Category: 🌱 Life

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.

Feeling determined to change - Zen Habits

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.

Advice for people in their early 20s - Zen Habits

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.

How to stay positive: 11 Smart habits - Positivity Blog

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