Category: Virtues

  • Jim Collins’ Top 10

    Jim Collins’ Top 10

    Suggestions for a good life from Jim Collins, a leading business thinker.

    1. Build a personal board of directors. Don’t populate thos board based on accomplishment, but on character and values you want to emulate.
    2. Turn off your electronics–not for others but for yourself. Down time and white space gives you time to think. You need the quiet to think.
    3. Work on your three circles. What are you passionate about? What are you genetically coded for? What could you do that would be useful to society? Study yourself like a bug. Get input from others around you.
    4. What is your questions-to-statements ratio? Can you double it, so you are asking way more questions than making statements?
    5. Suppose you wake up tomorrow to learn that you suddently have $20M and that you only have 10 years to live. What would you stop doing immediately? Maybe you should stop doing that anyway.
    6. Start your stop doing list. Be clear about what to stop doing.
    7. Unplug everything that’s just a distraction.
    8. Find something that you have so much passion for that you will be able to endure the pain to make something great.
    9. Take the time to clarify your personal values.
    10. Prepare to live a life where at 65 you feel that you are only 1/3 through the work.
  • The Importance of Communicating Well

    The Importance of Communicating Well

    Your success will depend entirely on your ability to communicate well. I don’t think that’s an overstatement. If you can write well and speak clearly — able to effectively communicate the thoughts in your head so the other person understands exactly what you are trying to say — you are on your way to effective leadership, compelling thoughts, and convincing people to see your perspective. Conversely, if you can’t communicate well, your success will be limited. As a first step, invest the time in learning to write effectively, even 2-3 sentence-long emails. If you write effectively, your speech will also become more coherent and compelling.

    A bonus of learning to communicate effectively is you also learn to THINK better. If you can’t explain it well enough, you don’t understand it well enough. So learning to communicate it also helps you learn to think through it.

  • Gratitude

    Gratitude

    So much good comes to you from gratitude. Shift your focus to one of appreciation and gratitude. Make your experience one of thankfulness and joy. This can be really hard at first, but like building a muscle it becomes easier and faster over time.

    You should intentionally expose yourself to the other side of rough neighborhoods and other people. You can’t really be grateful for what you have until you know how special it is. Exposing yourself will immediately give you tremendous respect and gratitude for what you have.

  • Patience

    Patience

    Patience makes time your greatest asset. It will work for you, not against you.

    Saw this on Twitter: The greatest threat to results is impatience. If you let it, a tiny daily advantage will compound into a massive generational one. A lack of patience changes the outcome.

  • Hard Work = Luck

    Hard Work = Luck

    You will only have a handful of mega opportunities in your life, and they won’t hang around for long. That million dollar idea you had yesterday may be gone tomorrow. That job offer that is the dream job but requires you to move across the country expires in a week. That real estate deal might be off the market in six hours. These opportunities will come your way maybe once a decade. Which means that the vast majority of your time will be spent preparing for opportunity. The more you work and the harder you prepare, the more equipped you will be to capitalize on these opportunities. Will you be ready? Will you be able to identify the opportunity let alone seize the day?  Will your preparation be enough?

    In the same vein, always have your sails up so you’re ready to run when the winds pick up.
    • Quote: The harder I work the luckier I get.
    • Make your own luck.
    • Wooden Quote: It’s too late for preparation when opportunity strikes.
  • Fight For It

    Fight For It

    “If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won.” -Mumford & Sons

    Do you really want it? If so, you should fight for it. Sometimes in my life there have been things that I really wanted but didn’t fight for at the time. Invariably, looking back, I always regret not fighting for what I really wanted. The perspective I was missing at the time is that putting up a good fight for days or weeks or even months is a flash in a pan over the course of your life. You’ll always look back wondering “what if I had fought for it?”

    Mom has a wonderful story of how she got into business school by fighting for it.

    On a related but different note, you also need to fight for what you believe. If you know something isn’t right, don’t let it go unnoticed. Bring it to light, make everyone aware, and fight for it if it’s that important. With that said, you could also be wrong so you should be firm but always open to changing your mind. History is filled with stories of could-have-been would-have-been great people who mostly got it right but also got it wrong on a few really important points. Instead of adapting and listening, they ignored the reality coming at them and paid the price. The best place to be is to have, as the expression goes, “strong opinions, weakly held.”

  • 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

  • Stay Humble

    Stay Humble

    When you inevitably experience triumph and success in your life, it’s so tempting for it to go to your head. This can manifest in very obvious ways, or it can also be very subtle. You have to protect against confidence from past successes spilling over into cockiness. There’s always someone out there who is better than you so stay humble and realize that, more often than not, you aren’t as good as you think you are. Supreme confidence is great. Cockiness is a big turnoff to everyone around you.

    Virtue: Humility