise
Think of a person who has recently praised your work. What was your opinion of that person after
receiving praise?
Think back to a teacher or boss who regularly praised your work. How does that teacher or that boss
compare to other teachers and bosses?
"In our interpersonal relations, we should never forget that all our associates are human beings and
hunger for appreciation. It is the legal tender that all souls enjoy." ‐ Dale Carnegie
“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the
way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. I am anxious to
praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my appreciation and lavish in my praise”
‐ Charles Schwab
Like Schwab, live in a spirit of acknowledgment and be eager to praise others for their effort.
When you notice a co‐worker putting in extra effort on a project, walk over to them and praise their commitment to the team. If your child
or partner helps around the house in a small way, praise them for their effort.
“The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the
other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.” ‐ Dale Carnegie
To build your praise and appreciation muscle, make praise and appreciation a daily habit. Take two minutes at the start of every day to
write an email to praise a friend or co‐worker for any progress they've recently made on a personal goal or professional project. Make it
personal and specific; tell them what impresses you most.
“William James said: ‘The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.’ He didn’t speak,
mind you, of the ‘wish’ or the ‘desire’ or the ‘longing’ to be appreciated. He said the ‘craving’ to be appreciated.
Here is a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger, and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart
hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand and ‘even the undertaker will be sorry when he dies.’”
‐ Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
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Insights from The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier
When a friend is in a stressful situation and asks you for help, do you offer advice?
Author and world‐renowned performance coach Michael Bungay Stanier says, “Your advice is not as good as you think it is.” To be a great
coach (and a great friend), spend less time telling someone what to do and more time asking questions.
There are four excellent questions in The Coaching Habit that you can use to help your friends, teammates, or employees find their way out
of an overwhelming and stressful situation.
Side note: These four questions are a great way to start a journaling/self‐coaching session.
What’s on your mind?
When you ask, "What's on your mind?" you invite the person you're coaching to skip the small talk and get to what
matters.
"Rather than talk about the weather or how their sports team's doing, or any other superficial boring and simply
useless chitchat, get to what matters...what's provoking anxiety, what's all‐consuming, what's waking them up at 4:00 AM."
When you ask, “What’s on your mind?” You’re saying, “I’m here for you and ready to help you work through whatever is bothering you.”
What else?
Asking "What else?" acts as a pressure relief valve. You permit the person you’re coaching to open up and allow
important but uncomfortable issues to flow out of their mouth.
"Asking, 'what else?' creates more wisdom, more insights, more self‐awareness and more possibilities out of thin
air…When you use ‘And what else?’ you’ll get more options and often better options. Better options lead to
better decisions. Better decisions lead to greater success.”
What's the real challenge here for you?
It's tempting to pick the most critical problem and start offering advice. If you prioritize for them; however,
you'll raise your status and lower theirs (because you’re saying "I have all the answers and you don't"). When
you lower someone's status, you strip the confidence they need to make their own decisions.
Therefore, instead of deciding what they should focus on, get them to think for themselves by asking them,
"What's the real challenge here for you?"
When someone is stressed and overwhelmed, everything will feel like a challenge. But when you ask
someone, "What's the real challenge here?" you get the person you're coaching to pause, look inward, and determine what one challenge,
if resolved, would provide the greatest relief.
When you include “for you” at the end of the question, you make the question easier to answer. In a 1997 study, researchers found that
when the word “you” was presented in a math question, students came to a solution faster and more accurately than if “you” was left out
of the math question.
To get someone to prioritize quickly, ask them, "What's the real challenge here for you?" You’ll often find that their “real challenge” is the
challenge they’re avoiding most.
If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?
Saying 'yes' to overcoming a real challenge will require more time and energy than the person you're
coaching may think.
If the person you're coaching doesn't systematically eliminate distractions from their life, they'll fall
back on old habits (like compulsively checking email) and be too tired or too busy to focus on their
REAL challenge.
Are they willing to ‘yes’ to focusing on what matters by saying 'no' to distractions and delete
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram off their phone? Are they willing to say ‘no’ to watching TV at night
or going out with friends on the weekend?
Are they willing to saying ‘yes’ to doing great work by saying ‘no’ to useless meetings (even if saying no might upset their boss or
coworkers)?
By asking "If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?" You're getting them to think strategically. As business coach Michael
Porter says, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do."
"The change of behavior at the heart of what this book is about is this: a little more asking people questions
and a little less telling people what to do."
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Bold quotes shown above are by Michael Bungay Stanier
Insights from Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
“A woman wants her husband to wear black shoes with his suit. But her husband doesn’t want to; he prefers
brown shoes. So what do they do? They compromise, they meet halfway. And, you guessed it, he wears one
black and one brown shoe. Is this the best outcome? No! In fact, that’s the worst possible outcome. Either of the
two other outcomes—black or brown—would be better than the compromise. Next time you want to
compromise, remind yourself of those mismatched shoes.”‐ Chris Voss
How can you get what you want in a negotiation without compromising?
Author Chris Voss was the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI. After dozens of high‐stakes negotiations with kidnappers around the world
(and later with business people around the world as a consultant), Chris Voss has learned that getting what he wants, avoiding
compromises, and making the other side feel like they were treated fairly requires tactical empathy.
Tactical empathy is the act of sincerely empathizing with your counterpart’s situation and then getting them to empathize with your
situation.
Be Empathetic
During a psychotherapy session, a psychiatrist encourages a patient to talk while he or she listens intensely.
Psychiatrists know that a patient will be defensive and oppositional to change until they feel heard.
The same is true for a negotiation. During a negotiation, your counterpart will resist any offer you make until you
prove to them that you understand what they’re saying and how they’re feeling.
That’s why the first goal of a negotiation is to listen closely to the cares and concerns your counterpart has, and then summarize their cares
and concerns with a statement that starts with "it seems like..." or "it sounds like..."
"It seems like you’re really concerned about ______________." OR "It sounds like ______________ is really important to you."
The beauty of these statements is if you’re wrong you won’t damage the conversation, since you can follow‐up your statement with “I
didn’t say that how it was, it just seems that way.”
However, if your counterpart affirms your summary statement with "that's right," then you’ll know that you you’ve made them feel heard.
After you hear a “that’s right”, your counterpart will be open to what you have to say and willing to move off their initial position.
Ask for Empathy
Now that you’ve built rapport with your counterpart by being empathic to their situation, ask them to return the
favor. Get them thinking about your challenges and coming up with solutions to your problem.
The best way to get your counterpart thinking about and solving one of your problems is to counter their
proposals by asking "How am I supposed to do that?"
Let's say you were renting an apartment, and your landlord tells you he is going to increase the rent from $1200/month to $1500/month. In
this situation, you could respond with, "It seems like you’re concerned that your apartment unit is under‐valued, and you want what's fair,
but how am I supposed to pay $1500/month when I only make enough at work to afford $1200/month?"
The key is to say, "How am I supposed to do that?" the same way you would say, "I value your intelligence, can you please help me solve
my problem?”
If you've made your counterpart feel heard and built rapport with them, then ask your counterpart the calibrated question, "How am I
supposed to do that?" Your counterpart will most likely do one of two things:
1. Generate a creative solution so that both of you can get what you value most.
2. Raise or lower their initial demand to accommodate you.
If they counter with an offer that doesn't meet your needs, you simply respond with a slightly different calibrated question. Back to the
rental example, if your landlord but reduced his rent to $1400/month, you would respond with "that's very generous of you and that's
probably the lowest you can go, but I'm sorry, I just don't see how I'm supposed to pay $1400/month to stay here when can I rent a similar
apartment nearby for less than $1200/month."
“He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of
negotiation.” – Chris Voss
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Productivity Principle: The Five-Minute Favor
Inspired by the book Give & Take by Adam Grant
“You should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.” - Adam Rifkin
In 2011, Fortune named Adam Rifkin the world’s greatest networker. Rifkin is a shy Silicon Valley entrepreneur with more connections to
Fortune’s top ‘movers and shakers’ (CEOs, rising stars, and influential figures) than anyone else on earth. Rifkin’s networking success is due
to a simple daily habit: offering a five-minute favor to anyone, without expecting anything in return.
“It takes him no time to raise funding for his start-ups. He has such a great reputation; people know he’s a good guy. That’s a dividend that
gets paid because of who he is.” – Raymond Rouf, fellow Silicon Valley entrepreneur
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Insights from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
& Leif Babin
“There are only two types of leaders: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders that lead successful, high-
performance teams exhibit Extreme Ownership. Anything else is simply ineffective. Anything else is bad
leadership.” - Leif Babin
Jocko and Leif create high performing Navy Seal teams and corporate business teams by teaching ‘decentralized command’ – allowing a
smaller team (4-6) to make decisions within a larger team without being told explicitly what to do. To allow independent decision making,
leaders must issue a Commander’s Intent:
“My leaders learned they must rely on their subordinate leaders to take charge of their smaller teams within the team and allow them to
execute based on a good understanding of the broader mission (known as Commander’s Intent), and standard operating procedures. That
was effective Decentralized Command.” – Jocko Willink
If Jocko instructed a group of Navy Seals snipers to go to the rooftop of a building, they might get to the rooftop and discover there is little
cover. At that point, they might set up on the rooftop anyways (because they were ordered to) and risk being killed, or simply disobey
orders. However, if Jocko issues a Commander’s Intent: “We need covering fire on this street to help these ground troops advance to
position bravo. Find the best position to apply this cover. I would suggest starting with that rooftop.” At this point, the Navy Seals would
get to the rooftop, notice that it has poor cover, and quickly decide to go to the 3 rd floor to provide covering fire.
“Those leaders must understand the overall mission, and the ultimate goal of that mission—the Commander’s Intent. Junior leaders must be
empowered to make decisions on key tasks necessary to accomplish that mission in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Teams
(of 4-6) within (larger) teams are organized for maximum effectiveness for a particular mission, with leaders who have clearly delineated
responsibilities. Every tactical-level team leader must understand not just what to do but why they are doing it. If frontline leaders do not
understand why, they must ask their boss to clarify the why. Decentralized Command does not mean junior leaders or team members
operate on their own program; that results in chaos. Instead, junior leaders must fully understand what is within their decision-making
authority—the “left and right limits” of their responsibility.” - Jocko Willink
Issue intents, not commands. The next time you need help, explain the mission’s intent and the desired outcome. Provide suggestions,
but let them decide ‘how’ they will meet the intent within clear “left and right limits” of the mission’s intent. If something changes, they
can make decisions without having to rely on you.
Letting other people make decisions in situations you’re ultimately responsible for seems to contradict the concept of ‘Extreme
Ownership’. How can you have extreme ownership if you are not in direct control?
“Every leader must walk a fine line. That’s what makes leadership so challenging. Leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the
dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another. The simple recognition of this is one of the most
powerful tools a leader has. With this in mind, a leader can more easily balance the opposing forces and lead with maximum effectiveness.” -
Jocko Willink
Taking extreme ownership but giving away control is just one of the many contradictions leaders must live moment to moment:
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39
Insights from Atomic Habits by James Clear
If you’ve failed to adopt a healthy or productive habit you either failed to make your new behavior obvious, easy, attractive, or satisfying.
These are what author James Clear calls ‘The Four Laws of Behavior Change’. Failing to abide by any one of these laws means you'll fail to
adopt a new behavior.
Don’t have an obvious daily cue to exercise? You’ll forget about your new healthy habit and stick to your old daily routine.
Don’t have an easy exercise routine? You’ll perform an easy and familiar routine instead (like watching TV).
Don’t find exercise appealing (i.e. exercise isn’t attractive)? You’ll resist exercise enough to avoid doing it consistently.
Don’t get immediate satisfaction after exercise? You’ll lack the motivation to exercise it consistently.
Here are two strategies to make every new healthy and productive behavior (i.e. exercising, cooking, writing, reading, etc.) obvious, easy,
attractive, and satisfying so that it may turn into a daily habit.
Stacking & Starting
You’ve probably used ‘habit stacking’ to build new hygiene habits without realizing it. As a child, you
stacked the habit of flushing the toilet with the habit of washing your hands. Flushing the toilet became the
cue for your hand washing habit.
Habit stacking involves using an old and reliable daily habit as the trigger for a new habit. When you stack a
new habit on an existing habit, you use the momentum of the old habit to make the new habit easier to
initiate. I think of it as riding a bike down a hill to build up enough speed to get up the next hill with minimal
peddling.
But if the hill of your new habit is too daunting, the momentum of the old habit won't be enough. That's why you need to reduce your new
habit to an easy two‐minute ‘starting ritual’.
James Clear: “Even when you know you should start small, it’s easy to start too big. When you dream about making a change,
excitement inevitably takes over and you end up trying to do too much too soon. The most effective way I know to counteract this
tendency is to use the Two‐Minute Rule, which states, ‘When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.’”
“Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.”
“Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.”
“Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.”
“Fold the laundry” becomes “Fold one pair of socks.”
“Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.”
Syncing & Scoring
Ronan Byrne, an electrical engineering student in Dublin, Ireland knew that he should exercise more, so he
used his engineering skills to synchronize his stationary bike with his laptop. He wrote a program on his
laptop to play his favorite Netflix shows on the TV in front of the stationary bike when he cycled at a
certain speed. If he slowed down, Netflix would pause, and he’d need to cycle harder to finish the episode
he was watching ‐ binge‐watching Netflix meant burning calories.
Like Byrne, if you only allow yourself to enjoy your favorite experiences while executing a healthy and
productive new habit, you’ll find the new habit is something you look forward to doing.
Entrepreneur Kevin Rose only allows himself to play his favorite video game on the treadmill.
I only allow myself to enjoy my favorite protein cookie if I'm at the gym.
I only allow myself to listen to my favorite DJ (Deadmau5) while I’m writing the scripts for my videos.
When you synchronize an experience you crave with a new habit you dread doing, the craving will counteract the resistance to executing
the new habit and allow you to get started.
Synchronizing is a great tool for building a new habit, but to make a habit stick the habit must become inherently satisfying. And to make a
habit inherently satisfying you must keep score.
Imagine on January 30th you look up at your wall and see 27 red check marks, on 27 of the last 30 days. Each check‐mark represents a
successful workout. That calendar is visual proof that you are someone who cares about their health. You should take pride in that fact!
If you take time to score the completion of a habit in a habit tracker (ex: calendar on your wall, app on your phone, or physical habit
tracking notebook), you’ll start to see a pattern of behavior that proves you’re becoming the type of person you’ve dreamed of being. The
immediate pride you experience after using a habit tracker provides the satisfaction you need to return to the habit over and over until the
habit sticks.
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Insights from High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard
Three key habits to improve performance and productivity:
Habit #1: Tension to Intention
Most high performers know they have the power to generate whatever feelings they want in any situation.
High performers know they don't have to carry around the emotions of the day. They don't have sit back and
hope to feel the way they want to feel.
Brendon says "It’s so thoroughly obvious that high performers are generating the feelings they want more
often than taking the emotions that land on them."
Each transition during the day (work to home, school to gym, etc) is a chance to build the habit of releasing the tension and then setting an
intention of the feeling you want to bring to the next situation.
Habit Sequence: When you transition from one situation to the next (or one work mode to the next), close your eyes and release the
tension in your face, neck and shoulders. Then set an intention for how you want to feel by asking yourself: “What is the primary feeling I
want to bring into this situation?”
Habit #2: Necessity through Identity
The feeling of necessity might be the most powerful feeling high performers choose to generate. Musician
Bob Marley once said, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.”
High performers don’t hope they perform well. High performers create situations and mindsets where they
must perform well. They do this by creating a sense of identity around their goals and processes.
When Brendon asks high performers why they work so hard or how they stay so focused, their responses
often sound something like this, “It’s just who I am. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Whatever your important goals (running a marathon, writing a best‐selling book, etc) are, form your identity around them. You’ll make
progress a must, not a nice to have.
Habit Sequence: When you feel unmotivated to work, repeat the following statement to yourself, “This is who I am. This is what I do.”
Cultivate a feeling of identity around your work process.
Habit #3: Bringing my ‘A’ Game
Our culture tells us that sense of purpose comes from "helping millions" or "changing the world." However,
Brendon Burchard has found that most high performers develop a sense of purpose by focusing on one
person. Not millions, not even a group of people, just one person.
To find the person who will give meaning and purpose to your work, ask yourself, "Who needs my A game?"
Brendon Burchard says: “This question gets you looking beyond your individual performance or feelings, and
it connects you with a reason to be your best for others. It helps you find somebody worth fighting for. By asking this question, you stoke
the necessity to be your best in order to help others, which allows you to hit high performance faster and stay there longer."
When you ask, “Who needs my A game”, you might think of a family member, a boss you like, a teammate in need, or a customer you want
to help. Whoever it is, see their face in your mind’s eye. By doing so, you will tap into a reserve you didn’t know you had.
Habit Sequence: When feeling stressed at work, or you find yourself losing focus, ask yourself, “Who needs my ‘A’ game right now?” Think
of a person worth pushing yourself for.
By committing to develop high performance habits we are committing to a life of excellence.
“The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their
chosen field of endeavor.” ‐ Vince Lombardi
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Insights from The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler
“Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our
best. It is a transformation available to anyone, anywhere, provided that certain initial conditions are met.
Everyone from assembly-line workers in Detroit to jazz musicians in Algeria to software designers in Mumbai rely
on flow to drive performance and accelerate innovation.”
– Steven Kotler (all quotes in bold are by Steven Kotler)
Flow is the feeling of being totally immersed in what you are doing. “In flow, every action, each decision, leads effortlessly, fluidly,
seamlessly to the next. It’s high-speed problem solving; it’s being swept away by the river of ultimate performance.”
According to Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Ned Hallowell: “Everything you do, you do better in flow, from baking a chocolate cake
to planning a vacation to solving a differential equation to writing a business plan to playing tennis to making love. Flow is the doorway to
the ‘more’ most of us seek. Rather than telling ourselves to get used to it, that’s all there is, instead learn how to enter into flow. There you
will find, in manageable doses, all the ‘more’ you need.”
mmediate feedback
When your experience includes an immediate cycle of action-reaction-improvement, you’ll have a better chance
of experiencing flow. “The smaller the gap between input and output, the more we know how we’re doing and
how to do it better. If we can’t course correct in real time, we start looking for clues to better performance—
things we did in the past, things we’ve seen other people do, things that can pull us out of the moment. “
In the context of your work, externalize thoughts so you can immediately improve upon them – sketch out
ideas, type out sentences, draw on the whiteboard.
ay “Yes! And…”
Whatever comes up, accept it and add to it.
“Interactions should be additive more than argumentative. The goal here is the momentum, togetherness, and
innovation that comes from ceaselessly amplifying each other’s ideas and actions. It’s a trigger based on the first
rule of improv comedy. If I open a sketch with, “Hey, there’s a blue elephant in the bathroom,” then “No, there’s
not”…the scene goes nowhere. But if the reply is affirmative instead—“Yeah, sorry, there was no more space in
the cereal cupboard”—well then that story goes someplace interesting.”
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Productivity Principle: The 4% Zone
Inspired by the book The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler
One reason adventure sport athletes improve much faster than most athletes is that their environmental conditions
force them to stay within 4% of their current ability and remain completely focused on the task at hand. If they
pushed themselves too hard, they would encounter a situation far beyond their current skill level that could kill them
(ex: a big wave surfer trying to surf a wave 50% larger than any wave he’s ever surfed will get overwhelmed, lose
focus, and be crushed by the wave). By continually tackling challenges just beyond their CURRENT ability, adventure
sport athletes enjoy the process of improvement and end up doing the impossible (like surfing 100 foot waves).
“If we want to achieve the kinds of accelerated performance we’re seeing in action and adventure sports, then it’s 4
percent plus 4 percent plus 4 percent, day after day, week after week, months into years into careers. This is the road
to real magic. Follow this path long enough, and not only does impossible becomes possible, it becomes what’s next—
like eating breakfast, like another a day at the office." – Steven Kotler
If you want to accelerate skill development AND enjoy the process…ASK YOURSELF:
When Executing Repetitive/Mundane Tasks: do it slightly faster OR with slightly less effort.
When Doing Creative Work: improve your existing work by 4% (i.e. make the next revision slightly
better) OR impose creative constraints (ex: condense the length of your speech slightly).
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Insights from Spark by John Ratey MD
“Right now the front of your brain is firing signals about what you’re reading, and how much of it you soak up
has a lot to do with whether there is a proper balance of neurochemicals and growth factors to bind neurons
together. Exercise has a documented, dramatic effect on these essential ingredients.” ‐ John Ratey MD
Exercise accelerates learning
When you exercise, your body naturally releases a protein called ‘brain‐derived neurotrophic factor
(BDNF)’ into the bloodstream and up to the brain. In the 1990s, scientists discovered BDNF rapidly
accelerates brain cell growth and increases the ability to learn.
“Researchers found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically
sprouted new branches, producing the same structural growth required for learning—and causing me to
think of BDNF as Miracle‐Gro for the brain…BDNF gathers in reserve pools near the synapses and is
unleashed when we get our blood pumping.” ‐ John Ratey MD
“Exercise sparks the master molecule of the learning process” ‐ John Ratey MD
Exercise enhances creativity
During exercise, the hippocampus brain region receives a large amount of BDNF growth factor. The
hippocampus acts like a cartographer for the brain ‐ linking new information to existing memories.
“A memory, scientists believe, is a collection of information fragments dispersed throughout the brain. The
hippocampus serves as a way station, receiving the fragments from the cortex, and then bundling them
together and sending them back up as a map of a unique new pattern of connections.” – John Ratey MD
Exercise sparks growth in the hippocampus, helping you create new connections between existing ideas
and allowing you to come up with novel solutions to complex problems.
“If you have an important afternoon brainstorming session scheduled, going for a short, intense run
during lunchtime is a smart idea.” ‐ John Ratey MD
What’s the most ‘productive’ way to exercise?
Largest cognitive benefits in the least amount time, done sustainably
Type:
The most effective form of exercise for increasing mental performance is aerobic exercise (also known as cardio). Aerobic exercise
includes any activity that pushes your heart and lungs for a sustained period. Examples include running, biking, and swimming. Although
weight training is essential for physical health, it won’t provide the cognitive benefits aerobic exercise does.
Timing:
Schedule your aerobic exercise before learning a difficult subject, tackling a complex project, or conducting a brainstorming.
Duration:
Exercise for 20‐30 minutes with at sustained heart rate of 60‐70% of your maximum heart rate (max heart rate = 208 ‐ (0.7)*current age). If
you exceed 70% of your maximum heart rate, you’ll start burning reserve fuel (glycogen) and releasing large amounts of lactic acid, which
breaks down muscle. The more time you spend above 70% of your maximum heart rate, the more recovery time you’ll need between
exercises, and the less often you’ll reap the cognitive benefits of exercise. If you don’t have a heart rate monitor, don’t worry. Iowa State
University kinesiologist Panteleimon Ekkekakis has found moving at a pace which feels “somewhat hard” is a good indication you are
exercising near 70% of your maximum heart rate.
You experience the largest mental gains when you combine aerobic exercise with an activity that requires advanced motor skills:
“Choose a sport that simultaneously taxes the cardiovascular system and the brain—tennis is a good example—or do a ten‐minute aerobic
warm‐up before something nonaerobic and skill‐based, such as rock climbing or balance drills. While aerobic exercise elevates
neurotransmitters, creates new blood vessels that pipe in growth factors, and spawns new cells, complex activities put all that material to
use by strengthening and expanding networks. The more complex the movements, the more complex the synaptic connections.” ‐ John
Ratey MD
“In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not
separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man
can attain perfection.” ‐ Plato
44
Insights from Are You Fully Charged? by Tom Rath
“We identified and catalogued more than 2,600 ideas for improving daily experience. As we narrowed down the
concepts to the most proven and practical strategies, underlying patterns continued to surface. Three key
conditions differentiate days when you have a full charge from typical days” – Tom Rath
Meaning: making the connection between what you do and how it benefits another person
Interactions: creating far more positive than negative moments
Physical Health: making choices that improve your mental and physical health.
Meaning
“Until you understand how your efforts contribute to the world, you are simply going through the motions each
day.” – Tom Rath
According to a 2008 study by the Radiological Society of North America, when a patient’s photo was attached to
an MRI scan, the accuracy of the radiologists’ diagnosis improved by 46%! Therefore, get in the habit of making
a connection between what you are working on and who it is impacting. Place a picture of who your work is
impacting on your desk or on the wallpaper of your computer desktop.
Interaction
“We need at least three to five positive interactions to outweigh every one negative exchange. Bad moments
simply outweigh good ones. Whether you’re having a one-on-one conversation with a colleague or a group
discussion, keep this simple shortcut in mind: At least 80 percent of your conversations should be focused on
what’s going right.” – Tom Rath
What's ‘right’ includes: focusing on a strength, recent accomplishment, or an experience you can look forward
to. At end of each day, as you lay in bed, reflect upon the positive interactions you had during the day.
Reflecting on positive interactions will focus your mind to form more positive interactions tomorrow.
Physical Health
“There is absolutely no dietary need for any added sugar - a toxin that fuels diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and
cancer. Eliminate as much added sugar as possible…Drink more water, tea, and coffee instead of soda or other
sweetened drinks.” – Tom Rath
Look at the label of everything you are about to purchase and eat. If it contains more than 10 grams of sugar,
don’t buy it. Aim for zero added sugar (naturally sweetened foods only) throughout the day to keep you blood
sugar stable and remain fully charged. At a minimum, avoid these sugary foods: soda, candy, pastries, fruit juice,
and most dressings.
“Being active throughout the day is the key to staying energized. Even 30–60 minutes of exercise a day will not
cut it if you spend the rest of your day sitting around. Moving around and getting more activity every hour is
what will keep you fully charged” – Tom Rath
A study of over 200,000 people found that even if you exercise more than 7 hours each week you still had a 50%
greater risk of death if you sit the majority of the time each day.
“When you sit down, the electrical activity in your leg muscles shuts off quickly. Your rate of burning calories
drops to just one per minute. The enzymes that help break down fat fall by 90 percent. After sitting for two
hours, your good cholesterol drops by 20 percent.” – Tom Rath
Set hourly reminders to move around. Make standing the default position (get a stand-up desk if you work in an
office).
“The best performers in these studies slept for 8 hours and 36 minutes per night on average. The average
American, in contrast, gets just 6 hours and 51 minutes of sleep on weeknights…One study suggests that losing
90 minutes of sleep can reduce daytime alertness by nearly one-third.” – Tom Rath
Sleep is essential to our daily performance. Here is how to get more of it:
Reduce your exposure to light at night (turn off electronic devices 1 hour before a scheduled bed
time).
Lower the room temperature (reduced temperature prevents your natural body clock from waking
you up in the middle of the night).
Reduce exposure to noise while sleeping by wearing ear plugs or playing a white-noise soundtrack
while sleeping (use an app on your smartphone).
45
Insights from The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal
“People who use their willpower seem to run out of it. In study after study:
Controlling emotions didn’t just lead to emotional outbursts; it made people more willing to spend money on
something they didn’t need.
Resisting tempting sweets didn’t just trigger cravings for chocolate; it prompted procrastination.
It was as if every act of willpower was drawing from the same source of strength, leaving people weaker with each
successful act of self-control.” – Kelly McGonigal
Neuroscientists have found that self-control resides in an area of the brain called the pre-frontal cortex. Each time you use
the pre-frontal cortex to make decisions, think through problems, or resist temptations, you deplete your limited willpower
reserves.
In the modern age, you face an onslaught of self-control challenges. If you aren’t careful, you will quickly use up your
limited self-control reserves, which leads to excessive procrastination on our biggest projects. Therefore, you need to have
a large willpower reserve to avoid becoming defenseless against temptation and distraction later in the day. In addition to
the two strategies detailed in my animated summary video (increasing heart rate variability by slowing your breathing to
five breaths per minute and forgiving yourself for past willpower failures), here are four daily habits to strengthen your
willpower:
46
Insights from The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
Dr. Jim Loehr, co‐founder of the Human Performance Institute and author of “The Power of Full Engagement”, has dedicated his
professional life to improving the performance of elite athletes and executives. When Loehr started working with elite athletes, he
couldn’t understand the performance gap between his low‐ranked athletes and his high‐ranked athletes. Both athletes had incredible
talent and work ethic.
Then, one day, he noticed his high‐performing tennis players doing something strange. Between points the high‐performing players
seemed to zone out. In the middle of a match, they appeared to be completely relaxed and in a Zen‐like state.
Days later he had his tennis players wear heart rate monitors and observed their heart rates during a tennis match. During the match the
high‐ranking, high‐performing tennis players frequently engaged in short rituals of recovery and relaxed their heart rates by as much as 20
beats per minute between points. The low‐ranking, low‐performing tennis players had no rituals of recovery and maintained an elevated
heart rate throughout the match. In the last half of these tennis matches, these low‐ranked tennis players made errors that ultimately cost
them the match.
Loehr found that high‐performing athletes can consistently perform at a high level because they’ve developed the habit of going through
rapid cycles of intense focus and relaxation.
“The richest, happiest and most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to
disengage periodically and seek renewal.” – Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
“Sadly, the need for recovery is often viewed as evidence of weakness rather than as an integral aspect of sustained performance. The result
is that we give almost no attention to renewing and expanding our energy reserves, individually or organizationally.” – Jim Loehr & Tony
Schwartz
“We must learn to establish stopping points in our days, inviolable times when we step off the track, cease processing information and shift
our attention from achievement to restoration. Moore‐Ede calls this a ‘time cocoon.’” – Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
The key is to build a set of rapid recovery rituals into your day to restore your energy sources. You can execute the rituals in two scenarios:
1. After 90 minutes of continuous focus on a task.
2. Any time you start to feel slightly irritable.
The four energy sources you need to restore are physical energy, emotional energy, mental energy, and spiritual energy. To help you build
your rapid recovery rituals, here is a list of rapid recovery rituals I practice every day to spark your thinking.
To quickly restore my physical energy, I walk up a flight of stairs, go for a jog around the block, or do a set of push‐ups.
I do these exercises just long enough to intensify my breathing, but not enough to break a sweet and require a change
of clothes. By doing these brief exercises, I oxygenate my cells and rejuvenate my brain. Then I drink cold glass of
water. Drinking water has a profound impact on your physical energy because your brain and heart are made of almost
75% water.
To quickly restore my emotional energy, I text someone I enjoy spending time with to make plans for that evening (ex:
going out for dinner with my wife). Planning events with others creates a sense of anticipation and excitement I can
carry into my work session. Another emotional boost is to give praise to others around me. “Gallup found that the key
drivers of productivity for employees include whether they feel cared for by a supervisor or someone at work; whether
they have received recognition or praise during the past seven days; and whether someone at work regularly
encourages their development.” – Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
To quickly restore my mental energy, I go for a walk, listen to music, let go of what I was working on, and let my mind
wander. By letting my mind wander, I let ideas related to my work incubate in my sub‐conscious. When I return to work
10‐15 minutes later, I have a burst of creative energy. “The highest form of creativity depends on a rhythmic movement
between engagement and disengagement, thinking and letting go, activity and rest. Both sides of the equation are
necessary, but neither is sufficient by itself.” – Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
To quickly restore my spiritual energy, I take out a piece of paper and write down answers to the questions: ‘How I
want to be remembered?’ and ‘Who I want to help?’. Spiritual energy comes from thinking of things bigger than
yourself. The greatest spiritual energy gains come from tapping into a sense of purpose. To tap into a sense of
purpose: “We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were
being questioned by life—hourly and daily. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and
in right conduct.” – Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz
Take a few minutes to write out your own rapid recovery rituals. Include physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual recovery components.
“Physical capacity is defined by quantity of energy. Emotional capacity is defined by quality of energy. Mental
capacity is defined by focus of energy. Spiritual capacity is defined by force of energy.” – Jim Loehr & Tony
Schwartz
47
Insights from Performing Under Pressure by Hendrie Weisinger and J. P. Pawliw‐Fry
“In a stressful situation, reduction is the goal. In a pressure moment, success is the goal. Thinking that you
have to be successful all the time means you are under pressure all the time.”
How does pressure affect your performance?
“In a pressure moment, your heart rate starts to zoom (and) your thinking is apt to become rigid and distorted.”
Everyone is negatively affected by pressure. No one can perform their best under pressure, not even so‐called ‘clutch performers’ like
superstar athletes LeBron James and Tom Brady.
“People who handle pressure better than others do not ‘rise to the occasion’ or perform statistically better than they do in non‐pressure
situations. If you are a sports fan, you’ve been fed a myth by the media that some athletes are ‘clutch’ performers who do better under
pressure. Or maybe you’ve heard that some people at work do more creative work, are more productive, work better as a team, or add more
value to a client under pressure. But it’s not true.”
“In our multiyear study of individuals under pressure who were able to perform in the top 10 percent of the twelve thousand people we
studied, and who statistically received more promotions that advanced their careers, we found that each of them was doing the same thing
as basketball star LeBron James or New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady: allowing themselves to be affected less by pressure than
those around them.”
3 Ways to be Less Affected by Pressure
When psychologist Adam Grant told students to get excited when they felt nervous, they delivered
speeches that were rated seventeen percent more persuasive and fifteen percent more confident
than students who were told to calm down.
In another experiment, when students were told to get excited before a big exam they scored
twenty‐two percent higher than students who were instructed to stay calm.
The next time you feel pressure, interpret your anxiety as excitement. Tell yourself “I’m excited for
the upcoming challenge.”
“Before you go into a high‐pressure situation, convince yourself it is a challenge or an opportunity…Think of your tasks and responsibilities
as daily challenges to strut your stuff. If you are a project manager, tell your team, ‘I challenge you to make this your best work ever.’ A sales
manager might tell his sales force, ‘Here’s the challenge—let’s see if we are up to it.’ Or ‘Hey, it’s great that we get opportunities like this to
show how good we are!’”
“Track sprinters have more false starts when told their time is important and will be recorded as
opposed to being discarded and used for training purposes.”
Research shows that sales reps who are told to simply ‘shoot the breeze’ when presenting a new
product make significantly less mistakes than sales reps who are told their product presentation is
‘very important.’
The next time you feel pressure, downplay the situation by equating it to something familiar, easy,
and less important.
For example, when you feel nervous before a big exam, tell yourself “it’s just like a practice test.”
“When you focus on ‘uncontrollables,’ you intensify the pressure; it boosts your anxiety to the point
of disturbing your physiology, creating distracting thoughts that undermine your confidence.”
The next time you feel pressure focus entirely on what you can control.
Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Greg Maddux judged his performances by how many pitches left his
hand the way he intended (whether the batter hit his pitch was irrelevant). Before delivering a
speech, I fixate on my breathing, posture, and how I’m going to deliver my opening sentence. In high
pressure situations, professional golfers focus on executing their pre‐shot routine (a series of actions
taken before they hit the golf ball).
The authors recommend performing the following exercise:
1. Visualize the high‐pressure moment; think about the things you can control, and imagine those going well.
2. Now think about the things you can’t control. Visualize your performance going astray.
3. Bring your mind back into focus on what you can control, and visualize yourself getting back on track.
“Very few think about how to handle pressure moments better—until it’s too late. Few have strategies
grounded in the latest science of the brain or in psychology.”
48
All bold‐italic quotes are by authors Hendrie Weisinger and J. P. Pawliw‐Fry
Insights from 10-Minute Toughness by Jason Selk
"A considerable body of research validates that each of these five tools is highly effective for improving an
individual's ability to perform…Give it a try. Complete the mental workout for two weeks, and judge for
yourself if it helps you to improve focus, ability, and consistency." – Jason Selk
Performance Statement
"After taking your centering breath, repeat to yourself the statement that most effectively focuses you on what it takes for
you to be successful in competition. Repeating the performance statement in your mental workout will help remind you of
the most helpful thought necessary for success." – Jason Selk
Without a performance statement, your mind will naturally fill up with thoughts of worry and self-doubt. Repeating a performance
statement is an excellent tool to reduce negative self-talk during performances. A cyclist’s performance statement is: "Weight back and
breathe easy." A business executive’s performance statement is: "Listen first; then decide; be swift and confident.”
Discover your performance statement: "Imagine that you are about to compete in the biggest game of your life, and the best coach you
have ever had is standing right next to you. Sixty seconds before the competition begins, your coach looks you in the eye and tells you that if
you stay focused on this one thing or these two things, you will be successful today. What one or two things would the coach name? (Be as
specific as possible, and avoid using the word don't)" – Jason Selk
Visualizations
After reciting your performance statement, spend one minute visualizing past success (seeing highlights from past
performances), one minute visualizing ultimate success (seeing yourself performing well on the biggest stage you can
imagine, ex: a stadium full of people), and one minute visualizing a successful upcoming performance.
Visualization Guidelines:
A. Rapidly replay a scene in your mind until it feels right.
B. Ensure your final visualization is at 'game speed' (how you expect to experience the upcoming performance in real time).
C. End each successful visualization by congratulating yourself on an excellent performance.
Questions to ask yourself while visualizing (answer with as much detail as possible):
1. What do I see? ________________________________________________________________________________________________
2. What do I hear? _______________________________________________________________________________________________
3. What do I feel? ________________________________________________________________________________________________
4. Emotionally, what does it feel like to be successful? __________________________________________________________________
Identity Statement
"Upon completing your personal highlight reel, repeat to yourself your identity statement to help mold your self-image. The
identity statement is a proven tool for boosting self-confidence, which is the single most helpful mental variable in
improving performance." – Jason Selk
Complete the following statement:
“I am incredibly: (a key strength of yours – ex: passionate, thoughtful, creative, etc.); I am the: (what you want to be known for – ex: best
speaker at this conference, most effective salesperson at this tradeshow, etc.).
Jason Selk’s identity statement:
"I am more motivated than my competition; I am the most effective sports psychology consultant in the world."
"The 10-MT workout is designed to help athletes control arousal (through centering breaths), create a precise
and effective focus (through the performance statement and personal highlight reel), and improve self-image
(through the identity statement)." – Jason Selk
49
Insights from 10% Happier by Dan Harris
“There’s a reason why business people, lawyers, and marines have embraced meditation. There’s no magic or
mysticism required—it’s just exercise. If you do the right amount of reps, certain things will happen, reliably and
predictably.”– Dan Harris
“When you see that there’s something better than what we have then it’s just a matter of time before your brain is like, ‘Why the fuck am I
doing that? I’ve been holding on to a hot coal.’ ” – Dr. Jud Brewer, mindfulness researcher at Yale
“Every time you get lost in thought—which you will, thousands of times—gently return to the breath. I cannot stress strongly enough that
forgiving yourself and starting over is the whole game. As my friend and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg has written, ‘Beginning again
and again is the actual practice, not a problem to overcome so that one day we can come to the ‘real’ meditation.’” – Dan Harris
“If you give your brain enough of a taste of mindfulness, it will eventually create a self-reinforcing spiral—a
retreat from greed and hatred” – Dan Harris
50
Insights from The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor
“We become more successful when we are happier and more positive.” – Shawn Achor
“Happiness gives us a real chemical edge on the competition. How? Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin,
chemicals that not only make us feel good, but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new
information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural
connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see
and invent new ways of doing things.” – Shawn Achor (all bold italic quotes shown below are by Shawn Achor)
ractice gratitude
“When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they
become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience
fewer headaches than control groups. Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are
more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely.”
Keep a journal near your bed. Before going to sleep at night OR before getting out of bed in the morning,
write down 3 things you’re grateful for.
51
Insights from Drive by Daniel Pink
What is the best way to motive yourself and others to do cognitively demanding work?
External rewards like cash bonuses are great for straight‐forward tasks: getting kids to do their chores, convincing yourself to do repetitive
data entry work, or motivating an employee to do assembly line work.
However, these ‘if you do this, I’ll reward you with that’ types of external incentives are horrible for motiving yourself and others to learn a
difficult subject or come up with creative solutions to complex problems.
According to scientific research (studies: 1,2,3,4), if you use external incentives like money, grades, or social status, you will do significant
harm to one’s long‐term motivation to do cognitively demanding work.
The best way to motive yourself and others is to spark three intrinsic drivers:
UTONOMY
When Atlassian, an Australian software company, allowed their programmers to have a complete day of
freedom (they were paid to work on whatever code they wanted with whomever they wanted), they came up
with several new product ideas and dozens of creative solutions to existing problems.
Atlassian co‐founder Mike Cannon‐Brookes told author Daniel Pink, “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose
people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator.” What motivates people beyond equal pay is work
autonomy.
By giving yourself and others a degree of flexibility within a rigid framework with a choice of tasks, free time to work on side projects,
choice of technique, and the opportunity to pick team members, you will spark the intrinsic drive of autonomy. Author Daniel Pink calls
these the four T’s of autonomy: freedom to pick the task, the time, the technique, and the team.
“Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.” ‐ Daniel Pink
ASTERY
When Swedish shipping company, Green Cargo, wanted to overhaul their performance review process, they
implemented a key finding by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: when workers are given tasks slightly
above their current skill level and stay in a state between boredom and anxiety, they are more engaged, more
motivated to work, and more creative.
Green Cargo implemented Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s findings by changing the way they conducted performance
reviews. During each performance review, managers now needed to determine if their employees were
overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their current work assignments. Then the managers needed to work with
each employee to craft Goldilocks work assignments: work assignments that weren’t too hard, not too easy, but just right above their
current skill level.
What effect did Green Cargo's new performance review system have? Employees were more engaged and reported feelings of mastery
over their work. After two years of these new performance reviews, Green Cargo became profitable for the first time in 125 years.
“One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what
they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom.
But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious.” ‐ Daniel Pink
URPOSE
"You have to repeat your mission and your purpose...over and over and over. And sometimes you're like, doesn't
everyone already know this? It doesn't matter. Starting out the meetings with This is Facebook's mission, This is
Instagram's mission, and This is why Whatsapp exists (is critical)." – Sheryl Sandberg
When Sheryl Sandburg starts her meetings by stating the mission, she's sparking the third intrinsic driver: a
sense of purpose.
Purpose is the reason organizations like ‘Doctors Without Borders’ can get highly skilled doctors to willingly
travel to poor villages around the world, live in harsh conditions, and get paid very little money to do so. These doctors are motivated to
work because they are fueled by a sense of purpose they get from helping others.
Ask: How will learning this topic allow you to help the people you care about? How will solving this problem serve the greater good?
“Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self‐determined, and connected to one another.
And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.” ‐ Daniel Pink
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Insights from Rethinking Positive Thinking by Gabriele Oettingen
“Positive fantasies led to lower energy levels, which in turn predicted lower accomplishment" ‐ Gabriele
Oettingen
Gabriele Oettingen has studied the effect of positive visualization for several decades, and she’s uncovered some surprising findings:
College students who visualized themselves receiving a good grade on a psychology 101 midterm received a lower
grade than students who didn’t participate in the positive visualization exercise.
College graduates who visualized themselves getting a high paying job received fewer job offers and earned less money
than graduates who didn’t complete the positive visualization exercise.
When you allow yourself to fantasize about a positive result in the future, you fool your mind into thinking that you’ve already achieved
that result. If the mind thinks you’ve already reached your goal, it won’t be motivated to take action towards attaining that goal.
Author Gabriele Oettingen has found that women who participate in a six‐minute visualization exercise lower their blood pressure by 3‐5
points (mimicking the calming effects of smoking half a cigarette).
"Positive fantasies might make us feel electrified for an instant, but at the very least, this feeling does not correspond to what is going on in
our bodies.” – Garbriele Oettingen
However, positive fantasies are helpful if you want to decide which goal to pursue. By fantasying you can rapidly simulate several future
experiences and select the future that is most worth struggling for. Therefore, you should not scrap the practice of positive thinking.
Here is how you can use positive thinking to envision the future you want and RAISE your motivation to attain that vision:
ish: "What do I want, and why is it reasonable?" ‐‐> allow yourself to see it
Visualize yourself making progress in one of the following areas of your life: physical health, financial security, key
relationships, or the problem you are most concerned with now. Then focus on one action you could take today to
move you closer to that vision. Make sure the action is feasible and completely within your control.
Examples: go for a run after work, eat one serving of vegetables with every meal, cook dinner for my partner, etc.
utcome: “What powerful emotion do I associate with getting it? ‐‐> allow yourself to feel it
Focus on the greatest benefit that will flow from completing your wish today. Allow yourself to feel a peak emotion
associated with completion your intended action.
Examples: balanced, proud, relieved, connected, energized, satisfied, etc.
bstacle: “Why is it going to be hard?” ‐‐> see yourself struggling to get it
Focus on the biggest internal obstacle you need to overcome today to fulfill your wish. If your goal is feasible, then the
only thing that can hold you back from achieving is an internal limitation. This means being honest you’re yourself and
preempting the excuses that you’ll come up with during the day to avoid taking action.
Examples: got distracted, too busy, too tired, procrastinated too much, couldn’t resist, etc.
lan: “How do I know I can still do it?” ‐‐> see yourself overcoming a struggle to achieve it
Focus on your response to this obstacle. Consider what has worked in the past, or what you think could work based on
advice from a credible resource. Then think: “If I notice the obstacle, then I will…[the action you will take to move past
the obstacle]”
Examples: “If I come home tired from work, then I will put on my running shoes and walk outside.” OR “If I experience
cravings for junk food, then I will go for a walk and drink a large glass of water.”
Instead of fantasizing about a future goal, start WOOPing your goals. Start by visualizing what you want, then anticipate what might hold
you back, and come up with an if‐then plan to neutralize those internal struggles. By WOOPing your goal you'll remain motivated to take
action, and be more likely to actually experience your optimistic vision of the future.
“Participants in our studies show important, long‐term changes in their behavior—such as eating more
vegetables, exercising more, drinking less—after as little as a single WOOP session…It’s a living tool
that you can use in your everyday life. Practiced daily over an extended period of time, WOOP enables
you to not only solve specific problems or wishes, but live a life that is balanced, meaningful, and
generally happy.” ‐ Gabriele Oettingen
53
Insights from The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman
“This book is about my personal quest to test the art and science of rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any
new skill as quickly as possible. The purpose of this book is to help you acquire new skills in record time. In my
experience, it takes around twenty hours of practice to break through the frustration barrier: to go from
knowing absolutely nothing about what you’re trying to do to performing noticeably well.” – Josh Kaufman
Here is a systemic way to become competent in any skill (mental or physical) as quickly as possible:
Remove physical, mental, and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice
"There are many things that can get in the way of practice, which makes it much more difficult to acquire any
skill." – Josh Kaufman
Here are three barriers to rapid skill development to consider and eliminate prior to practicing a new skill:
1. Limited access: If it's too hard to get started, or it takes too long to get started, you'll find an excuse not to
start. If you want to learn to play the guitar, place your guitar in the middle of the living room with a sheet of
music next to it. Doing so will make it easy and effortless to pick up the guitar and start practicing.
2. Distractions: Skill development requires your undivided attention while you practice. Practice in areas that
you consider boring while you are free from distractions: no television, ringing phones, or incoming e-mails.
3. Self-consciousness: The fear of looking incompetent is the largest barrier to skill development. Adjust external expectations and laugh at
yourself for the first 20 hours (without losing enthusiasm for learning the skill).
Practice the most important sub-skills (with feedback), for at least twenty hours
"Once you start, you must keep practicing until you hit the twenty-hour mark. If you get stuck, keep pushing:
you can’t stop until you reach your target performance level or invest twenty hours. If you’re not willing to
invest at least twenty hours up front, choose another skill to acquire. The reason for this is simple: the early
parts of the skill acquisition process usually feel harder than they really are. You’re often confused, and you’ll
run into unexpected problems and barriers. Instead of giving up when you experience the slightest difficulty,
precommitting to twenty hours makes it easier to persist.” – Josh Kaufman
An easy and effective way to reach 20 hours of practice is to devote 1 month, 40 minutes a day, to practicing
your desired skill (one skill at a time). I suggest practicing for 20 minutes after you wake up and 20 minutes before you go to bed. Before
each practice session, set a timer for 20 minutes and push yourself to improve (struggle is ok, in fact struggle is essential to learning
process). Seek instant feedback while you practice – use coaches, mentors, software programs, and video capture devices when possible.
After 20 hours of practice, you’ll be in a better position to decide if you want to continue developing the skill.
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Insights from Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger & Mark McDaniel
“People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times— say, a textbook passage
or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class— you can burn it into memory. Not so.”
“The hours immersed in rereading can seem like due diligence, but the amount of study time is no measure of mastery.”
Rereading is a terrible study strategy. Mass repetition is an unproductive skill development strategy.
Why? They’re too easy.
“The more you repeat in a single session, the more familiar it is and the less you struggle to remember it, therefore the less you learn.
Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”
Here are three learning techniques (backed by peer‐reviewed science) that actually increase information retention, skill acquisition, and
lead to mastery.
Self‐Quizzing
Pause an Audiobook every 30 minutes or put down a book every 15 minutes and ask yourself:
What were the key ideas?
Which of those ideas were new to me?
How can I use these ideas in my life?
WARNING: It’s hard to recall the details you’ve just read/heard!
According to empirical evidence, you forget roughly 70% of what you read and hear shortly after you learn it. Your minds are in a constant
state of forgetting.
Self‐quizzing forces you to use the limited information you recall to navigate your way back to the information you’ve forgotten. If learning
is like exploring a new land, then self‐quizzing is like retracing your steps back to a lake of knowledge. When you put in the effort to find a
path back to the information you want to retain, you slow your rate of forgetting.
“The harder it is for you to recall new learning from memory, the greater the benefit of doing so…the effort of retrieving knowledge or
skills strengthens its staying power.”
Interleaving
Instead of practicing one specific skill over and over, shift between three or more similar skills.
“A baseball player who practices batting by swinging at fifteen fastballs, then at fifteen curveballs, and then
at fifteen changeups will perform better in practice than the player who (goes between the three pitch
types in random order). But the player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to
decipher and respond to each pitch…and he becomes the better hitter.”
If you want to learn graphic design and master software programs Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and
Adobe After Effects, don’t master one program at a time. Instead, get good at all three simultaneously.
Do Photoshop on Monday and Friday, Illustrator on Tuesday and Thursday, and After Effects on Wednesday and Saturday.
When learning to cook, don’t master one meal at a time. Instead, master five similar meals at a time, and never cook the same meal twice
in a row.
Spacing
“Lots of practice works, but only if it’s spaced.”
Mass repetition relies heavily on short‐term memory. Spaced repetition, however, requires you to use your
long‐term memory to recover the information you’ve partially forgotten.
“The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering
consolidation (brain’s method of encoding information), further strengthening memory.”
If you only have two hours to practice a new skill this week, don’t do all two hours in one day. Instead, practice for an hour today and an
hour at the end of the week.
Why are self‐quizzing, interleaving, and spacing effective learning techniques?
They’re hard. The harder you work to retrieve information, the more likely that information will stick.
Effort = Retention
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All bold quotes are from the book Make It Stick
Insights from A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley
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Insights from Peak by Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool
“The most effective (improvement) method of all: deliberate practice. It is the gold standard, the ideal to
which anyone learning a skill should aspire.” - Anders Ericsson
Turn your practice sessions into deliberate practice sessions by adding S.P.I.C.E.:
mmediate feedback
To discover a mental representation that works, you’ll need to test various mental representations during each
practice. In order to verify if a representation is effective or not, you’ll need to receive accurate and immediate
feedback. The quicker the feedback, the faster you’ll improve your mental representation.
Steve knew if his approach was working after each attempt. Imagine if he had to wait 10 minutes before knowing
whether the last six attempts were correct…
“Without feedback— either from yourself or from outside observers— you cannot figure out what you need to
improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.” - Anders Ericsson
“Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have
been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert
performers and with how those abilities can best be developed.” - Anders Ericsson
“Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Improving performance
goes hand in hand with improving mental representations; as one’s performance improves, the representations
become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more.” - Anders Ericsson
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Insights from The 4‐Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss
“It is possible to become world‐class, enter the top 5% of performers in the world, in almost any subject
within 6– 12 months, or even 6– 12 weeks. There is a recipe, the real recipe in this book, and that is DiSSS.”
– Tim Ferriss
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Insights from How to Fail at Almost Everything
and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
“The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to
systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly
useful for just about any job.” – Scott Adams
Clear Writing
The goal of all business writing is to write clearly. That means removing unnecessary words and passive
language.
“As it turns out, business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise. You think you
already do that in your writing, but you probably don’t.
Consider the previous sentence. I intentionally embedded some noise. Did you catch it? The sentence that starts
with “You think you already do that” includes the unnecessary word “already.” Remove it and you get exactly
the same meaning: “You think you do that.” The “already” part is assumed and unnecessary. That sort of
realization is the foundation of business writing.” – Scott Adams
“Your brain processes “The boy hit the ball” more easily than “The ball was hit by the boy.” In editors’ jargon, the first sentence is direct
writing and the second is passive. It’s a tiny difference, but over the course of an entire document, passive writing adds up and causes reader
fatigue.” – Scott Adams
Making Conversation
The goal of conversation is to get people to like you. A proven conversation technique is smiling, using open
body language, introducing yourself, and searching for a common interest by asking questions.
“The technique is laughably simple and 100 percent effective. It’s all you need to be in the top 10 percent of all
conversationalists.” – Scott Adams
“The secret to making the list of questions work without seeming awkward is in understanding that the person you meet will feel every bit
as awkward as you. That person wants to talk about something interesting and to sound knowledgeable. Your job is to make that easy.
Nothing is easier than talking about one’s self.” – Scott Adams
Persuasion
“No matter your calling in life, you’ll spend a great deal of time trying to persuade people to do one thing or
another.” – Scott Adams
Scott is a trained hypnotist, and he knows a thing or two about persuasion. Here are two of his favorite
persuasive words/phrases:
“…Because”: People are more cooperative when you ask for a favor using a sentence that includes the word
because, even if the reason you offer makes little or no sense. – Scott Adams
“Would You Mind…?”: It’s hard to be a jerk and say no to any request that starts with “Would you mind.” The question comes across as
honest, while also showing concern for the other person. It’s a powerful combination. – Scott Adams
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Insights from The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane
“When you meet a charismatic person, you get the impression that they have a lot of power and they like you a lot.” ‐ Olivia Fox Cabane
If you look at early presentations by Steve Jobs, you'll notice that If you want to learn how to be more charismatic you need to learn
he wasn't nearly as charismatic as he was later in life. In his initial how to convey a sense of power, warmth, and presence
presentations, he was bashful, awkward, and nerdy. simultaneously and effortlessly.
It took Steve Jobs several years to become the charismatic person You can find this rare combination of power, warmth, and
most of us remember. presence in the late Steve Jobs, in the late Martin Luther King, and
in Oprah Winfrey. It's the rare combination of power, warmth, and
Author Fox Cabane has spent her adult life studying and teaching presence that gives charismatic people their magnetic
charisma. She has proven that like Steve Jobs, you can develop personalities.
your charisma with practice.
The best way to convey power, warmth, and presence
The assumption that charisma is something “you naturally have” is automatically and effortlessly is to put yourself in powerful, warm,
a myth. Charisma is not a gift; charisma is a skill you can develop. and present mental states. When you adopt the optimal mental
state for power, warmth, and presence, your body language and
voice will naturally be more powerful, warm, and present.
“Whatever your mind believes, your body will manifest.” ‐ Olivia Fox Cabane
Three visualizations to create charismatic mental states:
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Insights from Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
"When an expert asks, ‘Will people understand my idea?,’ her answer will be Yes, because she herself understands." ‐ Chip & Dan Heath
Once we know something, it’s hard to imagine what it was like to not know it. Psychologists call this the curse of knowledge. This ‘curse’ impedes
our ability to share ideas effectively because it makes us believe other people share our interests and other people care about our ideas as much as
we do.
To deliver messages people find interesting and memorable (despite not having our knowledge and experience), you need to modify your
ideas to include the following traits:
Simple: What one thing do I want my audience to remember?
In the 1992 US Presidential election, Bill Clinton was notorious for going off point. Clinton loved policy, and he wanted to
address every issue that the country was facing at the time. But Clinton’s inability to prioritize policy issues made voters
wary.
James Carville, Clinton’s advisor, got Clinton to stay on point by writing three phrases on a whiteboard for all the campaign workers to see.
One of the phrases was: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The United States economy was in the middle of a recession and needed to be the
central talking point of every interview. The message was simple and memorable.
What’s the main message you want your audience to walk away with? If you want your audience to remember anything you say, deliver
fewer ideas. Two or three ideas are OK, but one idea is best.
Unexpected: How can I make my message surprising and insightful?
When a manager at Nordstrom’s (a retail store in the United States) wants to explain the importance of customer service,
she tells the story of the Nordstrom’s employee who gift‐wrapped items bought at Macy’s or the story of the
Nordstrom’s employee who started a customer’s car in the middle of a snow storm.
"Tell them something that is uncommon sense."‐ Chip & Dan Heath
Concrete: How can I make my message easy to understand?
When managers at Trader Joe’s (a grocery store in the United States) explains their target customer, they don’t say
‘upscale budget‐conscious customer,’ they say, ‘unemployed college professor.’
Use concrete language everyone understands. Leave out the jargon. Stop trying to sound smart.
"The beauty of concrete language—language that is specific and sensory—is that everyone understands your message in a similar way.” –
Chip & Dan Heath
Credible: How can I make my message believable?
When the directors of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange (LLDE) company tried to convince a workshop of people that their
core value was ‘diversity,’ the audience seemed skeptical. One of the audience members said, “everyone claims that they
value diversity, but you’re a dance company. You’re probably filled with a bunch of twenty‐five‐year‐old dancers, all of
them tall and thin. Some of them are probably people of color, but is that diversity?”
Peter DiMuro, the artistic director of the LLDE, responded with an extreme example, “as a matter of fact,” he said, “the longest‐term member
of our company is a seventy‐three‐year‐old man named Thomas Dwyer…” This detail—seventy‐three‐year‐old Thomas Dwyer—silenced the
skepticism in the room." ‐ Chip & Dan Heath
Make your message credible by telling extreme anecdotes with vivid detail.
Emotion: How can I make my audience care?
In 2004, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that people were more likely to donate money when they heard
a message about a starving seven‐year‐old girl in Africa than a message about 3 million starving children in Africa.
When you tell a personal story about yourself, someone you know, or someone you read about, your audience can put
themselves in their shoes and feels that person’s struggle and success.
“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” ‐ Mother Teresa
Story: How can I keep my audience engaged?
"Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem‐solving mode.... (we) empathize with the
main characters and start cheering them on when they confront their problems: “Look out behind you!” “Tell him off
now!” “Don’t open that door!” ‐ Chip & Dan Heath
The most engaging stories are mysteries that keep your audience wondering:
“What’s going to happen next?”
“How is this going to end?”
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Insights from Presence by Amy Cuddy
“When our body language is confident and open, other people respond in kind, unconsciously reinforcing not
only their perception of us but also our perception of ourselves.” – Amy Cuddy
Your body position, at every moment of the day, influences your mind to feel empowered and disempowered.
Victory Pose
Stand-up, raise your hands above your head, and pretend you just won the 100m dash at the
Olympics. Author Amy Cuddy does this in the restroom prior to giving a speech.
Walking or Exercising
Move your body in a dynamic way: go for a walk (bonus points if you strut while walking) or hit the
gym.
“Focus less on the impression you’re making on others and more on the impression you’re making on yourself.” -
Amy Cuddy
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Insights from The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins
“I was the problem and in five seconds, I could push myself and become the solution.” – Mel Robbins
When you silently count down from five, your brain knows something needs to happen after one; it's the universal cue to act.
And when you take a deliberate action immediately after counting down you generate the joy of feeling in control.
“There’s an important concept in psychology put forth by Julian Rotter in 1954. It’s called ‘locus of control.’ The more that you believe
that you are in control of your life, your actions and your future, the happier and more successful you’ll be. There’s one thing that is
guaranteed to increase your feelings of control over your life: a bias toward action.” – Mel Robbins
According to psychologists, the ‘Golden Rule of Habits’ says to change a bad habit you must replace it with a different habit. Every habit
has three parts: cue, routine, and reward. When you silently countdown from five (cue), take a small positive action (routine), and get a
pleasurable feeling of control (reward), you’ve created a new habit loop.
Here are a few ways you can use a five‐second action habit to overwrite a bad habit:
If you want to break a bad habit of drinking wine before bed, notice yourself reaching for the bottle of wine at night and then
silently say to yourself “five, four, three, two, one,” and put the bottle back of the cupboard.
If you have a habit of getting angry at people, notice the anger and then silently say “five, four, three, two, one,” and think of
three people you’re grateful for.
If you have a habit of getting nervous before a performance, notice your anxiety and silently say to yourself “five, four, three,
two, one…I’m excited!”
“I speak for a living. A lot. In 2016, I was named the most‐booked female speaker in America— 98 keynotes in one year. Amazing. Do I get
nervous? Absolutely. Every single time. But here’s the trick: I don’t call it ‘nerves.’ I call it ‘excitement’ because physiologically anxiety
and excitement are the exact same thing…When using this technique in experiments ranging from singing karaoke to giving a speech
on camera to taking a math test, participants who said ‘I’m excited’ did better in every single challenge than those participants who said
‘I’m anxious.’” – Mel Robbins
“When you set a goal, your brain opens up a task list. Whenever you are near things that can help you achieve those goals, your brain
fires up your instincts to signal to get that goal completed. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you have a goal to get healthier. If you
walk into a living room, nothing happens. If you walk past a gym, however, your prefrontal cortex (front part of your brain) lights up
because you are near something related to getting healthier. As you pass the gym, you’ll feel like you should exercise. That’s an instinct
reminding you of the goal. That’s your inner wisdom, and it’s important to pay attention to it, no matter how small or silly that instinct
may seem.” – Mel Robbins
Here are a few ways you can immediately start acting on your inner wisdom:
When you're lying in bed in the morning and you know you should get up and work on your business idea, act on your inner
wisdom and start counting down, “five, four, three, two, one,” and then get out of bed and walk to your desk.
When you’re in the office and have the feeling that you should stop checking email and start writing that proposal or
presentation, act on your inner wisdom and start the countdown, “five, four, three, two, one.” Then close the email application
and start writing.
At night when you’re about to watch new episode on Netflix and get the feeling that you should turn off the TV so that you can
get a good night’s sleep and be more productive tomorrow, listen to that inner wisdom. “Five, four, three, two, one,” and then
get your butt in bed.
“You can’t control how you feel. But you can always choose how you act.” – Mel Robbins
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Insights from Hooked by Nir Eyal
A study of 150,000 people found that the average smartphone user unlocks their phone 110 times a day! (https://dailym.ai/1gATNlP)
“79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.” ‐ Nir Eyal
Why You’re Hooked to Your Smartphone
Smartphone Apps Provide Immediate Relief
When you feel bored, a list of interesting tweets or Instagram photos is one‐click away.
When you feel uncertain, a list of Google search results is a few seconds away.
When you feel insignificant, you can tap the email icon on your phone to see a list of people who
need you.
Human beings have always felt bored, uncertain and insignificant, but thanks to our smartphones, we’ve
never had a faster way to remedy these “negative” emotions.
Evan Williams, the co‐founder of Medium and Twitter, tells us the formula he and other technology
companies use is, “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time… and use
modern technology to take out steps.”
“Negative emotions frequently serve as internal triggers…To build a habit‐forming product, makers need to understand which user
emotions may be tied to internal triggers and know how to leverage external triggers to drive the user to action.” ‐ Nir Eyal
Smartphone Apps Offer Variable Rewards
“Simply giving users what they want is not enough to create a habit‐forming product.” – Nir Eyal
Every time you pick up your phone you’re in for a surprise. There is a constant stream of new content coming
your way via email, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and a dozen other apps. In a list of new content, you’re
bound to find an interesting idea or photo worth liking. The frequency and variability of pleasurable content
inside apps keep you hooked.
In the 1950s, psychologist B.F. Skinner put pigeons inside of a box. Inside the box was a button and every time
the pigeons pecked the button, they received a food pellet. The pigeons learned to peck the button when
they were hungry and to stop when they were satiated.
Then Skinner adjusted the food pellet dispenser so that sometimes the pigeons pecked the button and received a food pellet and
sometimes they received nothing. Making the reward variable made the pigeons go insane. One pigeon pecked the button more than two
times a second for 16 hours straight!
Sadly, human beings aren’t much different…
Smartphone Apps Get Us to Make Small Investments
“A psychological phenomenon known as the escalation of commitment has been shown to make our brains
do all sorts of funny things. The power of commitment makes some people play video games until they keel
over and die. It is used to influence people to give more to charity... The more users invest time and effort
into a product or service, the more they value it.” – Nir Eyal
When you open the Instagram app for the first time, Instagram asks you to add a friend. Instagram makes
adding people easy because they give you popular suggestions and offer to scan your Facebook and Contact
list. Instagram knows when you make the small investment needed to add one person to your Instagram
account you are more likely to return to the app when they send you a notification.
The more often you return to an app, the more you invest in an app, and the more likely you are to form a mindless app checking habit.
How to get UNHOOKED
Make it harder to check your phone:
Put a long password on your phone, so it takes time to unlock it.
Put your phone in a drawer under a stack of papers while you work.
Put your phone in another room when you go to sleep.
Turn off all non‐essential app notifications. The only app notifications on my phone are to‐do list reminders and calendar events. If an
application can’t buzz, ding, or flash messages at you, that app is less likely to get you to use it.
When you understand how product developers design apps to hook you, and what you can do to unhook yourself, you are well on your
way to reclaiming your ability to focus and being more productive.
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Insights from Your Brain at Work by David Rock
How well do you know your brain?
Can you explain what your brain is doing when you open up your laptop to work, open a textbook to study, or conduct a meeting?
In the book “Your Brain at Work” author David Rock uses the latest neuroscience to explain what your brain is doing while you work.
Rock says your mind is like a theater. The stage in your mental theater represents your short‐term working memory, and it's controlled by
your prefrontal cortex (the brain region just behind your forehead).
During the workday you can use your stage to perform five functions: understanding, recalling, memorizing, inhibiting, and deciding. To
remember these five functions, think of the acronym: U.R. M.In.D.
To perform these five functions, you need actors, audience members, and a stage director. Actors on stage represent objects, tasks, and
pieces of information you're focused on at any one moment. This sentence is currently an actor on your stage.
Audience members are maps of information in your long‐term memory. The audience is constantly trying to make sense of and associate
with actors on stage. Understanding, recalling, memorizing and deciding are made possible by the audience making associations to the
actors on stage.
The stage director is responsible for inhibiting unwanted actors from coming onto the stage and ruining a performance. These unwanted
actors are external distractions, like nearby conversations, and internal distractions, like afternoon food cravings.
3 Things You Must Know About Your Theater
3 Ways to Deal with the Limitations of Your Mental Stage
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Insights from The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
Sales: Do people believe and trust the business enough to make a transaction?
If a stranger were to walk up to you at the bus stop and offer you $20 in exchange for $10, would you make the
transaction? Probably not, because you don't believe or trust the offer is legitimate. However, if your friend
standing next to you could vouch for this stranger, you'd probably make the transaction.
Sales is all about making a customer believe and trust the business can deliver on it’s promise. The quickest way
to build belief and trust is social proof. Examples of social proof include one hundred 5-star Amazon reviews, or
getting a recommendation from a key influencer like Oprah. Thousands of people trust Oprah, and that trust is
transferred to any product she recommends, leading to thousands of sales.
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Insights from Rework by Jason Fried
Starting a business doesn’t need to be intimidating.
The book “Rework” offers a refreshing approach to business that author Jason Fried and his team at Basecamp have validated over the
last twenty years while running a successful software business. I’ve developed a three‐part mantra from “Rework” to successfully start any
business venture:
“Solve your problem, with less, then pick a fight.”
“Solve your problem”
When Bill Bowerman was a track coach at the University of Oregon, he looked for a lighter, higher‐
quality running shoe for his athletes. He couldn’t find any. He went to a local workshop and started
pouring rubber in a waffle iron to create his own shoes. Years later, Nike was born.
Author Jason Fried and his team at Basecamp develop software applications for project managers. Each
of their products is built on a simple question, “Is it something we need and would want to use?”
Fried says, “There was no need for focus groups, market studies, or middlemen. We had the itch, so we
scratched it.”
By making a product or service to solve one of your specific problems, you will know immediately if what you are doing is any good. When
you solve your own problem, you can make decisions faster and more effectively.
Your ability to build a successful business come down to the speed and quality of your decisions.
“With less”
When Basecamp was building their first software application, they did it on a shoestring budget and in
far less time than they had originally planned. They shared office space with another company. They
bought one server and had just enough storage to support the launch plus a few months. They didn’t
hire customer support. The owners answered every customer email.
It would be nice to have an MBA or be the foremost expert in your industry before starting a business,
but you might be able to get started with access to Google and a handful of trusted resources you can
ask for help along the way.
It would be nice to develop a detailed business plan, but your time might be better spent building a solution that works and then seeing if
ten people want to buy it. Once you’ve validated your solution, then you can build a detailed business plan.
There are so many things aspiring business owners think they need to start their business. Most of it fits in the category of nice‐to‐have or
should have, not must have. You need less than you think.
“Then pick a fight”
Dunkin’ Donuts, a coffee shop in the United States, positions itself as the anti‐Starbucks. They pride
themselves on not having fancy names for cup sizes, like ‘venti’ or ‘grande.’ They even had a website
called DunkinBeatStarbucks.com where visitors could send e‐cards with messages like “Friends don’t
let friends drink Starbucks.”
Jason Fried says “Being the anti‐________ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers…
Taking a stand always stands out. People get stoked by conflict. They take sides.”
However, since you’re starting on the cheap, you might think it’s hard to one‐up your competition.
Don’t. Instead, one‐down them.
I recently went to a coffee shop in NYC that had four options: hot coffee, cold coffee, espresso, and espresso with milk. Their minimalist
approach was their way of being the anti‐mainstream coffee shop. They offered less, but what they did offer, was better than the
competition. Their cold coffee was one of the best coffees I’d ever had. I’ll be going back.
The strategy is to see what the mainstream solutions are, then decide what few things you are going to do to do well, and purposely
ignore the rest.
“What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.” ‐ Jason Fried
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Insights from Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Startups create a better future
“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future…Startups operate on the
principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.” –
Peter Thiel
Most important strength of a startup: the ability to support a new way of thinking about the world.
7 Question to Answer Before Launching a Startup
Engineering Question – Do we have a technology that is 10x better than the competition?
“PayPal made buying and selling on eBay at least 10 times better. Instead of mailing a check that would take 7 to 10 days to arrive, PayPal let
buyers pay as soon as an auction ended. Sellers received their proceeds right away, and unlike with a check, they knew the funds were good.” ‐
Peter Thiel.
Engineer a solution that is 10x better than the competition.
Timing Question – Is now the right time to start this business?
“Tesla CEO Elon Musk rightly saw a one‐time‐only opportunity. In January 2010 Tesla secured a $465 million loan from the U.S. Department of
Energy. A half‐billion‐dollar subsidy was unthinkable in the mid‐2000s. It’s unthinkable today. There was only one moment where that was
possible, and Tesla played it perfectly.” – Peter Thiel
A great startup is based on an idea that wasn’t possible three years ago and won’t be possible (or special) three years from now.
Monopoly Question – Are we starting with a big share of a small market?
“Tesla started with a tiny submarket that it could dominate: the market for high‐end electric sports cars. Since the first Roadster rolled off the
production line in 2008, Tesla’s sold only about 3,000 of them, but at $109,000 apiece that’s not trivial. Starting small allowed Tesla to
undertake the necessary R&D to build the slightly less expensive Model S, and now Tesla owns the luxury electric sedan market, too.”‐ Peter
Thiel
Focus your initial efforts on a promising market segment to prove your business model can generate cashflow.
People Question – Do we have the right team?
“If you’re at Tesla, you’re choosing to be at the equivalent of Special Forces. There’s the regular army, and that’s fine, but if you are working at
Tesla, you’re choosing to step up your game.” – Elon Musk, Tesla CEO
You need people on your team who are as committed to the startup vision as you are. You also need the right balance of engineering and
sales talent to be successful.
Distribution Question – Do we have a way to deliver our product?
“Most companies underestimate distribution, but Tesla took it so seriously that it decided to own the entire distribution chain. Other car
companies are beholden to independent dealerships: Ford and Hyundai make cars, but they rely on other people to sell them. Tesla sells and
services its vehicles in its own stores. The up‐front costs of Tesla’s approach are much higher than traditional dealership distribution, but it
affords control over the customer experience, strengthens Tesla’s brand, and saves the company money in the long run.” – Peter Thiel
The sales and distribution plan is as important as the engineering and product development plan.
Durability Question – Will our market position be defensible 10 years from now?
“Tesla has a head start and it’s moving faster than anyone else—and that combination means its lead is set to widen in the years ahead.” –
Peter Thiel
Create a defensible market position for decades by either creating strong brand (ex: Tesla and Apple’s strong association with luxury
goods), proprietary technology (ex: Google’s search algorithms), large network (ex: Facebook’s user size ensures people don’t leave the
platform for a smaller and less valuable network), or economies of scale (ex: Amazon and Walmart sell a massive number of items, which
lowers their fixed cost per item and allows them to outprice smaller competitors).
The Secret Question – Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don't see?
“Rich people especially wanted to appear “green”...Tesla built a unique brand around the secret that cleantech was even more of a social
phenomenon than an environmental imperative.” – Peter Thiel
Base your business on a behavior that people don’t want to admit or are aware they’ll be doing in the years to come.
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Insights from Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
“The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition.” – Blue Ocean Strategy
If you want to launch a successful business, don’t waste time competing for market share. Instead, focus on creating new value and
expanding the current market. If you create new value, you will find yourself in a highly profitable Blue Ocean, where the competition is
irrelevant.
Professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne studied the launch of 108 businesses across 30 industries over the span of several decades.
Their study revealed that when a new business tried to compete with an established business and steal market share, they were
substantially less profitable than a new business that avoided competition. Of the 108 businesses, 16 businesses adopted a Blue Ocean
strategy by creating a new product category that made the competition irrelevant. Those 16 Blue Ocean businesses took home 61% of the
combined profits of all 108 businesses! What's more, those 16 Blue Ocean businesses went on to dominate their market category for 10-15
years!
“The companies caught in the red ocean followed a conventional approach, racing to beat the competition by building a defensible position
within the existing industry order. The creators of blue oceans, surprisingly, didn’t use the competition as their benchmark. Instead, they
followed a different strategic logic that we call value innovation.” – Blue Ocean Strategy
They ELIMINATED the wine aging process. Aging wine resulted in a taste that was too complex for non-
wine drinkers. By eliminating the aging process they saved money on oak barrels and storage costs.
They REDUCED their inventory to just two wines, a white Chardonnay and a red Shiraz. By reducing
their inventory two wines they had far fewer wines than most wine businesses, and this was a good
thing because it made the wine selection process less intimidating for non-wine drinkers.
They RAISED the freshness and drinkability of the wine by raising their grape selection standards.
Raising the drinkability of the wine made it fun to drink for beer and cocktail drinkers.
They incorporated a few standards from the beer industry to CREATE a new wine experience for non-
wine drinkers. They created a wine label that simple and inviting, like most beer bottle labels. It didn’t
have the age of the wine and it didn’t have fancy language describing the vineyard or the winemaking
process. It had an image of a kangaroo, the name of their wine company, and the origin country of the
wine: ‘Australia.’ This simple label made their wine seem less pretentious, and more fun and
adventurous.
“Casella Wines created [yellow tail], a wine whose strategic profile broke from the competition and created a blue ocean. Instead of
offering wine as wine, Casella created a social drink accessible to everyone: beer drinkers, cocktail drinkers, and other drinkers of non-
wine beverages. In the space of two years, the fun, social drink [yellow tail] emerged as the fastest growing brand in the histories of
both the Australian and the U.S. wine industries and the number one imported wine into the United States, surpassing the wines of
France and Italy. By August 2003 it was the number one red wine in a 750-ml bottle sold in the United States, outstripping California
labels.” – Blue Ocean Strategy
70
Insights from Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen
If you were the owner of a fast food restaurant that sold milkshakes, and your milkshakes weren’t selling well,
how would you go about improving your milkshakes?
Would you buy higher quality ingredients?
Would you survey customers to see what flavors they would like to see on the menu?
Would you focus on one popular flavor, say chocolate, and make the chocolate shake richer and decadent?
Any one of these innovations might increase sales, but you can’t be sure. The success of each innovation relies heavily on luck. It’s like
throwing out a bunch of seeds and hoping for one of them to take root and grow into something people will buy.
Companies take this hopeful approach to innovation far too often. They waste millions of dollars and often go out of business because
they don’t know how to innovate. When global executives were recently surveyed by McKinsey, a shocking 94 percent said they were
unsatisfied with their innovation performance.
Author Clayton Christensen has studied innovation for over two decades, and he says those who fail to innovate are simply asking the
wrong question. Instead of asking, “How can I get more people to buy my product?”, they need to ask, “What job are my customers hiring
this product to do?”
“As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: ‘If you do not know how to ask the
right question, you discover nothing.’” ‐ Clayton Christensen
“When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. Some jobs are little (“pass the time while waiting in line”),
some are big (“find a more fulfilling career”). Some surface unpredictably (“dress for an out‐of‐town business meeting after the airline lost
my suitcase”), some regularly (“pack a healthy, tasty lunch for my daughter to take to school”)” ‐ Clayton Christensen
The “Jobs to be Done” theory essentially states that all products are services that promise a better experience for the person hiring them.
If you have the desire to create an innovative product or improve an existing product in an innovative way, and you want to rely more on
creativity and skill, and less on luck, here are three steps to get your product hired:
Find a job that needs to be done. Aim to understand why you, a set of existing customers, or a set of target
customers would want to pull your product into their lives.
Don’t just focus on the rational reasons like “satisfying hunger.” Dig deeper. Focus on the emotional and social
reasons people have for wanting to make progress in their lives.
“In many innovations, the focus is often entirely on the functional or practical need. But in reality, consumers’ social
and emotional needs can far outweigh any functional desires. Think of how you would hire childcare. Yes, the
functional dimensions of that job are important—will the solution safely take care of your children in a location and manner that works well
in your life—but the social and emotional dimensions probably weigh more heavily on your choice. ‘Who will I trust with my children?’” ‐
Clayton Christensen
When looking for a job to be done, think of yourself less as an entrepreneur and more of a psychologist. You want to find out what people
care about and determine where they specifically want to make progress in their life.
Document the journey from the moment a customer or potential customer hires the product for a job to the
moment the job is complete (or the customer gives up).
You want to be like a documentary filmmaker. Your goal is to find out where, when, and what they are doing at the
moment they have the desire to hire your product, and then create a timeline of the experience that follows.
“What progress is that person trying to achieve? What are the circumstances of the struggle? What obstacles are
getting in the way of the person making that progress? Are consumers making do with imperfect solutions through
some kind of compensating behavior? How would they define what “quality” means for a better solution, and what tradeoffs are they
willing to make?” ‐ Clayton Christensen
Remove the obstacles, remedy the frustrations, and create a better experience. The new experience you
create must at least be twice as good as their current experience. Why? Because most of us get anxious when hiring
something new.
New is often scary. Behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have done several studies to show
that “Loss aversion—people’s tendency to want to avoid loss (and maintain the status quo)—is twice as powerful
psychologically as the allure of gains.”
Executing these three steps won’t be easy, but it’s far easier than the alternative: spending a bunch of time and money on a series of
innovations and hoping one of them leads to more sales.
“New products succeed not because of the features and functionality they offer but because of the experiences
they enable.” ‐ Clayton Christensen
71
Insights from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
"As an engineer and later as a manager, I was accustomed to measuring progress by making sure our work
proceeded according to plan, was high quality, and cost about what we had projected. After many years as an
entrepreneur, I started to worry about measuring progress in this way. What if we found ourselves building
something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?" – Eric Ries
5. Pivot OR Persevere
Make tweaks to your MVP to get the desired customer behavior (clicks, engagement time, pre-orders, etc.). If you
don’t observe the desired customer behavior after several iterations, it’s time to pivot to a new product strategy and vision.
“The sign of a successful pivot is that these engine-tuning activities are more productive after the pivot than before.” – Eric Ries
When doing innovative, creative work always ask yourself: "Which of my efforts are value-creating and which are wasteful?"
Then seek empirical data from live experiments rather than relying on market research, focus groups, or pure intuition.
72
Insights from Sprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky
& Braden Kowitz
Silently Sketch
Some people have the ability to persuade others to adopt their solution with a great presentation (even if the idea is bad!).
The final solution selection should be based on the quality of the solution, not the charisma of the presenter. To ensure the
best idea wins every time, everyone needs to sketch their ideas:
“Everyone can write words, draw boxes, and express his or her ideas with the same clarity. If you can’t draw (or rather, if you
think you can’t draw), don’t freak out. Plenty of people worry about putting pen to paper, but anybody—absolutely
anybody—can sketch a great solution.” – Sprint book
Elect a Decider
Select one person to make all the final decisions.
WHY?...Doing so limits the endless discussion surrounding a decision and allows the team to move forward confidently and
swiftly. Since you should be testing your solution long before it is fully developed, it’s OK if the decisions aren’t perfect!
Validate w/ 5 People
According to data from 1000’s of user tests, 85% of the potential issues of your proposed solution are revealed after testing
the solution with JUST 5 people.
Testing your solution on more than 5 people yields diminishing returns.
“Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. The longer those assumptions remain unexamined, the
greater the risk.”
- Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz
73
Insights from Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
“In every industry— from books to movies to restaurants to plays and software— certain creations can be described as “perennial.” By that
I mean that, regardless of how well they may have done at their release or the scale of audience they have reached, these products have
found continued success and more customers over time. They are the kind of art or products that we return to more than once, that we
recommend to others, even if they’re no longer trendy or brand‐new.” – Ryan Holiday
How can we make a product that remains valuable?
The movie ‘Star Wars: A New Hope,’ and the book ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ are perennial sellers. Like all perennial sellers
they live on by word‐of‐mouth. I learned about Star Wars from a friend in grade school, who heard about Star Wars from his dad…20 years
after its release date.
Ryan Holiday has uncovered methods of making and marketing products to maximize word of mouth. By using his methods, our work
(blog posts, videos, books, etc.) can remain valuable long after its release date. By learning the tools to make a perennial seller we can do
the hard work now and reap the benefits for years to come.
Here are three methods we can use to maximize word of mouth and develop a perennial seller.
Make it Timeless
Focus on a topic or problem that never gets old.
Author Dale Carnegie released the book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' in 1936. People still
recommend ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ it to their friends in 2017. Why?
Dale Carnegie’s book solves a timeless problem: social anxiety. People struggle with social anxiety today as they
did in 1936. People will continue to struggle with social anxiety for the foreseeable future.
If you want to make a perennial seller ask yourself: why will people still be talking about this ten years from now? (tip: focus on
reoccurring human problems and not the latest technology)
“Focus on the things that don’t change.” – Jeff Bezos
Make it Specific
People share products they love.
When people enthusiastically share a product with their friends, the products audience will grow organically over time
(like compound interest).
If you want to make a perennial seller, you need to ask yourself: Who specifically will love this?
"It's better to make a product that one hundred people love than a product one million people just like." – Paul Graham (Y Combinator founder)
People love products that fit their needs, wants, and interests. Therefore, you must narrow your focus and direct your energy on making a
product for a specific person (or niche group of people). All perennial products can be described in one sentence: This is a __, that does__ for __.
When you help a specific person solve a specific problem, that person (and people like them) are more likely to fall in love with your product and
share it with everyone they know.
“Many creators want to be for everyone . . . and as a result end up being for no one. Picking a lane isn’t limiting. It’s
the first act of empowerment we take as a creator.” – Ryan Holiday
Make it Accessible
It's better to be underpaid than to be unheard of.
“Think about all the stuff out there that you haven’t checked out— even though most of it is really cheap. That’s
the kind of abundance we enjoy as consumers. There is so much out there that you couldn’t possibly consume it all
in your lifetime. So we ignore a lot of it, especially the stuff that looks expensive. Which is why as creators we have
to get more comfortable with giving people a taste of our work— or, in some cases, giving some people the entire
meal for free. That’s how we build an audience and gather momentum.” – Ryan Holiday
Don’t be afraid to mark down your product at first (make it free!). The low cost will make it accessible to more people. When a low‐cost item is of
high utility and quality, people will share it with everyone they know.
“As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can
always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.”‐ Ryan Holiday
74
Insights from To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink
“We’re ALL in sales” – Daniel Pink
If we look at our outgoing emails and text messages from the previous week, we’ll see that several of our messages were sales attempts.
We may have sold a friend on the idea of sharing a Facebook post. We may have sold our kids on the benefits of cleaning their rooms. Or
we may have sold a work colleague on the importance of attending our project meeting.
Anytime we persuade someone to act; we’re selling.
Most of our professional success will depend on receiving help from people. Therefore, knowing how to sell people and persuade them to
act is critical to our long‐term success. But selling is hard. If we don’t take the time to develop the right sales skills, people will resist our
sales pitches.
“Selling, I’ve grown to understand, is more urgent, more important, and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize. The ability to
move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness." – Daniel Pink
Two Essential Sales Skills
Attunement
We can think of attunement as the adjustment of a radio dial in the mind. Just as a radio needs to be
adjusted to attune to the frequency of a radio station, we need to adjust our thinking to attune to the
thoughts of the people we’re trying to persuade.
The first step to attunement is lowering our perceived power
If we approach a sale with the feeling that we have more resources and know more than the person
we’re trying to persuade, we’ll fail to attune to their perspective. A 2006 Northwestern University study
revealed that when people are primed to feel powerful through a series of power inducing exercises, they
were three times less likely to consider another person's point of view. Therefore, the first step of attunement requires lowering our
perceived power.
“Think of this first principle of attunement as persuasion jujitsu: using an apparent weakness as an actual strength. Start your
encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the other side’s perspective
more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them.” – Daniel Pink
Clarity
Consider a mess in your house you should clean up, but you don’t feel like cleaning it up right now.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 meaning ‘not the least bit ready’ and 10 meaning ‘totally ready,’ how ready are
you to start cleaning?
Now answer this question: Why didn’t you pick a lower number?
"This technique, which originated in therapy and counseling but has since spread to other realms, seeks to
spark behavior change not by coercing people, promising them rewards, or threatening them with
punishments, but by tapping their inner drives... Most people who resist doing or believing something don’t have a binary, off‐on, yes‐no
position.” – Daniel Pink
By comparing our current state of readiness with a lower state of readiness, we clarified our motive for acting (cleaning the house). Our
job as salespeople is to clarify personal, positive, and intrinsic motives for action by making comparisons. If we use the right comparisons,
we will spark a desire for action within the person we are persuading, which will make them more receptive to what we’re selling.
"We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation....That’s why the
most essential question you can ask (when clarifying a problem) is this: Compared to what?” – Daniel Pink
Start your sales by comparing someone’s current experience with a potential experience, or what they have, with what they could lose.
ALWAYS answer these two questions when selling:
"1. If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will his or her life improve?
“2. When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began? If the answer to either of these questions
is no, you’re doing something wrong." – Daniel Pink
75
Insights from The E‐Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the
world…” – Michael Gerber
To prevent your business from turning into a personal prison you must replace yourself (and all your unique talents) with a unique system.
The entrepreneurial perspective is about “building a business that works not because of you but without you.” – Michael Gerber
If you own a bakery, you don’t want to bake the best cakes in town. You want to create a system that bakes the best cakes in town. You
want your cake baking system to enable the ordinary people you hire to produce extraordinary results.
How do you build such a system?
Here’s how…
Imagine you want to hire a Salesperson for your business. You “The Rule of Ordinary People—that says the blessing of ordinary
start by considering how you want your company to interact people is that they make your job more difficult. The typical owner
with its customers. You test different wording for your sales calls of a small business prefers highly skilled people because he believes
and modify your sales script to increase its effectiveness. You they make his job easier—he can simply leave the work to them.
write down everything you learn in your companies Sales That is, the typical small business owner prefers Management by
Operation Manual. Abdication to Management by Delegation.
“Before long, the Sales Operations Manual contains the exact “Unfortunately, the inevitable result of this kind of thinking is that
scripts for handling incoming calls, outgoing calls, meeting the the business also grows to depend on the whims and moods of its
customer at the door. The exact responses to customer inquiries, people. If they’re in the mood, the job gets done. If they’re not, it
complaints, concerns. The system by which an order is entered, doesn’t. In this kind of business, a business that relies on discretion,
returns are transacted, new product requests are acted upon, ‘How do I motivate my people?’ becomes the constant question.
inventory is secured.” – Michael Gerber ‘How do I keep them in the mood?’ It is literally impossible to
produce a consistent result in a business that depends on
When building your operations manual, ask yourself: extraordinary people. No business can do it for long. And no
extraordinary business tries to!” – Michael Gerber
“What would best serve our customer here? How could I most
easily give the customer what he wants while also maximizing After hiring an ‘ordinary’ person to be your salesperson, hand
profits for the company? And at the same time, how could I give them the manual and walk them through it. In a few weeks you’ll
the person responsible for that work the best possible have your replacement performing the job just as good as you
experience?” – Michael Gerber did. Now that you’ve freed yourself from the sales position, you
can develop systems for other areas of your business.
When your Sales Operation Manual is complete (and you’ve
followed your procedures exactly as you’ve written them to get "The system becomes the tools your people use to increase their
results you desire), it’s time to run an ad for a salesperson. productivity, to get the job done in the way it needs to get done in
order for your business to successfully differentiate itself from
your competition." – Michael Gerber
“But not for someone with sales experience. Not a Master
Technician. But a novice. A beginner. An Apprentice. Someone
eager to learn how to do it right. Someone willing to learn what Make it your mission to work ON the business (building systems)
(you’ve) spent so much time and energy discovering. Someone for instead of IN the business. Aim to be non‐essential to any system
whom questions haven’t become answers. Someone who is open that produces your company’s product or service.
to the possibility of learning skills he hasn’t developed yet, skills he
wants to learn.
“What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order, and meaning. A place in which
being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential. A place where the generally disorganized thinking
that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result. A place where
discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise and action, of being what you
are intentionally instead of accidentally. A place that replaces the home most of us have lost. That’s what a
business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing." – Michael Gerber
76
Insights from Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
"Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself. When you make a company,
you make a utopia. It’s where you design your perfect world." – Derek Sivers
Delegate or Die...
When asked a question regarding an operational decision, complete the following steps:
1. Gather everyone together
2. Explain your philosophy (why you would do what you would do)
3. Ensure that everyone understands (simulate an example and ask questions)
4. Get one person to write down the philosophy in the company manual
5. Let everyone know that they can make the decision next time without having to ask you for permission
77
78
Insights from The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
An internal enemy prevents you from being creative. That enemy is Resistance.
“Most of us have two lives: The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” – Steven Pressfield
Everyone has the capacity to be creative and produce original work, but very few do. Resistance stops them.
Resistance is like the Terminator; it’s programmed to kill your creative spirit and prevent you from realizing your potential.
Resistance is the antagonist on your creative journey.
Resistance fills your heads with self‐doubt:
If you dream of writing a book, Resistance will convince you that you have nothing to say.
If you dream of being a creative freelancer, Resistance will convince you that you’re not talented enough.
If you dream of launching an innovative business, Resistance will tell you that you have too much to lose.
Resistance urges you to give into cravings and forget your creative aspirations:
Resistance urges you to pour an extra glass of wine and sleep‐in the next day.
Resistance urges you to order dessert, so you feel too lethargic to work on your craft afterward.
Resistance can convince you to do the most idiotic things to avoid doing creative work.
When author Robert McKee wanted to start a new book, Resistance convinced him to try on every piece of clothing in his closet
first.
How do we defeat Resistance?
Embrace it
“If you're feeling massive Resistance, the good news is, it means there's tremendous love there too. If you
didn't love the project that is terrifying you, you wouldn't feel anything. The opposite of love isn't hate; it's
indifference. The more resistance you experience, the more important your unmanifested art project or
enterprise is to you, and the more gratification you will feel when you finally do it.” – Steven Pressfield
When you feel lost, Resistance is your guiding compass. Listen to that little voice in your heart, seek out
projects that interest you, and then gauge the amount of Resistance you feel. The more Resistance, the better.
If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur with a long list of product ideas, pick the product you find most interesting and terrifying.
If you’re an actor and don’t know what part to take next, take the part that excites you and scares you.
Face it (especially on days when you don’t feel like it)
When Pressfield is working on a book, he faces his Resistance every day at 10:30 am, even on days when he
doesn’t feel like working.
Every day at 10:30 am he sits down to write and doesn’t stop until he’s exhausted or starts making typos
(which is usually 3‐4 hours later).
Pressfield doesn’t care how many pages he’s produced or if his writing is any good. “All that matters,” he says,
“is I put in my time, and hit it with all I've got. All that counts is that for this day, for this session, I have
overcome resistance.”
When you commit to sitting with your Resistance for a set amount of time every day, something magical happens; a divine power rewards
your efforts. It’s as though you’re given an angel for the day to show you the way forward.
“When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us… we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron
filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.” – Steven Pressfield
The experience goes from excruciating to enjoyable...but only for the remainder of the day. Resistance will be waiting for you tomorrow. If
you can find the courage to face Resistance tomorrow, and the next, and the next…without giving in to its demands, you will discover
what you were born to do.
“If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy
yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of
the actor. It's a gift to the world and every being in it. Don't cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you've got.” – Steven Pressfield
79
Insights from Measure What Matters by John Doerr
“As much as I hate process, good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. And that’s where OKRs come in.” – Larry Page,
Google co‐founder
The Objective: WHAT you want to achieve.
The Key Results: HOW you’re going to achieve your objective; 3‐5 measurements that indicate you’re moving closer to your objective.
Common key results include revenue, growth, active users, customer satisfaction scores, etc.
3 Essentials for Setting OKRs
Audacious Objective
Set an audacious objective by being idealistic, not realistic. Ask yourself:
If I were freed from constraints, what change would I want to make in the world?
If I had the unique opportunity to be the best in the world at one thing, what would that be?
After discovering a goal that inspires you, scale it back until it’s one step short of being impossible. Your
objective must be significant and inspiring, but believable.
When Bill and Melinda Gates started 'The Gates Foundation,' they set an audacious objective of eradicating malaria by 2015. However, they
realized it was an impossible goal that demotivated the team, so they adjusted their objective to eradicate malaria by 2040. The new
objective was still big, but now it was believable. This audacious objective inspired the team to grow to meet the challenge.
"When you try to do something BIG, you never entirely fail" ‐ Larry Page
Quality & Quantity Key Results
“Objectives are the stuff of inspiration and far horizons. Key results are more earthbound and metric‐driven.” ‐ John Doerr
Example Objective (from the book): Win the Indy 500
A strong set of key results are specific and measurable quality and quantity targets. When you have quality and quantity key results, you
reduce costly errors and re‐work.
Key results are like gauges on the dashboard of your vehicle. You want to increase average speed while keeping your RPM and engine
temperature low so that you can get to your destination as efficiently as possible.
Color Coding Check‐ins
Regular color‐coding check‐ins will keep you accountable for setting challenging key result targets and making progress on those key
results.
Each week, month or quarter (you choose the time frame based on your key results), look at your key results and label each result green,
yellow or red.
Green means you are 70%‐100% on target, and you should continue with your current strategy.
Yellow means you are 30%‐70% on target, and you need to develop a recovery plan and adjust your strategy.
Red means you are 0%‐30% on target, and you need to develop a recovery plan or replace that key result.
“There’s no need to hold stubbornly to an outdated projection—strike it from your list and move on. Our goals are servants to our
purpose, not the other way around.” ‐ John Doerr
WARNING: If you're approaching 100% on all your key results, you've failed. Aim for a mix of yellow and green key results, with an average
key result score of 70% on target. "The biggest risk of all is not taking one." ‐ Mellody Hobson
“OKRs allowed us to be ambitious and disciplined at the same time.” ‐ Bill Gates
80
Insights from Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work
in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
“At its root, Scrum is based on a simple idea: whenever you start a project, why not regularly check in, see if
what you’re doing is heading in the right direction, and if it’s actually what people want? And question whether
there are any ways to improve how you’re doing what you’re doing, any ways of doing it better and faster, and
what might be keeping you from doing that.” – Jeff Sutherland
All major projects require cycles of execution and improvement called Scrum Sprints. Scrum
Sprints are typically conducted bi-weekly, and they contain the following 7 steps:
ESTIMATE:
Part 1: Refine and Estimate Backlog Items (list document with numbers and sections boxed off)
1. Assign the longest duration item(s) with a 13 (highest Fibonacci number in the sequence: 1,2,3,5,8,13)
2. Assign Fibonacci numbers 1,2,3,5,8,13 to all items, relative to the hardest item
Part 2: Sprint Planning Session
1. Set fixed Sprint duration (time till next evaluation - max 20% of the project duration)
2. INITIAL SPRINT: estimate points to be completed within that time
3. SUCCESSIVE SPRINTS: previous Sprint actual point total + 10%
81
Insights from The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney,
Sean Covey, and Jim Huling
Why is it so hard to execute promising ideas and important goals?
Authors Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling have surveyed over 200,000 leaders around the world to find out why they struggle
to execute. The answers varied, but the authors realized all their answers had one thing in common. The main reason leaders and teams
routinely fail to execute promising strategies and important team goals is because they spend all their energy dealing with the whirlwind.
“The real enemy of execution is your day job! We call it the whirlwind. It’s the massive amount of energy that’s necessary just to keep your
operation going on a day‐to‐day basis; and, ironically, it’s also the thing that makes it so hard to execute anything new. The whirlwind robs
from you the focus required to move your team forward.” – The 4 Disciplines of Execution
The whirlwind includes all the incoming messages you need to respond to, all the important phone calls you need to take, all the problems
you need to resolve, and all the meetings you need to prepare for.
“The whirlwind is urgent and it acts on you and everyone working for you every minute of every day. The goals you’ve set for moving
forward are important, but when urgency and importance clash, urgency will win every time." – The 4 Disciplines of Execution
Executing any promising idea or important goal amid a raging whirlwind requires discipline. It requires the discipline to deal with urgent
items while remaining focused on what’s important. The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) is a simple, repeatable, and proven formula to do
just that.
Discipline #1: Focus on the WIG
The first discipline of execution requires sustaining the whirlwind at its current level while you advance one wildly important
goal. To find your wildly important goal, DON’T ASK: “What’s most important?” If you ask that question, you’ll inevitably focus
on the whirlwind because everything in the whirlwind seems important. Instead, ask yourself: “If everything else remained at
its current level of performance, what one achievement would make everything else seem secondary?”
In other words, if you didn’t need to worry about anything else for the time being, what one goal would you focus on right now?
“Once you stop worrying about everything else going backward, you can start moving forward on your WIG.” – The 4 Disciplines of
Execution
Discipline #2: Measure Lead Behaviors
There are two measurements you can focus on while executing: lead behavior measurements and lag result measurements.
Lag result measurements are measurements of the results you want. Lead behavior measurements are measurements of the
critical day‐to‐day activities that lead to the results you want.
More sales calls (lead behavior) leads to more sales (lag result).
More time spent studying (lead behavior) leads to higher grades (lag result).
Measuring results such as sales or grades can be frustrating because it takes time for your actions to produce measurable results. That’s
why they are called lag results.
If you measure a value you can’t immediately improve, your willingness to execute will diminish. However, when you focus on a metric you
can influence every day or every week, like a lead behavior, you’ll sustain your level of execution. Seeing daily/weekly signs of
improvements will increase engagement and drive the execution of your WIG.
Discipline #3: Put up a Scoreboard
Without a scoreboard, you or your team will lose track of your measurements, forget
the score, and lose the will to win. Therefore, you need to create an office
scoreboard that includes your WIG (title at the top of the scoreboard), your lag
measurements (line chart from left to right), and your lead measurements (bar
chart below the lag measurements).
Your office scoreboard should be large enough to notice every day and simple enough to
know if you’re winning in 5 seconds or less. If you’re improving the lead measurement, and that lead measurement is corresponding to
improvements in the lag measurement, then you’re winning.
Discipline #4: Schedule Weekly Accountability Talks
The fourth discipline of execution requires setting up weekly accountability meetings with teammates or peers (not bosses or
managers). Holding regular weekly accountability meetings with people at your level (called WIG sessions) ensures you stay in
the game.
When you set up reoccurring weekly meetings with teammates or like‐minded peers to discuss your efforts, you strengthen your
commitment to execution.
During your WIG sessions (~15‐minute weekly accountability meetings), do three things: report on last week’s commitment, review the
scoreboard and describe the actions you took to advance your WIG, and commit to a lead behavior improvement or a specific deliverable
for this week.
82
Insights from When by Daniel Pink
“Timing isn't everything but it's a big thing” – Daniel Pink
Between the hours of 2pm and 4pm (the midday “trough”):
Doctors mistakenly give more patients a fatal dose of anesthesia before surgery than any other time of the day.
Danish schoolchildren score significantly lower on standardized exams.
CEOs of publicly traded companies are more likely to say something stupid in a quarterly earnings call and cause their stock price to drop.
“Across many domains, (the midday) represents a danger zone for productivity, ethics, and health.” ‐ Daniel Pink
Your attention and mental ability is biologically programmed to rise and fall according to your circadian rhythm. When you wake up your attention and
mental ability peak, trough, and rebound for approximately the next 16 hours.
During the Peak (first 7 hours of your day):
Execute logical work. Focus on clarifying, organizing, structuring, and explaining. Do work similar to programming a
computer, writing a legal brief, or taking a math test.
If you're a writer or content creator, do your research and editing during the peak.
If you're an salesperson, schedule important sales calls during the peak.
If you're an educator or student, schedule math and science classes during the peak.
During the Trough (7‐9 hours after waking up):
The best thing you can do in the through is avoid important work or take a nap.
“In many ways, naps are Zambonis for our brains. They smooth out the nicks, scuffs, and scratches a typical day has left on
our mental ice.” – Daniel Pink
The best naps are between 10‐20 minutes. That’s right, 10‐20 minutes is all you need. A 5‐minute nap has no effect, but a
10‐minute nap is scientifically proven to increase mental alertness for three hours.
“Italian police officers who took naps immediately before their afternoon and evening shifts had 48 percent fewer traffic
accidents than those who didn’t nap.” – Daniel Pink
NASA pilots, air traffic controllers, and computer programmers routinely take naps to boost performance.
If you can’t nap take frequent breaks and execute your least important, most mundane work (run errands, sort notes, clean the house, etc.).
During the Rebound (last 7 hours of the day):
Execute insight work. Focus on generating ideas, innovating, and designing.
If you're a writer or content creator, do your creative writing during the rebound.
If you're a salesperson, brainstorm ideas for your next presentation during the rebound.
If you're an educator or student, schedule art and design classes during the rebound.
BUT…
You might be the ~25% of people who have the late chronotype and experience a “peak” in attention in the evening and
“rebound” in the morning. If you have a late chronotype, you will perform best on logical tasks in the evening and insight
tasks in the morning.
You have a late chronotype if on free days (you don’t have obligations and you haven’t been partying all night) you are slow
to get up and have a moderate amount of energy in the mid‐morning, but experience a surge of energy in the evening.
83
Insights from Deep Work by Cal Newport
“My commitment to depth has rewarded me. In the ten-year period following my college graduation, I published
four books, earned a PhD, wrote peer-reviewed academic papers at a high rate, and was hired as a tenure-track
professor at Georgetown University." – Cal Newport
Shallow Work: non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks that can be completed in a semi-distracted state. Shallow work
includes answering email, sorting documents, and running errands. The less engagement your work requires, the more shallow it is.
“In an age of network tools, knowledge workers increasingly replace deep work with the shallow alternative—constantly sending and
receiving e- mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction. Larger efforts that would be well
served by deep thinking, such as forming a new business strategy or writing an important grant application, get fragmented into distracted
dashes that produce muted quality.” - Cal Newport
Any task that you complete while in a semi-distracted state will likely be automated in the near future (completed by software programs
and/or robots). Or the task will be completed by several thousand people around the world who are willing to do it for far less money than
you are doing it for. The more shallow work you do, the less rare and valuable your skills are, and the more likely you’ll be replaced by a
cheaper alternative.
Deep Work: hard but important intellectual work that in completed during long uninterrupted periods of time. Deep work requires a
state of distraction-free concentration to push you cognitive capabilities to their limit and create new value that is hard to replicate. Here
are 3 Examples of Deep Work:
Writer Mark Twain worked in a cabin isolated from the main house, requiring his family to blow a horn to attract his attention
for meals.
While writing the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling's only tweet for the first year and a half after joining Twitter was: “This is the
real me, but you won’t be hearing from me often I am afraid, as pen and paper is my priority at the moment.”
CEO Bill Gates famously conducted “Think Weeks” twice a year, during which he would isolate himself in a lakeside cottage to
do nothing but read and think big thoughts. One think week led to the famous “Internet Tidal Wave” memo which led to
development of Microsoft’s powerful web browser.
If you want to develop skills and produce work that the world considers rare and valuable, you need to develop a daily deep work ritual.
edicated workspace
“Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts. This location can be as simple as your normal office with
the door shut and desk cleaned off (a colleague of mine likes to put a hotel-style “do not disturb” sign on his office door
when he’s tackling something difficult). If it’s possible to identify a location used only for depth—for instance, a
conference room or quiet library—the positive effect can be even greater.” – Cal Newport
ower-ups
“Your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at a high level of depth. For example,
the ritual might specify that you start with a cup of good coffee, or make sure you have access to enough food of the right
type to maintain energy, or integrate light exercise such as walking to help keep the mind clear.” - Cal Newport
“If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.” – Cal Newport
84
Productivity Principle: Work = Time * Intensity
Inspired by the book Deep Work by Cal Newport
“(T)he common habit of working in a state of semi- distraction is potentially devastating to your performance. It
might seem harmless to take a quick glance at your inbox every ten minutes or so…(but) that quick check
introduces a new target for your attention…The attention residue left by such unresolved switches dampens
your performance.” - Cal Newport
Transitioning between tasks, meetings, or projects creates attention residue. Glancing at an email, text, or social feed creates attention
residue. Attention residue accumulates in a semi-distracted working state and reduces your ability to focus intensely. The more you
fracture your attention, the longer it takes to produce high-quality work.
Your ability to focus intensely increases when the likelihood of being distracted is diminished: phone on Airplane Mode, no
internet access, no TV playing in the background, no tempting foods nearby, no one to talk to, and no nearby conversations
to eavesdrop in on. Even if you aren’t focusing on a distraction, some part of your attention will be consumed by it.
The ideal environment to work intensely is an environment SO BORING that it makes work seem compelling.
But I can’t get away! Then put on headphones or book a conference room for an hour. When a meeting gets cancelled, go
to a nearby coffee shop. When you put the kids to bed, escape to a quiet part of the house. There are more ways to isolate
yourself and experience intense focus than you may think…
But I can’t go offline! You won’t lose a client or a friend if you go offline for 1 hour.
But I need to be with my team! You can work intensely with other people, but make sure that you collectively work to eliminate
distractions and direct your focus to a common reference point, like a whiteboard.
Ask yourself:
How would I rate my work intensity on a scale of 1-5?
1 being constantly distracted, and 5 being unable to maintain the intensity for longer than an hour without needing to take a
break.
1 2 3 4 5
What could be reducing my ability to focus intensely?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
The goal: “concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant.”
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author of Flow
85
Productivity Principle: Predict to Perform
Inspired by the book Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg
In 2012, two economists and a sociologist from MIT studied the habits of top performers in a midsized
recruiting firm. The researchers analyzed profit-and-loss data, appointment calendars, and 125,000 emails from
the past ten months.
“The superstars (those who earned an extra $10,000 in bonuses each year) were constantly telling stories about
what they had seen and heard. They were more likely to throw out ideas during meetings, or ask colleagues to
help them imagine how future conversations might unfold, or envision how a pitch should go. They came up
with concepts for new products and practiced how they would sell them.” – Charles Duhigg
The superstars told stories about their past experiences in the hopes that they could predict how future events
would unfold. These superstars were also prone to take on projects outside their area of expertise because it
was harder to predict how events would unfold. The mere act of making predictions was a source of
enjoyment for these high performers because it caused them to focus more intently on what they were doing.
According to Judy Willis, M.D., and neuroscientist, “every prediction you make triggers an increase in attention
and dopamine.” Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that boosts attention and reduces noise in neural networks,
making it easier to notice patterns. Increased pattern recognition means increased creativity, which ultimately
boosts learning and overall performance.
You won’t just get a shot of dopamine when your predictions are right; you’ll also release dopamine when your
predictions are wrong. In fact, Dr. Willis says “the dopamine boost is often greater when you learn something
new and useful than when you succeed.” This is one of the reasons gamblers keep coming back to the casino
despite losing more often than not.
Therefore, to boost your awareness, creativity, and performance, get in the habit of envisioning detailed
stories for events you are about to experience. Before your next meeting, ask yourself:
Take a few minutes each morning to visualize how your day will unfold:
What does my quest to ‘get things done’ look like today?
What conflicts am I likely to experience?
How will I respond?
When you know how things should proceed, it’s easier to anticipate distraction and take corrective action.
“If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as
specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do... Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which
real life deviates from the narrative inside your head.
By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where
our attention goes.” – Charles Duhigg
86
Productivity Principle: Process vs. Product
Inspired by the book A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley
To prevent procrastination, you want to avoid concentrating on product. Instead, your attention should be on building processes—habits—
that coincidentally allow you to do the unpleasant tasks that need to be done. – Barbara Oakley
When you focus on product, you rely on a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (a relatively new part of the brain in human
evolution). This is the rational ‘thinking’ part of the brain you use to visualize solutions. It’s also an inefficient, energy intensive part of your
brain.
When you focus on process, you rely on a part of the brain called the basil ganglia (a relatively old part of the brain in human evolution).
This part of the brain is used to execute habits (familiar work routines) and requires very little energy to operate.
You have thousands of habits stored in your basil ganglia. By trusting the automatic execution of these habits and not obsessing over the
end result, you bypass procrastination. It helps if you use a timer to cue your habits and periodically think of the product to ensure you
don’t stray too far from your intended outcome.
87
Insights from Little Bets by Peter Sims
“Chris Rock, the Pixar filmmakers, Frank Gehry, Steve Jobs, and Colonel Casey Haskins are all perfectionists and
yet they accept, even welcome, failure as they develop new ideas and strategies.” - Peter Sims
“Innate curiosity, which is the basis for so much creativity routinely gets squelched (as an adult). Perfection is rewarded, while making
mistakes is often penalized. The term “failure” has taken on a deeply personal meaning, something to be avoided at nearly all costs.” - Peter
Sims
A growing body of psychology research reveals that there are two forms of perfectionism: Healthy & Unhealthy.
“Healthy perfectionism is internally driven in the sense that it’s motivated by strong personal values for things like quality and excellence.
Conversely, unhealthy perfectionism is externally driven. External concerns show up over perceived parental pressures, needing approval, a
tendency to ruminate over past performances, or an intense worry about making mistakes. Healthy perfectionists exhibit a low concern for
these outside factors.” - Peter Sims
88
Insights from Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy
"It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters." – Brian Tracy
To increase the quality of your work‐time, you need to eat more ‘frogs’.
"Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don't do something about it. It is
also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and results at the moment." – Brian Tracy
Eating your biggest frogs allows you to get more done in less time so that you can spend more face time with the people you care about
most, doing the things that give you the most joy.
How to Find Your Biggest Frog
Consider the Consequences
We all take on roles in our professional lives, and those roles require a series of key results to survive and thrive.
"The key result areas of management are planning, organising, staffing, delegating, supervising, measuring, and
reporting. These are the areas in which a manager must get results to succeed in his or her area of responsibility. A
weakness in any one of these areas can lead to under‐achievement and failure as a manager." – Brian Tracy
What are the key result areas of your current role? Hint: Your key results are the reason you’re on the payroll (if you’re
an employee) or the reason you’re in business (if you’re an entrepreneur).
Visualize the long‐term consequences of doing nothing on your work to‐do list for an entire week. Then circle the five items, if left undone,
that would have the greatest long‐term impact on your key results areas.
"The potential consequences of any task or activity are the key determinants of how important a task really is to you and to your company.
This way of evaluating the significance of a task is how you determine what your next frog really is." – Brian Tracy
"The mark of the superior thinker is his or her ability to accurately predict the consequences of doing or not doing something." – Brian Tracy
Find Your Greatest Contribution
Among the things that you’ve identified to have long‐term consequences on your key result areas, ask yourself:
What ONE task could I do ALL day, that would contribute the greatest value to my company?
Brian Tracy says that if you ask yourself that question three times, the three tasks you come up with will be 90% of the
contribution you can provide your company.
"Perhaps the most important WORD in the world of work is contribution. Your rewards, both financial and emotional,
will always be in direct proportion to your results, to the value of your contribution." – Brian Tracy
"Identify the three things you do in your work that account for 90 percent of your contribution, and focus on getting them done before
anything else. You will then have more time for your family and personal life." – Brian Tracy
Do the Worst First
Start with the task you’ve most been avoiding. Do the worst first.
By doing the worst first, you'll receive the greatest sense of relief and satisfaction upon completing it, giving you the
confidence you eat more frogs.
"Eat the biggest and ugliest frogs before anything else.” – Brian Tracy
"Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with
the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long." ‐ Brian Tracy
How to Eat That Frog
The best way to eat a big ugly frog is to focus (solely) on the next bite.
"One of the best ways to eat a large frog is for you to take it one bite at a time…There is an old saying that ‘by the yard it’s hard; but inch by
inch, anything’s a cinch!’” – Brian Tracy
I focus solely on the next bite by asking myself: "What initial result can I achieve in the next 10 minutes to get me moving in the right
direction?"
"Your job is to go as far as you can see. You will then see far enough to go further. To accomplish a great task, you must step out in faith and
have complete confidence that your next step will soon become clear to you." – Brian Tracy
“You cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and
that will be enough, at least for the time being." – Brian Tracy
89
Insights from Getting Things Done by David Allen
“Reflect for a moment on what it actually might be like if your personal management situation were totally
under control, at all levels and at all times. What if you had completely clear mental space, with nothing pulling
or pushing on you unproductively? What if you could dedicate fully 100 percent of your attention to whatever
was at hand, at your own choosing, with no distraction?” – David Allen
Here’s How: Build a trusted system (an external brain), and actively capture, clarify, and remind yourself of whatever you need to do at the
time you need to do it. Here is my GTD (Getting Things Done) system and the three habits that allow my GTD system to be successful:
Capture
“There is no reason to ever have the same thought twice, unless you like having that thought…Anything you consider unfinished in any way
must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection tool, that you know you’ll come back to regularly and sort
through.” - David Allen
Process
“You must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it…You
must use your mind to get things off your mind.” - David Allen
Review
“The more complete the system is, the more you’ll trust it. And the more you trust it, the more you’ll be motivated to keep it…(each week)
Get clean, clear, current, and complete.” – David Allen
90
Insights from The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
“(T)he volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits
correctly, safely, or reliably.” – Atul Gawande, MD
Each day we process an overwhelming amount of information and take on more responsibility. As the complexity of our life increases, we
make small consequential oversights in our work, despite having experience and training. These oversights cause our co-workers,
managers, and customers to doubt the quality of our work.
When author and surgeon Atul Gawande makes a small oversight, like forgetting to wash his hands before surgery, he puts a patient’s life
in jeopardy. According to research, these small avoidable oversights occur more than 75,000 times a year in operating rooms across
America. On Gawande’s quest to find a solution he discovered a surprisingly simple, yet powerful tool the aviation industry has used for
years: the checklist.
“Four generations after the first aviation checklists went into use, a lesson is emerging: checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the
experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized. They provide a kind of cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in
all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness. And because they do, they raise wide, unexpected possibilities.” – Atul
Gawande, MD
More than 16 disciplines use checklists on a major construction site to coordinate efforts and verify each major step of the
building process. Their discipline to use checklists has kept the building failure rate in America to 0.00002% (1 in every 50,000
structure partially or entirely collapses due to human error).
Venture capitalists who take a methodical, checklist-driven approach to investing in businesses are 40% less likely to fire senior
management for incompetence. Venture capitalists who use checklists to verify investments experience 45% larger returns than
venture capitalists who avoid using checklists to verify their decisions (on average).
When surgeons and nurses started using checklists before surgery, major complications dropped by 36 percent, and deaths
reduced by 47 percent!
Resistance to Checklists
It’s one thing to realize that checklists work, it’s another thing to actually use them.
“It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among
us—those we aspire to be—handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have
protocols and checklists…Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.” – Atul Gawande, MD
To overcome the resistance of using checklists, you’ll need to make checklists efficient and effective. The more efficient a checklist is, the
more likely you’ll use it. The more effective a checklist is, the more mistakes you’ll catch and the more you’ll learn to rely on it.
Final note: For checklists to be effective you need to read, verify and physically check-off or click each item on a checklist. It’s the deliberate
act of going through each item that makes checklists effective, NOT the fact that you are familiar with every item on a checklist.
"(Checklists) not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher
performance.” – Atul Gawande, MD
91
Productivity Principle: Batching Buckets
Inspired by the book Getting Things Done by David Allen
“There is never a moment at which you “We all have times when we think more
could do everything you’ve decided to effectively, and times when we should
CONTEXT MODE
do, simply because most of those actions not be thinking at all.” - Daniel Cohen
require a specific tool or location.” – What’s the best What’s the optimal
David Allen context to be in to mental state to be in “When I first wake up, my brain is
complete this? to complete this? relaxed and creative. The thought of
“If you have traveled to meet a client at writing a comic is fun, and it’s relatively
her office and on arrival discover that At Office? High Energy- easy because my brain is in exactly the
In Car? Focused Mode?
the meeting will be delayed for fifteen right mode for that task. I know from
At Home? Social-Talkative
minutes, you will want to refer to your During Meeting? Mode? experience that trying to be creative in
Calls list for something you could do to At Grocery Store? Low Energy- the midafternoon is a waste of time. By
use your time productively. Your action Mindless Mode? 2:00 P.M. all I can do is regurgitate the
lists should fold in or out, based on what ideas I’ve seen elsewhere. At 6:00 A.M.
you could possibly do at any time.” – I’m a creator, and by 2:00 P.M. I’m a
David Allen copier.” – Scott Adams, Creator of the
Dilbert Comic
“You should have as many in-trays as you need and as few as you can get by with.” – David Allen
If I need to call a client, friend, or colleague, I put the task on my calls list and make the phone call during my commute time (when I can’t
do much else). Context: car. Mode: social/talkative.
If I need to write a blog post, I’ll put that task on my deep work list and complete that task in a deep work mode after my morning coffee
when my energy and focus are highest. Context: quiet space. Mode: high energy and focus.
What contexts (locations or tools) frequently constraint your actions (car, meeting, store, etc.)?
____________________________, ____________________________, ____________________________, ____________________________.
What time of the day do you most experience the following modes?
Focused work mode: ____ - ____ AM/PM | Mindless work mode: ____ - ____ AM/PM
Social/Talkative mode: ____ - ____ AM/PM | Anything-but-work mode: ____ - ____ AM/PM
What 3-5 lists can you make based on the contexts and modes listed above and direct actions to throughout the day?
92
Insights from Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss
“Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask... If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask
uncommonly clear questions.” – Tim Ferriss
Author Tim Ferriss reached out to 100+ brilliant minds and asked them 11 questions about living a happier, more productive, more fulfilling
life.
One of those questions was, “What do you do when you feel overwhelmed and unfocused?”
Among the hundreds of answers in the book 'Tribe of Mentors', I discovered three daily practices that many smart and successful people
turn to when they feel overwhelmed and unfocused.
Daily Practice #1: Move
“(Whenever I feel overwhelmed and unfocused I) Walk. Walk. Walk. A 30‐minute (or even 15‐minute) out‐of‐the‐
office walk with no devices almost invariably clears my head.” ‐ Tom Peters
When you walk, you walk into a state of clarity. Each step you take leaves a bit of overwhelm in your tracks.
“I’m kind of bummed that it took me so long to realize how great it makes me feel.” ‐ Jimmy Fallon
The next time you feel overwhelmed and unfocused, drop what you’re doing and go for a long walk (bonus
points if you walk a new route).
Daily Practice #2: Meditate
“(When I feel overwhelmed and unfocused) I drop into my breath..." ‐ Leo Babauta
“A few moments of focusing on my breath helps me move beyond the surface and go deeper.” ‐ Arianna
Huffington (paraphrased)
"(When I feel overwhelmed and unfocused) I observe my breath for a few seconds or minutes.” ‐ Yuval Noah
Harari
Babauta, Huffington, and Harari all rely on a simple form of meditation to eliminate overwhelm: breath awareness.
A twenty‐minute meditation session simply involves shifting your attention from a distracting thought to the natural rhythm of your
breath...over and over for 20 minutes.
Each time you shift your attention to your breath, a little bit of overwhelm falls away and a small amount of focus is restored.
Author Yuval Noah Harari says, "Without the focus and clarity provided by this practice (two hours of daily meditation), I could not have
written Sapiens and Homo Deus (two best‐selling books)."
Several people in 'Tribe of Mentors' recommend 20 minutes of meditation in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon. Some suggest
using the app Headspace to get started.
Daily Practice #3: Memento Mori
When Naval Ravikant, CEO and co‐founder of AngelList is overwhelmed and unfocused, he repeats the words
“memento mori.”
Memento mori is Latin for 'remember you must die.'
Death doesn’t need to be dark and depressing. In fact, realizing that you’re going to die one day can be a great
tool to clarify your priorities.
Tim Urban, creator of the blog WaitButWhy, uses death to pick projects he works on and people he spends his time with.
When deciding what creative project to work on, he asks himself: "Would I be happy if my epitaph had something to do with this project?"
Urban says, "For me, the epitaph test is usually a reminder to focus my time and effort on doing the highest‐quality and most original
creative work I can."
When considering who to spend time with, Urban asks himself: "Is this someone I might be thinking about when I'm on my deathbed?" and
"If I were on my deathbed today, would I be happy with the amount of time I spent with this person?"
The next time you're feeling overwhelmed and unfocused, don't push on. Don't answer ten more emails and don't do an extra hour of
work. Instead, move, meditate, and memento mori (remember that you could leave this earth right now).
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” – Henry David
Thoreau
93
Insights from The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” – Henry David Thoreau
Pareto’s Law states that 20% of work activity leads to 80% of the desired results. Therefore, 80% of potential tasks produce just 20% of
desired results. To drastically reduce your workweek, find, eliminate, or delegate 80% of tasks so you can focus on the vital 20%.
While working, get in the habit of asking: “Is this the best use of my time?”
Does it generate income? Am I obligated to do it? Do I enjoy it? If the answer to these questions is ‘No’, you’re doing an ‘80%’ activity, and
you need to complete the following steps (in the following order):
Let It Go
Are the consequences of not doing it reversible? What’s the worst case scenario of NOT doing this?
Run small ignorance experiments: stop doing tasks with small and reversible consequences. After the experiments are
complete, determine if you can live with the consequences and if you should stop doing those tasks all together.
“Can you let the urgent ‘fail’—even for a day—to get to the next milestone for your potential life-changing tasks? Small problems
will crop up, yes. A few people will complain and quickly get over it. BUT, the bigger picture items you complete will let you see
these for what they are—minutiae and repairable hiccups. Make this trade a habit. Let the small bad things happen and make the
big good things happen.” – Tim Ferriss
Let Others Do It
Is the task you want to hand off well defined (does it have clear instructions and requirements)? Is your hourly rate higher than what it would
cost someone else to do the task?
Passing inefficient tasks to others will generate more work for you in the long run.
“Each delegated task must be both time-consuming and well-defined. If you’re running around like a chicken with its head cut off
and assign your VA (virtual assistant) to do that for you, it doesn’t improve the order of the universe.” – Tim Ferriss
Rule of thumb: do a task at least five times before handing it off to others - this allows you to work out any issues and simplify the
process.
Estimate your hourly income by cutting the last three zeros off of your annual income and halving the remaining number (ex:
$50,000/year = $25/hour). If you make $25/hour, you should outsource all tasks that cost less than $25/hour to complete. This
allows you to generate more income by focusing on high-value tasks.
Always be thinking ‘How can I teach someone to do this?’ Make yourself replaceable by building checklists and FAQs and move on to
bigger and better things. When you’ve fully defined the tasks you want others to do, it’s time to hire a virtual assistant (VA):
“’Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's
important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.” – Tim Ferriss
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Insights from How to Have a Good Day by Caroline Webb
Morning Intention
Think about the day ahead and the activities you are likely to do (actions and interactions).
Write them down if possible.
“What matters most today?”
Find 1 or 2 key outcomes: _______________________ & _______________________
“What does that mean for my attitude, attention, and actions?”
Contrast the image of realizing your key outcome(s) with the attitude, focus, and actions you
need to take to overcome the obstacles to attain that outcome(s) – internal and external
struggles.
“What specific goals should I set/prime for the day?”
Schedule uninterrupted blocks of time where you can turn off notifications and advance your
goals through creative thinking.
Daily Monitoring
Shallow Breathing
Remind yourself to breathe deeply when you start feeling ‘defensive’ ‐ aim for 90 seconds of deep
diaphragmatic breathing each time.
Task Resistance
“What bigger aspiration or value of mine does this task speak to?”
“How does this request support something that matters to me?”
Behavior of Others
Could they simply be tired, hungry, or dealing with a lot right now?
Nightly Recap
“What went well today?”
1. ___________________________________________
2. ___________________________________________
3. ___________________________________________
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