Category: Success

  • A Goal is a Dream With a Deadline

    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.

  • Strong Views, Weakly Held

    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.

  • What is Success?

    What is Success?

    “I coined my own definition of success, which is peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you’re capable… You never heard me mention winning… My idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game, and you can win when you’re outscored.” -John Wooden

    If you put in 110% and give it everything you have, you can’t lose.

    Another idea: Success=do what you can with what you have where you are

    Success is a combination of experience and when/how to make decisions. Your decisions, based on your experience, will determine your success.

    happiness often comes from shooting for high goals but detracting yourself from the outcome. Set goals, work hard, and be happy with giving it your best.

    Conflicted on this because also need to win. Sometimes giving it “your best” doesn’t cut it. If failure is not an option, you can’t take no for an answer.

    Recommended reading:

    • Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and Off the Court
  • Are you getting better or worse?

    Are you getting better or worse?

    You are never stagnant or the same. You are ALWAYS either getting better or worse. Your blade edge is either getting sharper or duller. Commit yourself to getting a little better every day. Even just 0.1% better. Over time, all those little improvements add up to a lot.

    Virtue: Continuous improvement, Kaizen

  • Smart Enough

    Smart Enough

    Over the years, I have noticed a curious thing. The smartest people are rarely the most successful people. The most successful people I’ve encountered are generally smart and conversational, but not brilliant. You only have to be smart “enough.” Once you pass a certain threshold, success is no longer defined by intelligence. Instead, it’s a confluence of other skills and abilities, such as emotional intelligence, coachability, continuous improvement/learning, and luck among other things.

    Rest assured that you don’t have to be the most brilliant person in the room. And you are certainly smart enough to do anything you put your mind to. So don’t limit your ambition and build the future you want to see in the world.

  • Power of Mentors

    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.

  • 10,000 Hour Rule

    10,000 Hour Rule

    10,000 hours rule. Your intelligence is flexible. You can improve and change. Show examples of people who didn’t start great. You can get better with deliberate effort.

    There’s a lot of controversy around this rule but the lesson is important nonetheless.

    “The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly 4 hours a day for 10 years.” -Malcolm Gladwell

  • Failure

    Failure

    Anyone who is trying to do anything of significance will fail. It’s inevitable. How you cope to and react to failure is the whole key to success. It’s ironic-failure, and how you fail, is the key to success.

    In reality, there is no failure. Only learning. Every failure is an opportunity to start again smarter. You are either succeeding or growing. Each failure is another growth opportunity.

    Failure is an event, it is not a person. You will fail many times in your life, especially if you are pushing. Don’t let it define you.

    You’re not a failure until you quit trying.

    You only grow through stress. If you do something you already know how to do, you do not grow. It is only when you force your body and brain to do new and bigger things – new stresses – that you grow.

    Suggested reading:

    • Mindset book
  • Power of Habit

    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

     

  • Your Thoughts Define You

    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