What will you regret not doing (skydiving)? What will you regret doing (hard drugs)? Ask your future self what you should or shouldn’t have done to help guide your day-to-day decision making.
Category: Advice
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A Goal is a Dream With a Deadline
When dreaming about your future and the life you want, it’s easy to lose touch with reality. To make your dreams come true, you need to make a plan. Without a plan, your dreams will forever elude you. Start with the big vision for what you want, then work backwards. Set goals, develop a plan with milestones along the way, and then create deadlines to hold yourself accountable. This will put you on the path to realizing the dream.
Also, any dream worth chasing won’t happen overnight. This is all the more reason you need a plan with deadlines and milestones along the way that will ensure you eventually get there.
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Strong Views, Weakly Held
Have conviction in your beliefs. Stand up for yourself and your values.
But also have an open mind. Realize that situations are often way more complex than they might seem. You don’t always have all of the data, the right perspective, or the necessary background/experience. All of this adds up to the fact that you should be open to hearing the other side, learning, and change. Ultimately, it’s the bigger person who can acknowledge s/he was wrong and fix it.
This is VERY important in both your personal and your professional life. For your social life, it makes you a more accepting person and more fun to be around. If you are an executive in a company, this willingness to change and update based on new information is critical to long-term success.
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You Get Out What You Put In
This is so cliché but SO true. Any time I’ve skated through something in life, it hasn’t been worth the time and I regret wasting my life. In fact, when I think about regrets from the past, the root cause is usually not putting in 100% effort. Conversely, anything I look back and I’m super proud of, I’m proud because I put in the effort and gave it my all. If you want to get the most you can out of life, put in the effort, dedication, and time.
Some of the things I didn’t put 100% into and regret: High school academics – we covered so much material and had I made an effort I could know a lot more today, and yet I did only the minimum to get by and ended up regretting. Some of my startup projects didn’t get my full effort and struggled as a result.
Leave it all on the field (or court).
“Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable.” – John Wooden
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Who do you think you’re talking to!?
Monitor your internal dialogue. Careful how you talk to yourself. It’s so easy to get negative and judgmental, and spiral downward. Stay positive, optimistic, and upbeat.
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Extreme Ownership
Develop the mindset of extreme ownership, that you own everything in your world. You are ultimately responsible for what happens in your world. If your relationship isn’t working out, what did you or can you do to fix it? If you aren’t making progress towards your goals, how can you fix it? Have you done everything you can to improve it?
When you have this mindset, you become unstoppable because you are constantly searching for how you can become better or improve your world. It also means you have to become ultimately accountable because there is no one else to blame.
But perhaps more importantly, you also become happier. By taking extreme ownership, you preclude the possibility of becoming a victim of circumstance. Nothing escapes your control because one way or another you own it and therefore can work to improve it. As a result, extreme ownership can be a key to happiness and fulfillment.
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Life is About Balance
If you become a disciplined person, your discipline can dominate your mindset. In turn, this will lead you to feel guilty any time you deviate from your own standards or expectations. If you decide to get super fit and live a healthy life, any indulgence can riddle you with guilt. This guilt has the tendency to completely override any satisfaction that you might take from eating a piece of cholate cake (or whatever your guilty pleasure is). The same with finances. If you choose to save and live a frugal life, then spending money can bring a lot of feelings of guilt.
But life isn’t about scrimping and saving every penny, or ensuring every calorie you eat is as nutritious as possible. Life is about being satisfied, fulfilled and happy. I have observed that the best path to this is to be disciplined and hold yourself to a high standard, but to also be able to suspend this discipline so you can indulge in the finer things in life also.
Don’t be too disciplined. Don’t indulge too much. The right answer is a healthy balance between the two.
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Power of Mentors
Power of mentors, getting help from others, learning from others experiences
Look at all of the people who springboard with the help of others.
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Power of Habit
People often think setting the big hairy audacious goal is the key to success. It isn’t. The key to success is what you do year to year, month to month, and day to day that gets the results you need to achieve your goals. Habits are the foundation of success because they are literally how you carry yourself minute to minute. What’s incredible is once you form a habit it becomes unconscious and you don’t need to think about it or force yourself to do something–it happens automatically.
The power of habit is undeniable. Constructive habits, like exercising or eating vegetables, carried out over many years can have tremendous impact. It’s kind of like water dripping on a stone. Over the course of a day or even a month, you will not see any change to the rock. But leave it there for long enough and the water will literally wear away the stone. How do you think the grand canyon was formed?
What’s funny is the the habits you form not only determine your success… they also determine the kind of person you are. You literally are your habits. If you have habits of discipline, you will be known as a disciplined person. If you have habits of late night binge eating, you will be known as a fat person. This can also work in the other direction. A great question to ask yourself as you try to form habits and become the kind of person you want to be is “What would XYZ person do?” If you want to be fit, ask yourself, “What would a fit person do?” Eventually, as you repeat these actions/behaviors enough, you will become that person. You can also think of yourself as that fit person, which makes you all the more likely to carry the action forward. If you are debating whether or not to go to the gym, you can remind yourself that you are a fit person and it will propel you towards the gym.
Suggested reading:
- Power of Habit
- Atomic Habits
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Your Thoughts Define You
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t–you are right.” -Ford
You are your thoughts. Your thoughts determine your future. Your thoughts define the person you are. “You become what you think about most of the time.” –Earl Nightingale