Success | mastery.fm

Explore

If you don’t like the career choices in front of you, don’t decide. Go outside and explore, and let your intuition guide you.

What many people don’t realize, however, is that this exploration never ends. Exploring is an integral part of any fulfilling career, not merely something you do before making the choice. No career choice is final.

If you’re feeling stuck in your career choices, maybe none of them are right for you. Go outside your comfy hive. Do some of the things you’ve always wanted to try, even if they don’t seem relevant to your career. This exploration will serve you well.

And:

As I made additional career decisions, I asked myself, “What would be fun and interesting to do next?” as opposed to “What permanent career choice should I make?”

Loading Likes...

Build a Life That Turns You On

David Cain:

If there’s a real secret to “seduction,” here it is: Always be building a life that turns you on, represent yourself as honestly and straightforwardly as you can, and have conversations with a lot of people. That’s it. Connections will happen. If you’re bad at those things, give yourself as long as it takes to get good at them. You have time.

Loading Likes...

Go Forward

T. Lobsang Rampa:

Everything is in a state of movement, all life is movement, even death is movement, because cells are breaking down and turning into other compounds. Let us remember at all times that one cannot stand still on a tightrope, one can either go forward or backward.

Loading Likes...

Go Deep

Chris Bowler:

Be ready, because if you blink, you might miss it. Miss what? Something good!

Can we all agree to just let go? To stop caring that we might miss something big, something important?

The output is not going to stop, to lessen, anytime soon. We can never read it all, study it all, or even skim it all.

A few reminders:

To create is better than to consume.

But create for the few, not for the many.

Create for those you can see face to face.

Consume, but remember that the dose makes the poison.

When you consume something that is good, great, transcendent, consume it over and over … meditate on it, then act on it, be changed by it.

Go deep!

Loading Likes...

The No List

Liz Danzico:

So I started a list. Instances of saying no.

When I say no (e.g., conference talk invites, “pick my brain” invitations, jury solicitations), I immediately add my regret to the No List. I nurture this growing list of no-things, adding category data like dates events would have happened, themes, and date turned down.

Suddenly, I’m making list of cities not seen, airplanes not embarked, and time saved, rather than time taken away. Several months later, I have a made a substantial something. It’s how I’ve marked time.

There are many instances where deadlines are crucial, where getting things done needs to get done. Sometimes saying yes is just the thing that must happen. But just as importantly, most times it is not.

Stop reading a book halfway through, keep a list of your turn-downs, and celebrate the fringe benefits of no.

I’ll be right there with you.

Shawn Blanc:

When we say no, it doesn’t have to be because we are too busy. It can also be because we are intentional and purposeful about what we do with our time and energy.

David Allen:

You can do anything, but not everything.

Hit the Accelerator on Clarity Gains

Steve Pavlina:

It’s fair to say – and to accept – that there is no clarity to be found outside of experience. Experience is the mother of clarity. And this points us in an actionable direction. If we wish to gain clarity, we must get busy gaining experience. And we’ll generally achieve the greatest gains by courting fresh, new experiences as opposed to repeating previous ones. Thus, if you want to hit the accelerator in terms of clarity gains, make a habit of embracing new and different experiences. Go where you’ve never been. Do what you’ve never done. Try what you’ve never tried. This will have the triple benefit of upgrading your mental models of reality (truth), refining your palette of desires (love), and boosting your ability to blaze a trail to your desires (power).

Loading Likes...

A Difference in Priorities

Tim Ferriss:

So, what makes the difference? What separates the New Rich (NR), characterized by options, from the Deferrers (D), those who save it all for the end only to find that life has passed them by?

It begins at the beginning. The New Rich can be separated from the crowd based on their goals, which reflect very distinct priorities and life philosophies.

Note how subtle differences in wording completely change the necessary actions for fulfilling what at a glance appear to be similar goals. These are not limited to business owners. Even the first, as I will show later, applies to employees.

D: To work for yourself.
NR: To have others work for you.

D: To work when you want to.
NR: To prevent work for work’s sake, and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect (“minimum effective load”).

D: To retire early or young.
NR: To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.

D: To buy all the things you want to have.
NR: To do all the things you want to do, and be all the things you want to be. If this includes some tools and gadgets, so be it, but they are either means to an end or bonuses, not the focus.

D: To be the boss instead of the employee; to be in charge.
NR: To be neither the boss nor the employee, but the owner. To own the trains and have someone else ensure they run on time.

D: To make a ton of money.
NR: To make a ton of money with specific reasons and defined dreams to chase, timelines and steps included. What are you working for?

D: To have more.
NR: To have more quality and less clutter. To have huge financial reserves but recognize that most material wants are justifications for spending time on the things that don’t really matter, including buying things and preparing to buy things. You spent two weeks negotiating your new Infiniti with the dealership and got $10,000 off? That’s great. Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends?

D: To reach the big pay-off, whether IPO, acquisition, retirement, or other pot of gold.
NR: To think big but ensure payday comes every day: cash flow first, big payday second.

D: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike.
NR: To have freedom from doing that which you dislike, but also the freedom and resolve to pursue your dreams without reverting to work for work’s sake (W4W). After years of repetitive work, you will often need to dig hard to find your passions, redefine your dreams, and revive hobbies that you let atrophy to near extinction. The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

Loading Likes...

Start Progressing Again

Steve Pavlina:

How many years of our lives could we lose to stagnation if we’re not careful? How many years have you been stuck in a misaligned job or relationship? It’s hard not to think about what more could have been created with those years.

A key aspect of self-development is awareness. You learn to look at many parts of your life to seek out areas of stagnation, bring them into the light, and work on them till you get unstuck and start progressing again.

Imagine what a little more awareness and a little more courage can do for you in terms of preventing stagnation. This could potentially save you from decades of being stuck in a misaligned situation.

Self-development can also help with defining your purpose, so you don’t stagnate due to a sense of meaninglessness. You can develop yourself into a person with a rich and meaningful life instead.

Loading Likes...

Feed Your Desires

Steve Pavlina:

The idea of feeding your power to your desires is incredibly simple. All you need to do is decide what you want and then focus your thoughts, feelings, and actions on those desires. Identify your desires and then run straight at them. Be totally shameless about it. Intellectually this is not a difficult concept to understand, is it?

And:

Suppose your true desire is to be surrounded by friends and family that uplift, encourage, and support you. You want to be around like-minded people who are smart, fun, and happy. You want to hang out with people who empower you.

But instead using your power to create that, you feed it into your existing disempowering relationships. You obsess over what others think about you, people who really don’t encourage you to be your best self anyway. You worry about what your Mom thinks about you. By clinging to disempowering relationships of any kind, including blood relationships, you block yourself from receiving what you truly desire. Seriously… who the hell cares what your Mom thinks anyway? Let her live her own life. You go live yours.

Alternatively, you may feed your power into relationships with your TV or your computer instead of real face-to-face connections with human beings.

Again, the pattern is giving your power away to something you don’t even want as opposed to channeling all of your power into what you desire. When you feed your desires, you simultaneously starve your non-desires. If your Mom keeps sending you critical emails that bring you down, simply flag her email address as a spammer and be done with her. Then go out and recruit fresh social connections with people who are willing to support and encourage you along the paths you wish to explore. Be loyal to those who are supportive of your desires, not to those who do the opposite.

And:

Improving all your broken, disempowering relationships is not a prerequisite for attracting an amazing social life. Your social skills don’t need to be upgraded either. You can simply let go of the dysfunctional relationships and immediately begin feeding your power to create the social life you desire. Nothing else needs to happen first.

I repeat: Nothing else needs to happen first!

Loading Likes...

Asking the Right Questions

Steve Pavlina:

Most people ask lousy questions that cripple their results. Lousy questions turn your focus away from what you want and towards more of what you don’t want. And since we ask and answer mental questions every day, our questions wield great power over our results.

And:

Weak questions are disempowering. They keep your focused on your own ego, your problems, and your shortcomings. Weak questions keep you focused on what’s wrong… on what isn’t working. That might seem like a good idea, but all it does is further reinforce the situation you’d like to change. Weak questions will lead your brain to come up with answers that are useless, circular, or even destructive.

Yet weak questions are addictive. At first glance they may even seem helpful, and that’s why they’re so insidious. You might think that if you’re depressed, the best thing you can do is to ask, “Why am I so depressed?” Perhaps if you could diagnose the problem, you could cure it. But it doesn’t work that way. When you’re in a negative state or situation, you aren’t thinking clearly to begin with. You’re in no position to accurately diagnose yourself. Effectively you’re blind. So the answers you get back will be worthless. At best you’ll merely come up with a temporary solution, but the underlying condition will remain, and the problem will simply submerge and crop up again later, sometimes in a different form. Asking why you’re depressed merely feeds your depression. In answering the why question, now you’ve added a story on top of your depression. That goes way beyond acknowledging your depression and trying to do something about it.

Loading Likes...