Index
1. Business
The 7 Day Startup by Dan Norris
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
Become an Idea Machine by Claudia Azula Altucher
Choose Yourself by James Altucher
Contagious by Jonah Berger
Create or Hate by Dan Norris
Decisive by Chip & Dan Heath
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
The Dip by Seth Godin
Do The Work by Steven Pressfield
Drive by Daniel H. Pink
5. Philosophy
A Manual For Living by Epictetus
The Good Life Handbook by Epictetus
7. Self-Help
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins
- You have to spend time on the things that are most likely to bring you customers
- If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to ’ship’ your product.
- You have to build a business idea in order to test it.
- Gradually get more customers
- enter email != pay
- idea {huge void} successful business
- be passionate about growing a business
- Solve problems where people are already paying for solutions.
- You don’t learn until you launch
- extreme uncertainty.
- spend time on the things that will bring you customers
- Assets are built over time by ignoring short-term distractions in favor of a bigger, long-term vision
- A common MVP mistake is over-emphasizing the ‘minimum’ and under-emphasizing the ‘viable.
- forget about automation and figure out what you can do manually.
The 9 Elements of a Bootstrapped Business Idea
- Enjoyable daily tasks
- Product/founder fit
- Scalable business model
- Operates profitably without the founder
- An asset you can sell
- Large market potential
- Tap into pain or pleasure differentiators
- Unique lead generation advantage
- Ability to launch quickly
- How can you perform a service or offer a product to real customers?
- How will you get them to pay you after seven days?
- How close will your MVP be to the final vision of your product?
- The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.
7 Days to Startup
- Brainstorm and evaluation against the checklist
- Write down exactly what you will launch on Day 7
- Brainstrom business names. GRab the best domain
- Build the website
- Your marketing methods
- Create a spreadsheet that covers the first few months in business, the number of signups, revenue, estimated costs, and monthly growth
- Launch and start executing your marketing plan
The Law of...
- Leadership: It’s better to be first than it is better.
- Category: If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in. You have no competition.
- The Mind: It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
- Perception: Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perception.
- Focus: The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.
- Exclusivity: Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind.
- The Ladder: The strategy you use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder. The higher the better.
- Duality: In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race.
- Opposite: If you’re shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.
- Diversion: Over time, a category will divide and become two or more categories.
- Perspective: Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time.
- Line Extension: There’s an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand.
- Sacrifice: You have to give up something in order to get something.
- Attributes: For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute.
- Candor: When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive.
- Singularity: In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results.
- Predictability: Unless you write your competitors’ plans, you can’t predict the future.
- Success: Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.
- Failure: Failure is to be expected and accepted.
- Hype: A situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.
- Acceleration: Successful programs are not built on fads, they’re built on trends.
- Resources: Without adequate funding, an idea won’t get off the ground.
- “Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself”.
- “Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself”.
- “Never do anything just for the money”.
- “Don’t pursue business just for your own gain. Only answer the calls for help”.
- “Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working”.
- “You don’t need money to start helping people”.
- “The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy”.
- “When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than ‘Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!’—then say ‘no.’”
- avoid pursue little distractions instead of big dreams.
- Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself
- 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
- Never do anything just for the money
- You can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people
- Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business
- No plan survives first contact with customers
- Necessity is a great teacher
- Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers
- Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing
- Trust, but verify. Remember it when delegating. You have to do both
- Ideas are the currency of the 21st century.
- Execution is a subset of ideas.
- When you exercise your idea muscle every day you become an idea machine.
- “Ideas are the currency of life. Not money. Money gets depleted until you go broke. But good ideas buy you good experiences, buy you better ideas, buy you better experiences, buy you more time, save your life”.
- “Coming up with ten ideas a day is like exercise. And exercise makes the idea muscle stronger”.
- “When you come up with 10 ideas a day, or about 3000 ideas a year (depending on weather you include weekends or not), ideas will explode out of you. You will be unstoppable in every situation”.
- “Idea sex is mixing ideas and releasing control. It might lead to the birth of brilliant, more powerful ideas”.
- “The more value you bring to the world with your ideas, the more value you will bring to yourself, your family, and your community”.
- Remember: complaining is draining. So I wanted to make better use of that energy rather than fight it
- And change can only start with us. From within by making sure we are physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally healthy
- When an idea has electricity in it you will have no choice but to move into action. And you will love it because it will set your heart on fire
- “The world is changing. No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It’s up to you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself”.
- “You build a house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health”.
- “Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?”
- “In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur”.
- “Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves”.
- “Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too”.
- “The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure”.
- “Pretend everyone was sent to this planet to teach you”.
- I have to count the things that are abundant in my life. Literally count them. If I don’t they will begin to disappear
- ‘The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again’
- This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth
- Instead of counting sheep to get back to sleep, count all the things you are grateful for. Even the negative parts of your life. Figure out why you should be grateful for them. Try to get up to one hundred
- Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?
- People share things that make them look good to others.
- Top of mind means tip of the tongue.
- When we care, we share.
- If something is built to show, it’s built to grow.
- People like to pass along practical, useful information. News you can use.
- Information travels under the guise of idle chatter.
- Social Currency
- Triggers
- Emotion
- Public
- Practical Value
- Stories
- Successful people make things
- Creativity isn’t about wild talent as much as it’s about productivity. To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t. It’s a pure numbers game.
- Haters don’t create anything, and instead get caught up in a never-ending cycle of Hate feeding Hate and criticism triumphing over creation
- Learn how to use your time more productively to free up time for making things
- Things like single-tasking, smaller projects, tracking your progress, setting goals, doing timed work sessions free of interruption, and adding accountability are all proven methods for maximizing your productivity in a short amount of time.
- When you have less time, you become more productive. It’s often then that you really start to see where your priorities lie.
- If you can fail quickly and without worry, you can correct course quicker, improve quicker, learn more, and achieve more
- Comparison is a major creativity killer.
- Do more of what you love and you will be more successful.
- Avoid Negativity in Other People: cut with negative people
- Avoid Negativity in Yourself: eliminate negative self-talk. Practice self-awareness, gratitude, and empathy on a regular basis.
- Having a lack of gratitude will lead directly to negativity
- Practice gratitude daily
- Let difficult circumstances trigger gratitude
- Don’t watch the news
Becoming a more empathic person makes you more understanding, more grateful, less negative, and therefore more creative.
- Don’t rush into responses and don’t rush to judgment.
- If you can judge people less, you can understand people better.
- Notice people who are curious, who don’t just talk about themselves but eagerly want to hear about others.
- Don’t talk as much. During a conversation, listen more and ask open questions.
- Create more things
- Practice reading other people’s emotions. The more you can understand how people express emotions, the more you will understand other people.
If you are an entrepreneur, empathy is your business.
- Understand that you have two choices: to create something or consume something
- If you want to be an actively creative person, you have to create more than you consume.
- Create so much they can’t ignore you
Make your creative projects simpler, and you’ll be more likely to start- Create with others, help others, and creativity will flourish.
- The four villains of decision making are (1) narrow framing, (2) confirmation bias, (3) short-term emotion, and (4) over-confidence.
- Avoid “whether or not” decisions. Instead, consider several options simultaneously.
- Ask yourself, “Who else is struggling with a similar problem, and what can I learn from them?”
- When gathering good information and reality-testing your ideas, go talk to an expert.
- Rather than choose “all” or “nothing,” chose “a little something.”
we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that’s right in front of us while failing to consider the information that’s just offstage. Narrow framing is see choices in binary terms.
The mnemonic WRAP captures the four actions needed to protect you from the four villains:
- Widen your optins.
- Reality-test your assumptions.
- Attain distance before deciding.
- Prepare to be wrong.
To escape narrow frames, be aware of “whether or not” decisions. Example: “You cannot choose any of the current options you’re considering. What else could you do?”
“Multitracking” involves considering several options simultaneously.
We need to downplay short-term emotion in favor of long-term values and passions. To do a 10/10/10 analysis, think about a decision on three different time frames: How will you feel about it 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? How about 10 years from now?
When you put these two forces together—the mere-exposure(we like what’s familiar to us) principle and loss aversion(losses are more painful than gains are pleasant.)—what you get is a powerful bias for the way things work today. In helping us to make a decision, the single most effective question may be: What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?
set a timer that goes off once every hour, and when it beeps, we should ask ourselves, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?”
Core priorities are long-term emotional values, goals, aspirations. By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas. To carve out space to pursue our core priorities, we must go on the offense against lesser priorities.
By bookending—anticipating and preparing for both adversity and success—we stack the deck in favor of our decisions.
The goal of a tripwire is to jolt us out of our unconscious routines (autopilot) and make us aware that we have a choice to make. At some point, the virtue of being persistent turns into the vice of denying reality.
- Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.
- Shallow work is non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style work, often performed while distracted.
- Deep work is like a superpower in our increasingly competitive twenty-first-century economy.
- In order to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of, you need to commit to deep work.
- The ability to quickly master hard things and the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed, are two core abilities for thriving in today’s economy.
- “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.”
- “Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.”
- “The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”
- To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction
- When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
- To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction
- Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not
- Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging
- You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
- Your ritual needs to specify a location for your deep work efforts
- Focus on the Wildly Important
- Act on the Lead Measures: turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals
- Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
- Create a Cadence of Accountability
- At the end of the workday, shut down work thinking completely.
- Deep work training must involve two goals: improving your ability to concentrate intensely and overcoming your desire for distraction.
- Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.
Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of technology in which you focus your online time on a few carefully selected activities that support the things you value.
- focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else
- Digital Declutter: A practice in which you define your technology rules, take a thirty-day break, and reintroduce technology.
- Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
- The Social Media Paradox: Social media makes you feel both connected and lonely, happy and sad.
- The Bennett Principle: A practice in which you prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption
- checking “likes” is the new smoking.
- Tech companies encourage behavioral addiction through:
- Intermittent positive reinforcement; and
- The drive for social approval.
- Minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things,
- trying to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks.
- The “attention economy” describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. To join The Attention Resistance:
- Delete social media from your phone;
- Turn your devices into single-purpose computers;
- Use social media like a professional;
- Embrace slow media; and
- Dumb down your smartphone.
The Extraordinary Benefits of Knowing When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin
- Winners quit the right stuff at the right time.
- People settle for good enough instead of best in the world.
- Being well rounded is not the secret to success.
- “To be a superstar, you must do something exceptional. Not just survive the Dip, but use the Dip as an opportunity to create something so extraordinary that people can’t help but talk about it, recommend it, and, yes, choose it.”
- “The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.”
- “Winners understand that taking that pain now prevents a lot more pain later.”
- “The decision to quit or not is a simple evaluation: Is the pain of the Dip worth the benefit of the light at the end of the tunnel?”
- Quitting as a short-term strategy is a bad idea. Quitting for the long term is an excellent idea because it frees you up to excel at something else.
- Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most.
- Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other
- With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top
- The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path
- The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.
- It’s not enough to survive your way through this Dip. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat it like the opportunity that it really is.
- 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.
- If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.
- Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts.
- If you’re not able to get through the Dip in an exceptional way, you must quit. And quit right now.
Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way
- Resistance is what prevents us from doing our best work.
- The more important a call or action is to, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
- The worst thing we can do is to stop once we’ve started.
- “The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”
- Our mightiest ally (our indispensable ally) is the belief in something we cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or feel.
- “When we conquer our fears, we discover a boundless, bottomless, inexhaustible well of passion.”
- “We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is.”
- “Research can be fun. It can be seductive. That’s its danger. We need it, we love it. But we must never forget that research can become Resistance.”
- Resistance is a repelling force. It’s negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.
- Prepare yourself to make new friends. They will appear, trust me.
- Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies.
- Don’t think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.
- You’re allowed to read three books on your subject. No more.
- Let the unconscious do its work.
- Research can become Resistance. We want to work, not prepare to work.
- Get your idea down on paper. You can always tweak it later.
- Figure out where you want to go; then work backward from there.
- We can never eliminate Resistance. It will never go away. But we can outsmart it, and we can enlist allies that are as powerful as it is.
- Do research early or late. Don’t stop working. Never do research in prime working time.
- Only one thing matters in this initial draft: get SOMETHING done, however flawed or imperfect. You are not allowed to judge yourself.
- Stay stupid. Follow your unconventional, crazy heart.
- Ideas come according to their own logic. That logic is not rational. It’s not linear. We may get the middle before we get the end. We may get the end before we get the beginning. Be ready for this. Don’t resist it.
- Forget rational thought. Play. Play like a child.
- Our job is not to control our idea; our job is to figure out what our idea is (and wants to be)—and then bring it into being.
- Ask yourself what’s missing. Then fill that void.
- You are not to blame for the voices of Resistance you hear in your head.
- Our greatest fear is fear of success
- When we experience panic, it means that we’re about to cross a threshold. We’re poised on the doorstep of a higher plane.
The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
The carrot and stick approach to motivation is flawed.
- extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks
- We have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
- The new approach to motivation has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
- When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity.
- Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
- You are in control of your thoughts, your impulse, your will to get and your will to avoid.
- What disturbs men’s minds is not events but their judgments on events.
- Don’t blame others for hindering or disturbing or distressing you; blame your own judgments.
- Never say of anything, “I lost it,” but say, “I gave it back.”
- Behave in life as you would at a party.
- You are but an impression, and not at all what you seem to be.
- To accuse others of our own misfortunes is a sign we need to educate ourselves. To accuse ourselves shows that our education has begun; to accuse neither ourselves nor others shows that our education is complete.
- Ask not that events should happen as you will, but let your will be that events should happen as they do, and you shall have peace.
- Exercise yourself in what lies in your power.
- Let him then who wishes to be free not wish for anything or avoid anything that depends on others; or else he is bound to be a slave.
- You can be invincible if you never enter on a contest where victory is not in your power.
- when anyone makes you angry, know that it is your own thought that has angered you.
- No one shall harm you, without your consent; you will only be harmed, when you think you are harmed.
- There are things over which we have complete control and things over which we have no control at all.
- If you think you can control things over which you have no control, then you will be hindered and disturbed.
- If you desire and avoid only those things that are under your control, then you will not feel victimized by things you dislike.
- Focus on the things over which you have control.
- Welcome everything that happens in life.
- You have all the resources you need to overcome challenges.
- You cannot lose anything you don’t own, to begin with.
- Always conduct yourself as though you are at a formal dinner.
- What things are under your total control? What you believe, what you desire or hate, and what you are attracted to or avoid.
- Select carefully what you want to choose and what you want to refuse. Be disciplined and detached while making the choice.
- When you blame others for your negative feelings, you are being ignorant. When you blame yourself for your negative feelings, you are making progress. You are being wise when you stop blaming yourself or others.
- Don’t wish for things to happen the way you would like them to. Rather, welcome whatever happens. This is the path to peace, freedom, and happiness.
- If you practice attributing the correct source to problems you face, whatever happens, you will soon find that nothing that happens outside of you pertains to you.
- What you lose is what you pay for your peace of mind.
- It is essential not to respond to impressions impulsively. Take some time before reacting. You will see you are in better control.
- Compared to death, none of the things you face in life is important enough to worry about.
- If you decide to live by lofty principles, be prepared to be laughed at by others.
- Learn to accept whatever happens.
- While you should take care of your body, you should spend most of your time taking care of your mind.
- Not judging others too quickly will save you from misperceiving their actions.
- If you have chosen a simple life, don’t make a show of it. If you want to practice simplicity, do so quietly and for yourself, not for others.
- Decide that you are an adult, and you are going to devote the rest of your life to making progress. Stick closely to what is best. If you are distracted by pleasure or pain, glory or disrepute, realize that the time is now. The game has started and waiting any further is not an option. Win or lose will be decided today. Use reason to meet every challenge.
Think a little Change a lot
- Success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness.
- Before you can adopt the seven habits, you need to change your perception and interpretation of how the world works (see: paradigm shift).
- Between what happens to you and your response to it is your freedom to choose that response.
- Proactive people work on the things they can do something about.
- Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
- A paradigm is a way to “see” the world.
- We see the world, not as it is, but as we are conditioned to “see” it.
- To make relatively minor changes in your life, focus on your attitudes and behaviors. To make significant, quantum change, work on your basic paradigms.
- Be proactive
- Begin with the end in mind
- Put first things first
- Think win/win
- Seek first to understand then be understood
- Synergize
- Sharpen the saw
- Proactive people can carry their own weather with them. They are value driven; Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment.
- What matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.
- Proactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Influence.
A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: personal, positive, present tense, visual, emotional.
- “Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards and believe you can meet them”.
- “We must change our belief system and develop a sense of certainty that we can and will meet the new standards before we actually do”.
- “It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently”.
- “The three decisions that control your destiny are: 1. What to focus on. 2. what things mean to you. 3. what to do to create the results you desire”.
- “By changing any one of these five elements—whether it’s a core belief or rule, a value, a reference, a question, or an emotional state—you can immediately produce a powerful and measurable change in your life”.
- “Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure”.
- “It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean”.
- “Focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear”.
- If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in your life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve
- Making a true decision means committing to achieving a result, and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility
- In order to succeed, you must have a long-term focus
- Make decisions often and learn from them
- Ask yourself, ‘What’s good about this? What can I learn from this?
- Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach
- Most of us base our decisions about what to do on what’s going to create pain or pleasure in the short term instead of the long term
- It’s not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean
- If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible
- The way to expand our lives is to model the lives of those people who are already succeeding.
- There are three specific beliefs about responsibility that a person must have if they’re going to create long-term change: Something must change, I must change it, I can change it
- So often we blame the wrong cause, and thereby close ourselves off from possible solutions
- A genuine quality of life comes from consistent, quality questions
- The words you habitually choose also affect how you communicate with yourself and therefore what you experience
- Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary—the words you consistently use to describe the emotions of your life—you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live
- Many people know what they want to have, but have no idea of who they want to be
- Anytime you have difficulty making an important decision, you can be sure that it’s the result of being unclear about your values
- If you ever feel angry or upset with someone, remember, it’s your rules that are upsetting you, not their behavior
- Design your rules so that you’re in control, so that the outside world is not what determines whether you feel good or bad. Set it up so that it’s incredibly easy for you to feel good, and incredibly hard to feel bad
- Limited references create a limited life. If you want to expand your life, you must expand your references by pursuing ideas and experiences that wouldn’t be a part of your life if you didn’t consciously seek them out
- As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity