mastery.fm – Page 16 – caffeine for the mind & spirit

Only the hits

The economics are compelling. Start a movie studio, a record label or a book publisher that only markets hits. No clunkers. No filler. Simply the hits.

Easier than it sounds.

Why doesn’t a musician go straight to a “greatest hits” record and save everyone a lot of time and hassle? Why doesn’t a salesperson only call on people who are sure to buy?

Because no one knows anything.

You won’t know if it’s a hit until after you bring it to market. Dylan recorded 50 albums. Picasso painted 10,000 paintings. VCs fund hundreds of businesses.

Do your best. Then ship.

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Clearing Out the Clutter

Darren Hardy, from The Compound Effect:

The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes you have to get out of that environment to see that dream fulfilled. It’s like planting an oak sapling in a pot. Once it becomes rootbound, its growth is limited. It needs a great space to become a mighty oak. So do you.

When I talk about your environment, I’m not just referring to where you live. I’m referring to whatever surrounds you. Creating a positive environment to support your success means clearing out all the clutter in your life. Not just the physical clutter that makes it hard for you to work productively and efficiently (although that’s important too!), but also the psychic clutter of whatever around you isn’t working, whatever’s broken, whatever makes you cringe.

Each and every incomplete thing in your life exerts a draining force on you, sucking the energy of accomplishment and success out of you as surely as a vampire stealing your blood. Every incomplete promise, commitment, and agreement saps your strength because it blocks your momentum and inhibits your ability to move forward. Incomplete tasks keep calling you back to the past to take care of them. So think about what you can complete today.

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Saying no to everything else

Derek Sivers:

Steven Pressfield called himself an author for years, but he’d never actually finished a book. Eventually, the psychological pain of not finishing kept building until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He decided to finally beat the devil he calls “The Resistance”.

He created a situation with no escape. He rented a cabin, brought his typewriter, and shut off all other options.

He said,

“I didn’t talk to anybody during that year… I didn’t hang out. I just worked. I had a book in mind and I had decided I would finish it or kill myself. I could not run away again, or let people down again, or let myself down again. This was it, do or die.”

After a difficult year of wrestling with those inner demons and avoiding all temptations, he did it. He finished his first book. It wasn’t a success, but it didn’t matter. He had finally beat The Resistance. He went on to write many successful novels.

He told this story in the great book Turning Pro, the third in his series of little books about the creative struggle, including The War of Art and Do the Work. Read all three.

“Hell yeah or no” is a filter you can use to decide what’s worth doing. But this is simpler and more serious. This is a decision to stop deciding. It’s one decision, in advance, that the answer to all future distractions is “no” until you finish what you started. It’s saying yes to one thing, and no to absolutely everything else.

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Trust Your Own Intelligence

Steve Pavlina:

In the long run, it’s more important to learn to trust your own intelligence than it is to be right. At first your self-trust may be misplaced. You may very well find that you make a lot of dumb decisions by trusting yourself ahead of people who seem to know more. But through this process of failure, you’ll develop your intellectual capacity and expand your awareness, and soon your self-trust will be justified, and you’ll begin making some really empowering decisions that actually generate results.

The reason for self-trust becomes clear when you consider the alternative, which is never to fully trust yourself. You can’t really behave intelligently if you can’t trust your own decisions and act on them. Imagine what would happen if your computer was always doubtful about its computations, so it figured it was best not to share the results with you for fear of being wrong. It would be useless. And it’s fair to say that a human being who cannot trust him/herself is somewhat useless, in the sense that s/he is living far below his/her potential. But in that case, the most likely outcome is that this person will end up serving whatever goals social conditioning imparts. In the USA this means getting a job, going into debt, and gaining weight, among other things.

It’s fine to put more faith in your scuba instructor when you know nothing about scuba. That isn’t a self-trust issue. Self-trust comes into play when you make the big decisions of your life, such as those involving your career, your choice of mate, your spiritual beliefs, and how you will live. It isn’t intelligent to let your parents, your spouse, or your social conditioning make these decisions for you. I guarantee that if someone else makes these decisions on your behalf, your results in life will be nothing but a pale shadow of your true potential.

Trust your own intelligence, even when it doesn’t seem warranted to do so.

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Reminder • Routine • Reward

Ari Yeganeh:

For about a year I struggled to make my exercise habits stick. I found it a chore to wake up early and was tired after work so I never got around to it. I always had an excuse for not working out: “I’m tired today”, “I have too many things on”, “It’s Friday, give me a break”

That was until I came across a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The book made it perfectly clear to me why I couldn’t stick to my exercise habit. This is how it broke down the components of any habit:

Reminder (cue) – the trigger that initiates the behavior

Routine – the behavior itself; the action you take

Reward – the benefit you gain from doing the behavior

All I had so far was the exercise routine, not the reminder or reward.

I started with setting a reminder. I found phone reminders naggy and annoying. That didn’t work. Instead I looked at my day and wrote down actions I took without fail that I could use as reminders: waking up, brushing teeth, eating, getting dressed and so on…

The reminder that was the most powerful for me was hunger. I found if I got really hungry I would be motivated to work out (or do anything) just so I can eat. I liked food too much. More than the pain of an intense workout.

And thanks to this new discovery my new habit started to stick. I started consistently exercising every other day. I had all the components of a habit: reminder (hunger), routine (workout) and reward (food).

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Wealth Mindset

CNBC interview with Jen Sincero:

It was around this time when she “just finally woke up,” she writes, and made the decision to “get over my fear and loathing of money and figure out how to make some.”

The first thing she changed was her mindset.

If you want to build wealth, you have to start by telling yourself it’s OK, Sincero says: “One of the biggest obstacles to making lots of money is not a lack of good ideas or opportunities or time, or that we’re too slovenly or stupid. It’s that we refuse to give ourselves permission to become rich.”

After all, it can feel awkward to admit that you have that ambition — but it’s necessary.

You have to agree “to get really, really, really uncomfortable. Over and over again,” writes Sincero. “You must not only admit to desiring, and commit to creating, wealth but, most important, you must allow yourself to do so.”

And:

“Back in the day, I realized that one of the things I said all the time was, ‘I can’t afford it.’ That was sort of my mantra,” Sincero tells Make It. She didn’t start building wealth until she changed her mantra to “money flows to me easily and freely.”

“So every time I wanted to say, ‘I can’t afford it,’ I forced myself to say, ‘Money flows to me easily and freely,’ which seemed a little bit bananas,” she admits. “But what it did was it made me feel better — it was way more fun to say that than ‘I can’t afford it.’ And, it also forced me to shift my focus to be like, ‘OK, are there ways that money does flow to me easily and freely?’”

Changing her modes of thinking helped her change her reality, she says: “Once you shift your focus off of proving that, ‘I can’t afford it because I am Jen Sincero and I am broke,’ to proving that my money flows to me easily and freely, you open yourself up to the ways to make the new mantra true.”

And:

“Get into the emotional state of what it would feel like when you do make that money and get really excited about it and make it a non-negotiable goal that you make that money.”

And, she says, you have to commit: “When you really want to change something about your life, you’ve got to go about it with this hell-bent-for-glory attitude. You just can’t kind of, sort of want to make some more money. If you’re serious about it, you’ve got to do the work, get very specific about your goals and get in the emotional state to achieve them.”

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Walk in One Direction

Andy Shaw:

When you live your life knowing that deciding to walk in just one direction will eventually have a far greater result than constantly changing directions, then you can really start to make a difference.

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Happy Memories

Abraham-Hicks:

Happy memories do it. Pleasant imageries do it. Noticing lovely things where you stand do it. Taking in the splendor of one of these magnificent chandeliers and acknowledging the spectacle. The current that flows through it… and the glass that is formed… and the abundance of the glass… and someone’s creative design… and someone’s willingness and ability to put it there.

In other words, there’s so much to behold and appreciate just on something as insignificant in the scope of your life as that chandelier.

And yet nothing could put you in a better place of allowing your lover or allowing your perfect body weight or allowing anything that you want than beholding and achieving the feeling of appreciation in doing it, you see.

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The Universe as a Hologram

Michael Talbot:

In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

And:

As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion. We are really “receivers” floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

On health:

What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body. Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because, in the holographic domain of thought, images are ultimately as real as “reality”.

And:

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space … would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously.

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Focus

Michael Simmons:

When Bill Gates first met Warren Buffett, their host, Gates’ mother, asked everyone around the table to share the single most important factor to their success. Gates and Buffett both gave the same one-word answer: “Focus.”

Rainer Zitelmann:

In the words of Bill Gates Jr.’s college roommate, Andy Braiterman, “Bill had a monomaniacal quality […] He would focus on something and really stick with it. He had a determination to master whatever it was he was doing.” One of his ex-girlfriends described him as being extremely focused and intolerant of distractions. He didn’t own a television and had even dismantled his car radio. She elaborates: “In the end, it was difficult to sustain a relationship with someone who could boast a ‘seven-hour’ turnaround—meaning that from the time he left Microsoft to the time he returned in the morning was a mere seven hours.”

And:

Warren Buffett, too, had focused on a single goal for decades. According to his biographer, Alice Schroeder, even as a child, his dream was to become rich and he had devoured a book on One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000. “Opportunity knocks,” the reader is told on the very first page of Buffett’s favorite read. “Never in the history of the United States has the time been so favorable for a man with small capital to start his own business as it is today.”

When he was 11 years old, Buffett announced that he would be a millionaire by the time he was 35. At 16, he had already saved up $5,000 from various enterprises. In today’s currency, that money would be worth about $60,000—not bad for a 16-year-old. His prediction was only off by five years. He made his first million by the time he was 30.

And:

Recent scientific research has shown that most successful musicians and athletes owe their extraordinary success not to talent as was previously thought, but to a lifetime of dedicated practice or training from early childhood. Many people who haven’t managed to achieve the success they were hoping for blame their bad luck, lack of talent or lack of connections. The truth is that some people are more successful than others mainly because they are better at focusing their mental resources.

Thomas Carlyle:

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.

Bruce Lee:

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

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