A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.
Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.
Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.
Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.
You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.
Beautiful book. Easy to read. With pearls on every page.
Some verbatim highlights below, which I’ve also added to my personal bible.
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Humanity has given rise to many talented artists, musicians, and architects, but how many of us have mastered the art of creating a happy moment—for ourselves and those around us?
To meditate is to look deeply and see the things that others cannot see, including the wrong views that lie at the base of our suffering. When we can break free from these wrong views, we can master the art of living happily in peace and freedom.
We too are full of so many things and yet empty of a separate self. Like the flower, we contain earth, water, air, sunlight, and warmth. We contain space and consciousness. We contain our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, education, food, and culture. The whole cosmos has come together to create the wonderful manifestation that we are. If we remove any of these “non-us” elements, we will find there is no “us” left.
The Buddha said, “Where there is a sign, there is always deception.”
It is up to each one of us to develop a strong spiritual practice body every day. Every time you take one peaceful step or one mindful breath, your spiritual practice grows. Every time you embrace a strong emotion with mindfulness and restore your clarity and calm, it grows.
Use your time wisely. Every moment it is possible to think, say, or do something that inspires hope, forgiveness, and compassion.
Just as it tastes bitter to utter words that are negative or unkind, it feels wonderful to say something full of understanding and love.
Master Lin-Chi exhorted his students to be “business-less.” It means to not be getting busy all the time, to be free from busyness. If we can be business-less, we can touch the spirit of aimlessness in our daily life, not being carried away by our desires, plans, and projects.
You are about to start an argument. But then you remember to close your eyes and contemplate impermanence. You imagine your beloved three hundred years from now. He will be nothing but ash. It may not take three hundred years; perhaps within thirty or fifty years you will both be ash.
Breathing is a kind of celebration, celebrating the fact of being alive, still alive.
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. They are the ground upon which I stand.
Later, when you turn into rain, you will have no regrets.
The art of happiness is the art of living deeply in the present moment.
When you wake up in the morning, you can choose how you want to start your day. I recommend you start the day smiling. Why smile? Because you are alive and you have twenty-four brand-new hours ahead of you. The new day is a gift of life offered to you. Celebrate it and vow to live it deeply. Vow not to waste it.
Often we are not eating our food; we are eating our worries and our projects.
A strong emotion is like a storm that comes, stays a while, and passes. Everyone must learn to survive a storm. The practice of belly breathing is essential. Every time a strong emotion like anger, fear, sadness, or despair comes up, we should go back to our breathing right away so we can take care of the storm raging within us.
As we learn to handle our suffering, we are learning to generate moments of nirvana.
Time is not money. Time is life, and time is love.
Here are my favorite highlights from Matt Mochary’s The Great CEO Within. Matt is a repeat successful founder and now an executive coach. He generously shares a wealth of immediately usable management and leadership advice, in a simple Google doc.
Highlights:
If you want the most effective and efficient decision-making process, require that anyone who wants to discuss an issue write it up, along with the desired solution, ahead of time.
Culture is the unspoken set of rules that people in a group follow when interacting with each other.
It is important to determine the company’s five or six most significant KPIs, then track them religiously and make them available for the entire company to easily see on a daily basis.
Create a document listing every possible function in the company. Next to each function, list the directly responsible individual (DRI). This is the AOR list. It serves as a routing layer for any questions and ensures that no functions fall through the cracks. Make sure everybody in the company knows how to access the list, and update it as new functions arise or as responsibilities shift.
The only way to prevent politics is to never allow lobbying to be successful, and the only way to do this is to have a written policy about as many situations as possible, particularly around compensation, raises, and promotions. Apply this policy to all team members, all the time.
For an organization to work well, three things must occur at every level of the organization.
Accountability
Coaching
Transparency
(I use these particular words only because they form an easy-to-remember acronym: ACT.)
DO NOT use a 1-way communication method (email, text, voicemail) to give feedback, unless it is 100% positive.
As the hiring manager, write out a ninety-day roadmap for the position you need to fill. This roadmap includes all the goals that the new team member will be expected to hit within the first ninety days of joining. This is critical for successful onboarding. During the interview process, share this roadmap with the candidate to make sure that she is excited about these goals.
The granting and accepting of a job offer is a very emotional moment for a person. Making a big deal out of it is a good thing. We recommend that you make a ceremony out of it. Invite the candidate to receive the offer in person. Create a ritual out of this process.
To make a sale effectively, you need to do the following three things:
Build trust
Identify the customer’s specific pain
Sell results, not features
Through a series of questions, your aim is to understand 3 things:
What are their goals?
What are the challenges preventing them from reaching those goals?
What are their ideal solutions to overcoming those obstacles?
The 5-day gap in week 2 is hard to explain. I simply forgot to track. Think I was too “heads down” working on stuff, which is good and bad?
The last 10 days of the month was spent in Finland / Iceland on vacation, but found some time to exercise / work / habit. Somewhat unusual, as more commonly, any sort of travel – especially international – takes a wrecking ball to even my most consistent routines.
A blatant example is the “do it yourself” movement, a maneuver invented by the managers of the largest and most sophisticated System of mass production in the world to make the consumer do some of the work the system is supposed to do.
Parkinson, who concluded that Administrative Systems maintain an average rate of growth of five to six percent per annum (corrected for inflation) regardless of the work to be done.
In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service not only collect our taxes, they also make us compute the tax for them
The correct orientation is: A MACHINE ACTS LIKE A SYSTEM—and if the machine is large and complex enough, it will act like a large System. We simply have our metaphors backwards.
A LARGE SYSTEM, PRODUCED BY EXPANDING THE DIMENSIONS OF A SMALLER SYSTEM, DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE THE SMALLER SYSTEM
Such cycles may be found everywhere, wherever Systems exist. In Fashion, skirts go up and down, neckties become wider or thinner. In Politics, the mood of the nation swings Left or Right. Sunspots advance or retreat. Economic indicators rise or decline. The pragmatic Systems-student neither exhorts nor deplores, but merely notes the waste of energy involved in pushing the wrong way against such trends.
SYSTEMS TEND TO MALFUNCTION CONSPICUOUSLY JUST AFTER THEIR GREATEST TRIUMPH; Toynbee explains this effect by pointing out the strong tendency to apply a previously-successful strategy to the new challenge: THE ARMY IS NOW FULLY PREPARED TO FIGHT THE PREVIOUS WAR
The power of the Naming Effect should not be underestimated. It is literally the power to bring new “realities” into existence. Because of this power the various wars on “crime,” “poverty,” “addiction,” and the like not only continue in a state of chronic failure: they are doomed to be waged forever, so long as they continue to be framed in those terms. They perpetuate that which they have named.
TO THOSE WITHIN A SYSTEM, THE OUTSIDE REALITY TENDS TO PALE AND DISAPPEAR; Examples include evangelistic religious movements, certain authoritarian governmental systems, and the executive suites of some large corporations
As we all know, sensory deprivation tends to produce hallucinations. Similarly, immersion in a System tends to produce an altered mental state that results in various bizarre malfunctions, recognizable to us but not to the persons so immersed.
DESIGNERS OF SYSTEMS TEND TO DESIGN WAYS FOR THEMSELVES TO BYPASS THE SYSTEM
Example: The Congress of the United States specifically exempts itself from the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Privacy Act.
“I never ruled Russia. Ten thousand clerks ruled Russia.” Thus spoke the Czar Alexander on his deathbed.
A COMPLEX SYSTEM DESIGNED FROM SCRATCH NEVER WORKS AND CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK. YOU HAVE TO START OVER, BEGINNING WITH A WORKING SIMPLE SYSTEM
ANY LARGE SYSTEM IS GOING TO BE OPERATING MOST OF THE TIME IN FAILURE MODE
in 1969, five days before the liftoff of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins for their trip to the moon, it was discovered, purely by accident, that Gravity had been entered into the flight path program with a minus sign; that is, as a repulsive force rather than as an attraction.
every Bug, no matter how humble, always gives us at least one important piece of information; namely, it tells us one more way in which our System can fail
CHERISH YOUR BUGS. STUDY THEM
THE MEANING OF A COMMUNICATION IS THE BEHAVIOR THAT RESULTS
IN A CLOSED SYSTEM, INFORMATION TENDS TO DECREASE AND HALLUCINATION TENDS TO INCREASE
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when the Great Powers met to decide how to punish France for a generation of aggressions against Europe, the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand pointed out that France was just one more victim of Napoleonic oppression. Indeed, France was the one who had suffered the most and therefore, he insisted, she should be treated as an equal party to the Congress.
IN ORDER TO SUCCEED IT IS NECESSARY TO KNOW HOW TO AVOID THE MOST LIKELY WAYS TO FAIL
