Success – Page 3 – mastery.fm

No Need to Wait

If you go back 20 or 25 years, I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait. I went to college. I went to law school. I worked in law and banking, though not for terribly long. But not until I started PayPal did I fully realize that you don’t have to wait to start something. So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? Sometimes, you have to actually go through the complex, 10-year trajectory. But it’s at least worth asking whether that’s the story you’re telling yourself, or whether that’s the reality.

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Leaping Into the Glorious Unknown

Jen Sincero:

When you change who you’re being, you’re basically killing off your old identity, which completely freaks your subconscious self out. Change hurls you into the unknown and puts you at risk for all sorts of loss and, of course, all sorts of unthinkable awesomeness, which is why it brings your biggest fears to the surface.

Your [subconscious] is desperately trying to keep you in a safe, known space, otherwise known as your comfort zone, but if the truths you’re running your life on no longer fit who you’re becoming, it’s like trying to squeeze into the snow pants you wore as a kid when you’re thirty-six years old. Not so comfy after all. Yet we do it all the time because even though they cut off our circulation and hold us back from who we so desperately want to become, the puffy pants are familiar, cozy, and feel safer than trying on an outfit that we’ve never worn before. We are so attached to the unhelpful familiar, in fact, that we will spend our valuable, very finite time here on Earth crafting excuses to keep ourselves right where we are, instead of leaping into the glorious unkonwn and growing into who we’re really meant to be.

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Switch Strategies

Derek Sivers:

Life is like any journey. You need to change directions a few times to get where you want to go.

Early in your career, the best strategy is to say yes to everything. The more things you try, and the more people you meet, the better. Each one might lead to your lucky break.

Then when something is extra-rewarding, it’s time to switch strategies. Focus all of your energy on this one thing. Don’t be leisurely. Strike while it’s hot. Be a freak. Give it everything you’ve got.

If by chance it was a dead-end road, then switch your strategy back to trying everything.

Eventually your focus on something will pay off. Because you’re successful, you’ll be overwhelmed with opportunities and offers. You’ll want to do them all. But this is when you need to switch strategies again. This is when you learn to say “hell yeah or no” to avoid drowning.

Now you admit you’ve arrived at your first destination. This is where you stop following old directions, and decide where you’re going next. The new plan means you need to switch strategies again.

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Start Small

Reddit:

Do two things every day that make you a better version of yourself. I started small. I wrote something. I learned a word in another language. I kept a secret. Eventually it went to – I ran/worked out. I kept on my diet. Then it was I did one thing at work nobody asked me to do. I got better at something not related to my job. I still do this, going on 4-5 years. I’ve been diagnosed with depression since a teenager well into my late twenties. I’m approaching mid thirties now and this is the happiest I’ve been. Took a while. Brick by brick kind of thing. Pretty cool.

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Unlimited

Dustin Curtis:

If you want to do something great with your life—whatever that means to you—remember this: you get an unlimited number of tries. The only constraining factor is your lifespan.

The worst things you can do are:

care what other people think,

not take risks,

fail slowly,

give up.

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Recurring Reflections

Steve Pavlina:

When you identify a recurring result in your life that you don’t feel aligned with, pause now and then to ask yourself, How am I creating this? Don’t ask this question with an attitude of blame but rather with an attitude of curiosity. Consider the possibility that your own thoughts or actions are causing or contributing to these outcomes.

And:

When life threatens you with a financial problem, do you tighten up and go even deeper into the scarcity mindset that gave rise to this problem in the first place? Or do you use the challenge as an invitation to shift into abundance mode, such as by being more generous than usual?

If you go deeper into the thoughts, feelings, and energy patterns that give rise to your problems, you’ll attract more and bigger versions of those same problems.

And:

Which persistent problems in your life might you actually be creating? Is it possible that you’re creating financial scarcity by acting like a financially scarce person would? Is it possible you’re creating social disconnection? Is it possible you’re creating the health status of your body?

You may not learn the real truth until you deliberately shift your patterns of thought and behavior and give yourself the opportunity to see different patterns being reflected back.

It’s when you break the old patterns and try something incongruent with your previous mindset that you can finally see the causal links that were previously hidden to you.

And:

I suggest that you start small here. Test this idea when it doesn’t feel super critical.

When you’re experiencing scarcity, try donating a small amount of money online to a cause you like. When you’re bored at work, play one of your favorite songs, shake out your body, and take a dance break for a few minutes. When you’re feeling angry, try sending someone a thank you note.

If you don’t like the outcomes you’ve been experiencing, try setting a radically different cause in motion, and see how it affects your results.

Turn towards the patterns that feel more loving and more powerful to you, even if you can only manage this for a short time. When you disrupt your previous patterns, you’ll also raise your awareness of the old reflections you’ve been serving up unconsciously. And this will help you step into a zone of power that lets you change those patterns – and improve your results too.

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Mini Habits

Stephen Guise:

What’s More Important Than Your Habits?

Nothing. Habits form about 45 percent of your total behavior, according to a Duke University study. Not only that, but they are behaviors that you repeat frequently, which compounds their significance in your life. Habits are your foundation, and if this foundation is weak, you won’t be happy with the way you live.

The reason people fail to change their lives, and fail to instill new habits, is because they try to do too much at once. In simplest terms, if your new habit requires more willpower than you can muster, you will fail. If your new habit requires less willpower than you can muster, you will succeed.

The concept of mini habits:

Mini habits are exactly as they sound. First, you choose a desired habit or change you’d like to make—it could be thinking more positively, writing 1,000 words a day, or reading two books per week.

Next, you shrink these habits down until they are “stupid small,” a term I made up because when you say the requirement out loud, it is so small that it sounds stupid. Here are mine:

Write fifty words per day (article, story, etc.)

Write fifty words per day (for the habits book I’m writing)

Read two pages in a book per day

Easy, right? I could complete this list in ten minutes total. So far, I’ve met these daily requirements 100 percent of the time, and then much more.

I’ve actually written one to two thousand words and read ten to thirty pages per day, for these twelve days in a row and counting. Prior to this, I wasn’t reading at all and writing very little.

Ten Daily Mini Habit Ideas

Compliment one person

Think two positive thoughts

Meditate for one minute

Name three things you’re thankful for

Do one push-up

Write fifty words

Read two pages

Do ten jumping jacks

Go outside and take 100 steps

Drink one glass of water

You can change nearly any area of your life, and at one mini habit at a time, it’s easier than you think.

When you remove the pressure and expectations, you allow yourself to start.

What mini habit(s) will you start today?

Make a List of Uncomfortable Things

A friend shared this story with me about Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari:

This is mostly common sense but sometimes you just need to hear it to make it happen. I like this thing that the founder of Atari/Chuck E Cheese, Nolan Bushnell does. Every year, he makes a list of 11 things outside of his comfort zone that he wants to do. He rolls a dice and whatever it lands on, he HAS to do that one thing that year. This led him to do some very amazing and impactful things. Whatever your method is, it gets you to make a decision and actually take action instead of procrastinating or justifying not doing it.

Here’s Bushnell describing the process:

Bushnell commented on how people fail to reach their potential, “We all push ourselves to doing things that are easy, when we should be doing things that are really hard.” He encouraged everyone in the audience to play the “dice game” where a list of new experiences is numbered and two dice are rolled. He explained, “January one of every year, I throw dice to do something I’ve never done before.” Whatever number the dice added up too is the number of the new experience on the list that he tries to accomplish that year. This has lead to him painting his own collection of artwork and the writing of his first book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs.

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How to Become an Idea Machine

Excellent article from James Altucher. Here’s just some highlights:

So don’t be afraid to test, fail, test, fail, try again, repeat, improve, test, fail again, and keep improving. The way to keep improving? Keep coming up with ideas for your business and for other new businesses.

As your idea muscle improves, so will your ability to “fail quickly”. Failing quickly is a better skill than executing quickly.

You may not have a side project going on right now, but you can make money by starting one. I’ll tell you how here.

And:

– 10 things I can do differently today. Write down my entire routine from beginning to end as detailed as possible and change one thing and make it better.

– 10 Things I Learned from X. Where X is someone I’ve spoke to recently or read a book by recently. I’ve written posts on this about the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Steve Jobs, Bukowski, the Dalai Lama, Superman, Freakonomics, etc.

– A problem I have and ten ways I might try and solve it.

And:

At any given point I have about 10-20 books on my “to go” list. Books that I can just pop in and continue reading.

Every day I read at least 10% of a non-fiction book that gives me tons of new ideas, an inspirational book, a fiction book of high-quality writing, and maybe a book on games (lately I’ve been solving chess puzzles). And then I start writing.

And:

If you stick to an abundance mentality, and be grateful for the ideas that are flowing through you, then they will be infinite. Where they come from, nobody knows. But they will be infinite and lucrative for you.

So give ideas for free, and then when you meet, give more ideas. And if someone wants to pay you and your gut feels this is a good fit, then give even more ideas.

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