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Write down a list of your goals and dreams, because writing thoughts and ideas down is the first step to making them come to life.
- A list of your short and long-term goals can be a great motivator, as well as a trigger list to help generate new projects.
- I also like to have a list of areas of focus, the different roles that I play, each of which comes with a different set of tasks and goals.
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." - Bruce Lee
- If you want to improve your life then it’s tempting to want to add more.
- One problem with this may be that you don’t really have the time or energy to do more though.
- And so your efforts to improve become short-lived.
- Adding more and more just creates more stress and anxiety.
- Removing clutter and activities, tasks and thoughts that are not so important frees up time and energy for you to do more of what you really want to do.
- And as the clutter in your outer world decreases the clutter in your inner world also has a tendency to decrease.
- This has the added benefit of making it easier to actually enjoy whatever you are doing even more while you are doing it.
Bruce Lee’s top 7 fundamentals for getting your life in shape - Positivity Blog
Live your life by being true to yourself and following your dreams and passions, in order to make your life and the lives of others better and happier, instead of only doing things that other people want or expect you to do.
- I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all.
- When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.
- Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
- It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way.
- From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late.
- Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.
Have a growth mindset by believing that you can grow, learn new things, improve your skills and knowledge, and realizing that temporary and recurring failure are a necessary part of learning and growing.
- Dweck, like many adults, had learned to hide her frustration and anger, to politely say "I'm not sure I want to play this anymore" instead of knocking over the board.
- She figured the successful kids would be the same - they’d have tactics for coping with failure instead of getting beaten down by it.
- But what she found was radically different.
- The successful kids didn’t just live with failure, they loved it!
- When the going got tough, they didn’t start blaming themselves; they licked their lips and said "I love a challenge."
- They’d say stuff like "The harder it gets the harder I need to try."
Remember everyone is emotional and people are all going through the ups and downs of life, so try not to take it personally when people get angry, and try to comfort or support others when they are in a bad mood.
- Perhaps this is an exaggeration.
- But the core of the message is that people tend to have stronger feelings about something than they let on.
- People who regularly have outbursts of anger, depression or flamboyant enthusiasm are generally frowned upon in most cultures.
- This especially applies to men (for women trying to figure us out).
- The application of this rule is to not assume everything is fine just because someone isn’t having a nervous breakdown.
- We all have our individual problems, angst and upsets that are normally contained.
Give people sincere praise about something they have done well or that you appreciate about them before giving them negative feedback or an idea for something they could change or do differently.
- "Sandwich every bit of criticism between two heavy layers of praise."
- One well known strategy for feedback is the “criticism sandwich,” popularized by the above quote from cosmetics maven Mary Kay Ash.
- In the sandwich, you begin with praise, address the problem, and follow up with more praise.
- In fact, the more of the conversation you can frame positively, the more likely your recipient is to be in the right frame of mind to make the change you’re looking for.
How to Give and Receive Feedback at Work: The Psychology of Criticism - Buffer
Spend some time in solitude to think about and create ideas, make plans or goals, and come up with solutions to solve your problems.
- Like many inventors and creative types, Nikola Tesla was an advocate for solitude when creating and working.
- Most famously, he's quoted as saying "The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude.
- No big laboratory is needed in which to think.
- Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.
- Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born."
Exercise every day because it improves your body, your mind, and makes you happier and more productive on the day in which you exercise.
- A recent study from Penn State university shed some light on the matter and the results are more than surprising.
- They found that to be more productive and happier on a given work day, it doesn’t matter so much, if you work-out regularly, if you haven’t worked out on that particular day.
- Think about starting small and then start even smaller: Here is a little secret.
- When I first started exercising, I did it with 5 minutes per day, 3 times a week.
- Can you imagine that? 5 minutes of timed exercise, 3 times a week?
- That’s nothing you might be thinking.
- And you are right, because the task is so easy and anyone can succeed with it, you can really start to make a habit out of it.
- Try no more than 5 or 10 minutes if you are getting started.
What happens to our brains when we exercise and how it makes us happier - Buffer
Cultivate a positive environment by reading and listening to more positive information and entertainment sources, and choosing to spend time around positive people.
- Who you choose to spend your time with and the input you get from further away like the TV, the internet and magazines will have a huge effect on your outlook.
- To be able to stay positive it is essential to have influences in your life that support you and lift you up instead of dragging you down.
- So carefully consider what you let into your mind.
Get started by doing something for just a couple of minutes, because just getting started can often be the hardest part of many habits, tasks, or things you want to work on or get done.
- If you have to write something, just write a sentence.
- Then get up, get some water, stretch.
- Pat yourself on the back for getting started!
- Now do a little more: write a few more sentences.
- Get up, take a mental break (don’t go to another website), do a few pushups.
- Go back, do a bit more.
- Pretty soon, you’re in the flow of it.
Keep a dated list of tasks and projects you have completed and random things you have done, because looking back on your achievements or even little events from your life may provide a sense of accomplishment and purpose.
- There's something to be said for seeing how much you've gotten done at the end of the day.
- You know how satisfying it is to cross out items on your to do list, and then look back at the list to see everything you completed?
- A "done" list, or "anti-to-do list" as Marc Andreessen calls it, works in a similar fashion: you simply take note of each thing you get done during the day.
- Start out with the date and just list your "done" items underneath.
- Not only will this help you review your productivity at the end of each day and make you feel better about what you got done, but it can be really useful to keep around as a work log.
- You might want to look back in weeks or months to come to see what you were working on or how long a project took to complete.
Clever uses for plain text files that can increase your productivity - Lifehacker
Think positively and change your thoughts or mindset to a new way of thinking about something in order to improve your wellbeing and get things done.
- You are what you think.
- You cannot think negatively and have unlimited success.
- If you think negatively about business and finances [or leisure and relationships, or whatever else you want to change or improve in your life], your subjective experience will be a lack of both, whether or not that is true in reality.
- Discipline your mind towards the goals of what you want your productivity to look like and start putting the effort in right now to get there.
- Keep in mind that suffering over your own suffering doesn't work.
- Know the negative thought patterns you hold which require change and be deliberate in changing them.
8 Ways to radically increase your productivity - The Globe And Mail
Create daily habits and practices to improve your wellbeing, be happier, achieve goals, and make your dreams come true.
- The only way you can make something stick is to create a habit through daily practice.
- So if you want to exercise, set up 10 minutes every day, at the same time of day, when you’re going to do your yoga or pushups or jogging/walking.
- Put it on the calendar, and make it an unmissable appointment.
Find and meet up with people who are doing things that you are interested in doing.
- Find people online doing interesting things, meet up with them in real life.
- Find people who are passionate, who are building things, who are pushing themselves, who dream big, who are mindful and joyful and healthy and friendly and shy and gregarious and adventurous and curious.
- Befriend them. Be there for them. Be helpful. Make them laugh.
- These are your people.
Are we friends? Do you care? Let it go, let it go, let it go. - Enlightened TV Show
Are we connected?
What do you say about me?
Was I mean to you?
Were you to me?What do you think of me? Deep down?
Am I ridiculous? Or sweet? Or decent?
Are we friends? Do you care?
Let it go, let it go, let it go.
Each technology we create is transforming society and we need to be careful about considering if and when different technologies may be affecting us either negatively or positively.
- A report commissioned by the National Science Foundation and made public today speculates that by the end of this century electronic information technology will have transformed American home, business, manufacturing, school, family and political life.
- The report warned that the new technology would raise difficult issues of privacy and control that will have to be addressed soon to ''maximize its benefits and minimize its threats to society.''
- There will be a shift away from conventional workplace and school socialization. Friends, peer groups and alliances will be determined electronically, creating classes of people based on interests and skills rather than age and social class.
Study Says Technology Could Transform Society - NY Times (1982)
The solution or explanation with the fewest amount of steps or assumptions should often be preferred in order to simplify the solution down to its essential factor or factors.
- In philosophy, Occam's razor (also spelled Ockham's razor or Ocham's razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.
- It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae).
- Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", which translates as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity", although Occam never used these exact words.
- Popularly, the principle is sometimes inaccurately paraphrased as "The simplest explanation is usually the best one."
- This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should prefer the one that requires the fewest assumptions and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions.
80% of the result comes from 20% of your time, work, or activities, so realize that 80% could be good enough for many tasks or goals by focusing on the essential 20% of your habits and activities.
- This is one of the best ways to make better use of your time.
- The 80/20 rule - also known as The Pareto Principle - basically says that 80 percent of the value you will receive will come from 20 percent of your activities.
- So a lot of what you do is probably not as useful or even necessary to do as you may think.
- You can just drop - or vastly decrease the time you spend on - a whole bunch of things.
16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me In School - Positivity Blog
80% of the results will often come from 20% of the causes, so focus on finding the vital few inputs or actions that will provide the most benefit or effect.
- The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few").
- Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.
- Management consultant Joseph M. Juran developed the concept in the context of quality control and improvement after reading the works of Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto, who wrote about the 80/20 connection while teaching at the University of Lausanne.
- In his first work, Cours d'économie politique, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in the Kingdom of Italy was owned by 20% of the population.
Give honest and sincere appreciation. - Dale Carnegie
- Lincoln once began a letter saying: "Everybody likes a compliment."
- William James said: "The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
- He didn't speak, mind you, of the "wish" or the "desire" or the "longing" to be appreciated.
- He said the "craving" to be appreciated.
- Let's try to figure out the other person's good points.
- Then forget flattery. Give honest, sincere appreciation.
"Don't criticize, condemn, or complain." - Dale Carnegie
- Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.
- Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
- Instead of condemning people, let's try to understand them.
- Let's try to figure out why they do what they do.
- That's a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.
- "To know all is to forgive all."