My Note
My highlights
302 highlights from Kindle. These are the lines I stopped at.
Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.
Some skills are more important than others, and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting. Develop a habit of simplifying. Learn how to make small talk with strangers, and learn how to avoid being an asshole. If you get that stuff right—and almost anyone can—you will be hard to stop.
helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine.
Recapping the happiness formula: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already
Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life.
But a smarter approach is to take care of yourself first and use that success as leverage to get everything else you need.
If the list of five elements for happiness seems incomplete, that’s intentional. I know you might also want sex, a soul mate, fame, recognition, a feeling of importance, career success, and lots more. My contention is that your five-pronged pursuit of happiness will act as a magnet for the other components of happiness you need. When you’re fit, happy, and full of energy, people are far more likely to have sex with you, be your friend, and hire you, sometimes all in the same day.
imagination, diet, exercise, and sleep—my pick for the most important is exercise. If exercise sounds like a lot of work, wait for my chapter on the easiest way to become active.
Exercise also helps you sleep better, so that’s a double benefit.4 Of the big five factors in happiness—flexible schedule,
No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day.
I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.
The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination.
As a cartoonist, my drawing skills have slowly improved over most of my career, and that is a source of happiness for me. If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.
When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills.
Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that you are on the right track.
The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year.
We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad.
A person who is worth two billion dollars will feel sad if he suddenly loses one billion because he’s moving in the wrong direction, even if the change has no impact on his ability to buy what he wants.
Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term. It’s something you want to work toward. You won’t all become work-at-home cartoonists, but you can certainly find a boss who values your productivity over your attendance.
In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision.
pleasure simply by having control over when I do it.
I can control the timing of it on this particular day, it doesn’t feel like work.
A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
it’s easier to find a job with flexible hours.
It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources.
For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want.
You can’t always quickly fix whatever is wrong in your environment, and you can’t prevent negative thoughts from drifting into your head. But you can easily control your body chemistry through lifestyle, and that in turn will cause your thoughts to turn positive, while making the bumps in your path feel less important.
happiness isn’t as dependent on your circumstances as you might think.
My definition of happiness is that it’s a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind.
Happiness, like gardening, only seems simple.
Pursuing happiness without understanding the mechanisms behind it is like planting a garden without knowing the basics of fertilization, pest control, watering, and frost. It’s easy to pop a seed in the ground, but it takes a deeper understanding of the gardening arts to grow something wonderful.
A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life.
The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness.
want. Simply find the people who most represent what you would like to become and spend as much time with them as you can without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good habits and good energy will rub off on you.
The programming interface is your location. To change yourself, part of the solution might involve spending more time with the people who represent the change you seek.
Sometimes the people around us give us information we need, or encouragement, or contacts, or even useful criticism. We can’t always know the mechanism by which others change our future actions, but it’s pretty clear it happens, and it’s important.
Humans are social animals. There are probably dozens of ways we absorb energy, inspiration, skills, and character traits from those around us. Sometimes we learn by example. Sometimes success appears more approachable and ordinary because we see normal people achieve it, and perhaps that encourages us to pursue schemes with higher payoffs.
The best he could offer was his observation that life had patterns and this was one of them: You become like the people around you.
If your gut feeling (intuition) disagrees with the experts, take that seriously. You might be experiencing some pattern recognition that you can’t yet verbalize.
Dealing with experts is always tricky. Are they honest? Are they competent? How often are they right? My observation and best guess is that experts are right about 98 percent of the time on the easy stuff but only right 50 percent of the time on anything that is unusually complicated, mysterious, or even new.
I learned that sometimes experts get it wrong on the first try.
All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.
I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over.
I did something similar. I tried a lot of different ventures, stayed optimistic, put in the energy, prepared myself by learning as much as I could, and stayed in the game long enough for luck to find me.
I was like a hunter who picks his forest location intelligently and waits in his blind for a buck to stroll by.
It wasn’t a complete accident that luck found me; I put myself in a position where luck was more likely to happen.
When my timing has been off, no amount of hard work or talent has mattered.
The biggest component of luck is timing. When the universe and I have been on a compatible schedule—entirely by chance—things have worked out swimmingly.
you don’t need to know why something works to take advantage of it.
The details of affirmations probably don’t matter much because the process is about improving your focus, not summoning magic.
Affirmations are simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want to achieve while imagining the outcome you want.
If you see humor as an optional form of entertainment, you’re missing some of its biggest benefits: People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don’t. It’s human nature to want to spend time with people who can appreciate a good laugh or, better yet, cause one.
There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it.
I’m talking about the extra energy and vitality that good health brings.
The next pattern I’ve noticed is exercise. Good health is a baseline requirement for success.
Generally speaking, the people who have the right kind of education have almost no risk of unemployment.
Then there’s education. Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do,
improve your psychological bravery but say no to anything that has a strong chance of killing you.
A lack of fear of embarrassment is what allows one to be proactive. It’s what makes a person take on challenges that others write off as too risky. It’s what makes you take the first step before you know what the second step is. I’m not a fan of physical risks, but if you can’t handle the risk of embarrassment, rejection, and failure, you need to learn how, and studies suggest that is indeed a learnable skill.
One of my systems involves continually looking for patterns in life.
The quickest fix is simply to substitute silence where you once had “ums” and “uhs.”
When you’re trying to convey a fake sense of confidence—which is often handy—you need to tell yourself you’re acting. Simply speak the way you imagine a confident person would speak and you’ll nail it on the first try.
Keep in mind that I was poorly dressed, five feet eight inches tall, and prematurely balding in my twenties. I certainly didn’t look like CEO material, and while I’d like to think my interior brilliance sometimes shined through, I doubt that was the case. I think my fake professional voice and body language were at least half of the reason I was seen as having management potential.
Throughout my corporate years I used a serious-sounding tone of voice whenever I was in “professional” mode. I was literally acting, but it didn’t feel disingenuous because the business world is a lot like theater.
But research shows that voice quality is far more important to your overall health and happiness
You don’t need to be your own tech support for the hard stuff, but you also don’t want to be the only person in the room who doesn’t understand the topic.
manipulating coworkers to do better work is usually good for everyone.
In some cases you have a moral obligation to be manipulative if you know it will create a good result for all involved.
A little bit of irrationality is a powerful thing.
The way fake insanity works in a negotiation is that you assign a greater value to some element of a deal than an objective observer would consider reasonable.
In any kind of negotiation, the worst thing you can do is act reasonable.
Don’t confuse your artificial sense of decisiveness with a need to be right all of the time. Life is messy and you’re going to be right only sometimes. You’ll do everyone in your life a favor by acting decisively, though, even if you have doubts on the inside.
If you can deliver an image of decisiveness, no matter how disingenuous, others will see it as leadership.
The right approach to sharing a secret is to start small. Make sure the small secrets stay secret before you try anything riskier.
Research shows that people will automatically label you a friend if you share a secret.
Was it the surprise, the thoughtfulness, or how helpful the favor or gift was? Be specific.
No matter how you deliver a thank-you, make sure it includes a little detail of what makes you thankful.
Is There Anything You Can Do for Me?
No one likes to be proven wrong, but most people will be happy to “clarify,” even if the clarification is a complete reversal of an earlier position. It just feels different when you call something a clarification.
A more effective way to approach a dangerous social or business situation is sideways, by asking a question that starts with “I just wanted to clarify . .
In a similar vein, another good antipersuasion technique is to say you have a rule.
Instead, say something like “I don’t do food festivals.” And if anyone asks why, say, “I’m just not interested.” Some of these persuasive sentences work well in tandem.
There’s no argument against a lack of interest.
I’ve found that the most effective way to stop people from trying to persuade me is to say, “I’m not interested.”
There is an ethical consideration, of course. You don’t want to persuade people to do things that are not in their best interest. And it might feel creepy and manipulative if you find yourself too skilled at persuasion.
A good starting point in learning the art of persuasion is to go to your preferred online bookstore and search for “persuasion.”
No matter your calling in life, you’ll spend a great deal of time trying to persuade people to do one thing or another.
The correct term for an unproven and untested explanation is “hypothesis.”
a theory is a scientific explanation of reality that is so well tested that it is as good as a fact.
The single most important grammar rule to master is when to use “I” and when to use “me.”
If you get “were”/“was” grammar wrong, it’s a red flag to people who know the difference.
It’s an old cliché that business gets done on the golf course. I’m new to the game, but as far as I can tell, no one ever talks business on a golf course. The thing that golf does well is that it allows males, especially, to bond. Men bond with other men through common activities.
Success builds confidence and confidence suppresses shyness.
Try putting yourself in situations that will surely embarrass you if things go wrong, or maybe even if they don’t. Like any other skill, suppressing shyness takes practice. The more you put yourself in potentially embarrassing situations, the easier they all become.
I also find it helpful to remind myself that every human is a mess on the inside. It’s easy to assume the good-looking and well-spoken person in front of you has it all together and is therefore your superior. The reality is that everyone is a basket case on the inside.
People people enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things. They get bored in a second when the conversation turns to things.
You should also try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people. Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics.
The single best tip for avoiding shyness involves harnessing the power of acting interested in other people.
First, I remember that most people feel awkward in social situations at least some of the time. Chances are that the person you are talking to is feeling just as shy.
Acting like someone else gets you out of that way of thinking. When I fake my way past my natural shyness, I like to imagine a specific confident person I know well.
I credit one of my college friends with teaching me the secret of overcoming shyness by imagining you are acting instead of interacting. And by that I mean literally acting.
Medical stories: If you are normal, or anywhere near it, you will talk too much about your health issues no matter how persuasively I tell you that it’s a bad idea.
Dreams: No one cares about the details of your dream. If you must discuss your dreams,
Television show plots: Talking about TV shows that you and your conversation partner both enjoy can be fun and entertaining.
Food: People don’t care how good your meal was unless they plan to eat at the same place soon.
There is one topic that people care more about than any other: themselves.
Try to keep your setup to one sentence, two at most.
There’s only one important rule for a story setup: Keep it brief.
The most important key to good storytelling is preparation. You don’t want to figure out your story as you tell it.
I think everyone should learn how to tell a funny story. I don’t think people realize that storytelling is a learnable skill and not a genetic gift.
Try to get in the habit of asking yourself how you can turn your interesting experiences into story form.
If you’re unattractive—and this is my area of expertise—your conversation skills will be especially important.
If you’re physically attractive, it probably isn’t a good idea to talk too much. People are predisposed to liking attractive people. Talking can only make things worse. If you’re attractive, be sure you’ve created a solid connection before discussing your hobby of collecting baby animal skulls or whatever the hell you’re into. The less you say, the better, at least in the early stages of getting to know someone.
So how do you get a stranger to like you? It’s simple, actually. It starts by smiling and keeping your body language open. After that, just ask questions and listen as if you cared, all the while looking for common interests. Everyone likes to talk about his or her own life, and everyone appreciates a sympathetic listener. Eventually, if you discover some common interests, you’ll feel a connection without any effort.
Your job as a conversationalist is to keep asking questions and keep looking for something you have in common with the stranger, or something that interests you enough to wade into the topic.
All you do is introduce yourself and ask questions until you find a point of mutual interest.
Few people are skilled conversationalists. Most people are just talking, which is not the same thing.
I’m only trying to convince you of the importance of design and the ease with which you can pick up the main idea. Learn just a few design tricks and people will think you’re smarter without knowing exactly why.
design is actually rules based. One need not have an “eye” for design; knowing the rules is good enough for civilians.
learn enough about accounting and spreadsheets that you understand the basics.
No one with accounting skill would get involved with a business model that can’t work on paper.
In particular it’s helpful to be able to create your own cash-flow projection on a spreadsheet and feel some confidence that you understand the tax impacts and the so-called time value of money.
But a basic understanding of accounting is necessary to be a fully effective adult in a modern society, even if you never do any actual accounting on your own.
Clean writing makes a writer seem smarter and it makes the writer’s arguments more persuasive.
Business writing also teaches that brains are wired to better understand concepts that are presented in a certain order.
As it turns out, business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise.
I signed up for a company-sponsored class in business writing. This was part of my larger strategy of learning as much as I could about whatever might someday be useful while my employer was willing to foot the bill.
Consider it a lifelong learning process. You’ll be glad you did. Over time it starts to feel like a superpower that allows you to understand things that confuse and confound those around you.
working knowledge of psychology is essential to your success—both personally and professionally.
Rational behavior is especially useless in any situation that is too complex for a human to grasp.
If Steve Jobs had seen people as rational beings, he might have followed a path similar to Dell, selling highly capable machines at the lowest possible price.
Apple owes much of its success to Steve Jobs’s understanding that the way a product makes users feel trumps most other considerations, including price.
If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.
A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments.
You’re wasting your time if you try to make someone see reason when reason is not influencing the decision. If you’ve ever had a frustrating political debate with your friend who refuses to see the logic in your argument, you know what I mean. But keep in mind that the friend sees you exactly the same way.
It is tremendously useful to know when people are using reason and when they are rationalizing the irrational.
If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills.
You’ve heard the old saying that knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power. No matter what you’re doing or how well you’re doing it, you can benefit from a deeper understanding of how the mind interprets its world using only the clues that somehow find a way into your brain through the holes in your skull.
And I would go so far as to say that anything on the list that you don’t understand might cost you money in the future.
On a scale of one to ten, the importance of understanding psychology is a solid ten.
Below is Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases.1 It looks like a lot to know, but you have your entire life to acquire the knowledge. Think of it as a system in which you learn a bit every year.
If there’s something on this list that you’re not familiar with, you’re vulnerable to deception. In some cases, you’re missing opportunities to make your product and yourself more attractive to others.
Success in anything usually means doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t,
Quality is not an independent force in the universe; it depends on what you choose as your frame of reference.
When I look at the list of my personal failures and successes, one of the things that stand out is psychology. When I got the psychology right, either by accident or by cleverness, things worked out better. When I was blind to the psychology, things went badly.
Don’t assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.
Another thing I learned from my Dale Carnegie experience is that we don’t always have an accurate view of our own potential.
Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.
If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.
The future is thoroughly unpredictable when it comes to your profession and your personal life ten years out. The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job. This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.
If you find yourself in a state of continual failure in your personal or business life, you might be blaming it on fate or karma or animal spirits or some other form of magic when the answer is simple math. There’s usually a pattern, but it might be subtle. Don’t stop looking just because you don’t see the pattern in the first seven years.
The idea I’m promoting here is that it helps to see the world as math and not magic.
while we all think we know the odds in life, there’s a good chance you have some blind spots. Finding those blind spots is a big deal.
You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from a game with low odds of success to a game with better odds.
Don’t think of the news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.
I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic.
Personally, I try to avoid stories involving tragic events and concentrate on the more hopeful topics in science, technology, and business.
A smarter approach is to think of learning as a system in which you continually expose yourself to new topics, primarily the ones you find interesting.
The Knowledge Formula: The More You Know, the More You Can Know
Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.
Another huge advantage of learning as much as you can in different fields is that the more concepts you understand, the easier it is to learn new ones.
I was a learning machine. If I thought something might someday be useful, I tried to grasp at least the basics. In my cartooning career I’ve used almost every skill I learned in the business world.
My sixteen years in corporate America added half a dozen other useful skills to the mix as well.
Recapping my skill set: I have poor art skills, mediocre business skills, good but not great writing talent, and an early knowledge of the Internet. And I have a good but not great sense of humor. I’m like one big mediocre soup. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.
My combined mediocre skills are worth far more than the sum of the parts. If you think extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that’s just one approach, and probably the hardest. When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.
When you accept without necessarily believing that each new skill doubles your odds of success, you effectively hack (trick) your brain to be more proactive in your pursuit of success.
What matters is that the formula steers your behavior in the right direction. As is often the case, simplicity trumps accuracy.
Each Unnecessary Word = $100
When writing a résumé, a handy trick you’ll learn from experts is to ask yourself if there are any words in your first draft that you would be willing to remove for one hundred dollars each.
Sometimes an entirely inaccurate formula is a handy way to move you in the right direction if it offers the benefit of simplicity.
if you think of each skill in terms of doubling your chances of success, it will steer your actions more effectively than if you assume the benefit of learning a new skill will get lost in the rounding.
When I say each skill you acquire will double your odds of success, that’s a useful simplification.
Successwise, you’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one.
Good + Good > Excellent
Notice I didn’t say anything about the level of proficiency you need to achieve for each skill. I didn’t mention anything about excellence or being world-class. The idea is that you can raise your market value by being merely good—not extraordinary—at more than one skill.
When I speak to young people on the topic of success, as I often do, I tell them there’s a formula for it. You can manipulate your odds of success by how you choose to fill out the variables in the formula. The formula, roughly speaking, is that every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.
Practicing is not living. But when you build your skills through an ever-changing sequence of experiences, you’re alive.
The first filter in deciding where to spend your time is an honest assessment of your ability to practice. If you’re not a natural “practicer,” don’t waste time pursuing a strategy that requires it. You know you won’t be a concert pianist or a point guard in the NBA. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’re not doomed to mediocrity. You simply need to pick a life strategy that rewards novelty seeking more than mindless repetition.
Most natural inclinations have some sort of economic value if you channel them right.
There’s no denying the importance of practice. The hard part is figuring out what to practice.
If the first commercial version of your work excites no one to action, it’s time to move on to something different. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars. If your work inspires some excitement and some action from customers, get ready to chew through some walls. You might have something worth fighting for.
One of the best ways to detect the x factor is to watch what customers do about your idea or product, not what they say. People tend to say what they think you want to hear or what they think will cause the least pain. What people do is far more honest.
Quality is one of the luxuries you can afford when the marketplace is spraying money in your direction and you have time to tinker.
What you’re looking for is an unusually strong reaction from a subset of the public, even if the majority hates it.
But the thing that predicted Dilbert’s success in year one is that it quickly gained a small but enthusiastic following.
Again, the quality didn’t predict success. The better predictor is that The Simpsons was an immediate hit despite its surface quality.
The predictor is that customers were clamoring for the bad versions of the product before the good versions were even invented. It’s as if a future success left bread crumbs that were visible in the present.
Small successes can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.
Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.
That approach might conflict with the advice you’ve heard all your life—that sticking with something, no matter the obstacles, is important to success. Indeed, most successful people had to chew through a wall at some point. Overcoming obstacles is normally an unavoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit. Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.
The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.
Childhood obsessions and tolerance for risk are only rough guides to talent at best. As you grow and acquire more talents, your potential paths to success multiply quickly.
Where there is a tolerance for risk, there is often talent.
People generally accept outsized risk only when they expect big payoffs.
I was willing to take a significant personal risk for my so-called art, and this was in sharp contrast to my otherwise risk-averse lifestyle.
Another clue to talent involves tolerance for risk.
Childhood compulsions aren’t a guarantee of future talent. But my unscientific observation is that people are born wired for certain preferences.
One helpful rule of thumb for knowing where you might have a little extra talent is to consider what you were obsessively doing before you were ten years old. There’s a strong connection between what interests you and what you’re good at. People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.
All I needed to do was overprice myself and see what happened. As simple as that sounds in retrospect, I doubt I would have taken that path on my own. I think I would have politely declined the invitation.
No matter how you explain the perception, it leaves room for hope, and hope has a lot of practical utility.
Obviously there was some acting involved, but we are designed to become in reality however we act. We fake it until it becomes real.
But I think you’ve seen examples in your life in which a person changes dramatically upon becoming a member of a group or getting a promotion or anything that redefines a person.
Seekers obviously find more stuff than the people who sit and wait.
Free yourself from the shackles of an oppressive reality. What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.
Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.
You too can sometimes get what you want by adopting a practical illusion.
When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.
humility is your friend.
My main point about perceptions is that you shouldn’t hesitate to modify your perceptions to whatever makes you happy, because you’re probably wrong about the underlying nature of reality anyway.
In many cases, it’s your point of view that influences your behavior, not the universe. And you can control your point of view even when you can’t change the underlying reality.
A great strategy for success in life is to become good at something, anything, and let that feeling propel you to new and better victories. Success can be habit-forming.
Thanks to my experience with these exceedingly minor successes, I have a realistic understanding of how many hours it takes to be good at something. That keeps me from bailing out of things too soon.
practice. Once you become good at a few unimportant things, such as hobbies or sports, the habit of success stays with you on more important quests.
Walk away from the soul suckers. You have a right to pursue happiness and an equal right to run as fast as you can from the people who would deny it.
try hanging around friends who are naturally funny. Equally important, avoid friends who are full-time downers.
Understanding this two-way causation is highly useful for boosting your personal energy. To take advantage of it, I find it useful to imagine my mind as a conversation between two individuals.
acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes you want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make you feel energetic. Loving someone makes you want to have sex, but having sex also releases the bonding chemicals that make you feel love.
The smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of the larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it.
Smiling makes you feel better even if your smile is fake.
remember, goals are for losers anyway. It’s smarter to see your big-idea projects as part of a system to improve your energy, contacts, and skills.
Another benefit of having a big, world-changing project is that you almost always end up learning something valuable in the process of failing.
Today you want to daydream of your idea being a huge success so you can enjoy the feeling. Let your ideas for the future fuel your energy today. No matter what you want to do in life, higher energy will help you get there.
Ideas change the world routinely, and most of those ideas originate from ordinary people. You might have a patent idea, a product idea, or a process idea that could change the world.
A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity, and/or making a billion dollars. I try to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.
For the truly bad moods, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and time are the smart buttons to push.
If you’re experiencing genuine misfortune, you probably just need time and distance to recover. The daydreaming strategy is more of an everyday practice.
“Think of something happy.”
The easiest way to manage your attitude is to consume as much feel-good entertainment as you can.
This is the same reasoning for why you should avoid exposure to too much news of the depressing type and why it’s a good idea to avoid music, books, and movies that are downers.
Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.
The power of daydreaming is similar to the power of well-made movies that can make you cry or make you laugh.
A simple trick you might try involves increasing your ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts. If your life doesn’t provide you with plenty of happy thoughts to draw upon, try daydreaming of wonderful things in your future.
Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.
The best way to manage your attitude is by understanding your basic nature as a moist robot that can be programmed for happiness if you understand the user interface.
When I speak of priorities I don’t mean that in terms of what you love the most. You can love your family more than you love your job and still spend all day working so your family has food and opportunities. Priorities are the things you need to get right so the things you love can thrive.
The risk with using energy as your guide is that there are plenty of bad choices that also get you energized in the short run. But realistically, we all know, for example, that shoving cocaine up our noses isn’t a good long-term strategy. The dumb choices are generally quite obvious.
Right choices can be challenging, but they usually charge you up. When you’re on the right path, it feels right, literally.
One simple way to keep your priorities straight is by judging how each of your options will influence your personal energy.
Don’t bother trying to fix the world until you get the inner circles of your priorities under control.
If you don’t get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country.
It’s useful to think of your priorities in terms of concentric circles, like an archery target. In the center is your highest priority: you. If you ruin yourself, you won’t be able to work on any other priorities. So taking care of your own health is job one.
One of the best ways to pollute the energy in a group situation is by being a total asshole. You might succeed in getting people fully energized, but it won’t be in a productive way. If you think of your bad behavior as a lifestyle choice, as in “being yourself” or “just being honest,” you might be ignoring the cost to your personal energy. When you piss off the people around you, there is bound to be some blowback and wasted effort cleaning up the mess you made. It can all be quite distracting and draining.
I needed and I couldn’t find it. I think most entrepreneurs would tell you the same thing. And more to the point of this chapter, when you know how to do something, you feel more energized to take it on.
One of the biggest obstacles to success—and a real energy killer—is the fear that you don’t know how to do the stuff that your ideal career plans would require.
Likewise, it’s a good idea to dedicate certain sitting positions and certain work spaces to work and other spaces to relaxation or play. That makes your physical environment a sort of user interface for your brain, and it becomes a way to manipulate your energy levels and concentration. To change how you feel, and how you think, you can simply change where you are sitting.
Consistency might be more important than the specific position you choose.
Simplicity is a worthy long-term goal. That’s how you will free your personal energy so you can concentrate it where you need it.
Simplification frees up energy, making everything else you do just a little bit easier. That’s a huge deal. You don’t want your job interview to go poorly because on the way to the interview you completed four complicated errands that turned you into a ball of stress. When you are trying to decide between optimizing and simplifying, think of your entire day, not the handful of tasks in question. In other words, maximize your personal energy, not the number of tasks.
Optimizing is often the strategy of people who have specific goals and feel the need to do everything in their power to achieve them. Simplifying is generally the strategy of people who view the world in terms of systems. The best systems are simple, and for good reason. Complicated systems have more opportunities for failure. Human nature is such that we’re good at following simple systems and not so good at following complicated systems.
If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer. If the task is something you can do all by yourself, or with a partner who is on your wavelength, optimizing might be a better path if you can control most variables in the situation. And realistically, sometimes you simply have to get three hours of tasks completed in two hours, so we don’t always have the luxury of being able to choose simple paths.
“Energy” is a simple word that captures a mind-boggling array of complicated happenings. For our purposes I’ll define your personal energy as anything that gives you a positive lift, either mentally or physically.
Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up. When I get my personal energy right, the quality of my work is better, and I can complete it faster. That keeps my career on track. And when all of that is working, and I feel relaxed and energetic, my personal life is better too.
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities.
The healthiest way to look at selfishness is that it’s a necessary strategy when you’re struggling. In hard times, or even presuccess times, society and at least one cartoonist want you to take care of yourself first. If you pursue your selfish objectives, and you do it well, someday your focus will turn outward. It’s an extraordinary feeling. I hope you can experience it.
then family, tribe, country, and the world, roughly in that order.
Apparently humans are wired to take care of their own needs first,
I’m simply your cartoonist friend telling you that generous people take care of their own needs first. In fact, doing so is a moral necessity. The world needs you at your best.
I’m giving you permission to take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run.
The problem is that our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. We skip exercise to spend an extra hour helping at home. We buy fast food to save time to help a coworker with a problem. At every turn, we cheat our own future to appear generous today.
The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category—stupid—which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society.
Success always has a price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable. If you pick the right system, the price will be a lot nearer what you’re willing to pay. I can’t change the fact that success requires a lot of work. But if you learn to appreciate the power of systems over goals, it might lower the price of success just enough to make it worth a go.
Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system.
If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.
The world offers so many alternatives that you need a quick filter to eliminate some options and pay attention to others. Whatever your plan, focus is always important.
What he has is a spectacular system, and that beats passion every time.
What I see is a man who accurately identified his skill set and chose a system that vastly increased his odds of getting “lucky.”
Warren Buffett’s system for investing involves buying undervalued companies and holding them forever, or at least until something major changes. That system (which I have grossly oversimplified) has been a winner for decades. Compare that with individual investors who buy a stock because they expect it to go up 20 percent in the coming year; that’s a goal, not a system. And not surprisingly, individual investors generally experience worse returns than the market average.
On the system side, consider Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. It’s apparent that his system for success involved studying hard, getting extraordinary grades, going to a top college—in his case Harvard—and developing a skill set with technology that virtually guaranteed riches in today’s world. As it turns out, his riches came quickly through the explosive growth of Facebook. But had that not worked out, he would likely be a millionaire through some other start-up or just by being a highly paid technical genius for an existing corporation.
The minimum requirement of a system is that a reasonable person expects it to work more often than not. Buying lottery tickets is not a system no matter how regularly you do it.
When you apply your own truth filter to the idea that systems are better than goals, consider only the…
When goal-oriented people succeed in big ways, it makes news, and it makes an interesting story. That gives you a distorted view of…
Language is messy, and I know some of you are thinking that exercising every day sounds like a goal. The common definition of goals would certainly allow that interpretation. For our purposes, let’s agree that goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have…
let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If…
The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a…
The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your…
Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did…
All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and…
If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that…
To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true…
Throughout my career I’ve had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found…
His employers wouldn’t have hesitated to fire him at the drop of a hat for any reason that fit their business needs. He…
This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options. And it worked for this businessman, as he had job-hopped from company to company, gaining experience along the way, until he became a CEO. Had he approached his career with a specific goal in mind, or perhaps specific job objectives (e.g., his boss’s job), it would have severely limited his options. But for him, the entire world was his next potential job. The new job simply had to be better than the last one and allow him to learn something useful for the next hop.
your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
Most failures involve bad luck, ignorance, and sometimes ordinary stupidity.
I’ve long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome. I believe that viewing the world in that way can be useful for you too.
So forget about passion when you’re planning your path to success. In the coming chapters I’ll describe some methods for boosting personal energy that have worked for me. You already know that when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life. Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
So sometimes passion is simply a by-product of knowing you will be good at something.
Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at, while not enjoying things we suck at.
Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion.
Passionate people who fail don’t get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day. Naturally those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility.
I wish I could give you a surefire formula for success, but life doesn’t work that way. What I can do is describe a model that you can compare with your current way of doing things. The right answer for you might be some combination of what you’re already doing and what you read here. You’re the best judge of what works for you, as long as you acquire that wisdom through pattern recognition, trial, and observation.
There’s one step you will always do first if it’s available to you: You’ll ask a smart friend how he or she tackled the same problem.
Consistency is the best marker of truth that we have, imperfect though it may be. When seeking truth, your best bet is to look for confirmation on at least two of the dimensions I listed.
In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency. Consistency is the bedrock of the scientific method.
The Six Filters for Truth Personal experience (Human perceptions are iffy.) Experience of people you know (Even more unreliable.) Experts (They work for money, not truth.) Scientific studies (Correlation is not causation.) Common sense (A good way to be mistaken with complete confidence.) Pattern recognition (Patterns, coincidence, and personal bias look alike.)
To minimize the feeling of absurdity in your life, I recommend using a specific system for sorting truth from fiction. The system will be useful for reading this book, and it could be even more important in your life. The system recognizes that there are at least six common ways to sort truth from fiction, and interestingly, each one is a complete train wreck.
Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not.