Category: 📁 Life Tips

Think and Grow Rich is a classic motivational book. Written by Napoleon Hill and inspired by Andrew Carnegie, it was published in 1937 at the end of the Great Depression. In his introduction, Hill refers to the "Carnegie Secret", a conception which he reports is the foundation of all success and appears to be the premise of the book. Hill promises to indirectly describe this "secret" in every chapter, but never state it plainly, believing the use of the secret is only available to those who possess a "readiness" for it, a disposition Hill describes as essential to the concept itself.

Napoleon Hill talks about "The Secret" to Think & Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill - YouTube

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.

Pareto Principle - Wikipedia

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

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

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

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.

Top 5 regrets of the dying - Huffington Post

Choose to be happy with your current situation and life, as research has shown happiness may come down to your attitude and perception, not our faulty estimation of what we think we want, even big changes like getting a dream job, goal, partner, or money.

• Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want.
• Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned.

The surprising science of happiness - Dan Gilbert - YouTube

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."

Believe you can change - Aaron Swartz

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.

Occam's Razor - Wikipedia