Category: 🌱 Life

Your beliefs and thoughts influence your mind and your life, so any expectations you have about your self, your character, your abilities, your goals, and your dreams can and often will come true if you believe they will.

• A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part as a result of a person's belief or expectation that said prediction would come true.
• In the phenomena, people tend to act the way they have been expected to making the expectations come true.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies are an example of the more general phenomenon of positive feedback loops.
• A self-fulfilling prophecy can have either negative or positive outcomes.
• Merely applying a label to someone or something can affect the perception of the person/thing and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Self-fulfilling prophecy - Wikipedia

Take a quick break every hour to evaluate what you have done and refocus on what you should do next.

• STEP 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus.
• Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour.
• When it rings, take a deep breath, look at your list and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively.
• Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour.
• Manage your day hour by hour.
• Don’t let the hours manage you.

An 18 minute plan for managing your day - Harvard Business Review

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.

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Goodreads

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

"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

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.

Ways to do what you don’t want to do - Zen Habits

Positively influence other people's lives by telling them you believe in them, you think they are a good person, they possess particular good qualities, and you expect they will perform well because they have the ability to do so.

• The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area and low expectations lead to worse.
• It is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell so much in love with the perfectly beautiful statue he created that the statue came to life.
• According to the Pygmalion effect, the targets of the expectations internalize their positive labels, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly.
• A similar process works in the opposite direction in the case of low expectations.
• The idea behind the Pygmalion effect is that increasing the leader's expectation of the follower's performance will result in better follower performance.
• Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regard to education and social class.

Pygmalion effect - Wikipedia

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.

12 Lists that help you get things done - Lifehack.org

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

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."

Nikola Tesla's Best Productivity Tricks - Lifehacker