Category: Life
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Flexible habits are stickier habits
If you want to do something every day, you’ll need to be flexible about it. If you want to work out every day, do it all times of day—and in all time slots of the day. Have a workout plan for when you have just a few minutes, or even one minute. That’s not to…
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Knocking on doors
How people find out about you matters a lot. Your current physician probably didn’t cold call you. You find good products and services through recommendations, media, and searches. Anyone who is cold calling you is implicitly telling you, “Not enough people trust me to do business with me yet.” That’s why cold calling is difficult.…
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Build the team
If you’re an entrepreneur, one of the highest leverage activities you can do is find good people to work with, build a good relationship, and keep working with them. You don’t need to be hiring full-time to start doing this. People can be available in all capacities, for all sorts of roles. (In fact, many…
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On developing a taste for problems
“What if You Had a Universal Remote… That Controlled Your Universe?” The premise of Adam Sandler’s film, Click, is simple: the protagonist is granted a remote control that allows him to change the speed of his life (e.g., he can fast forward, slow motion, even rewind, etc.). Here’s the trailer for it: Spoiler alert: the…
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Monkey barring
Once you’ve found a ladder, and chosen a game, you need to stick with it. For some of us, that’s a tall order. If we’re not progressing, we don’t want to play. One solution here is to monkey bar. We’ve got two hands, and we don’t always need both on the same rung for a…
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Find a ladder
Structure is great for giving people things to focus on and to channel their creative energy through. Structure is bad for constraining people and sucking away their motivation. It’s easy to either become too rigid with your structure, or to embody a swirl of chaotic energy. You need to know when to do what. One…
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“What if grinding is bad?”
A coach asked me this question in my late 20s. It was mind-blowing. At the time, I’d already read Trying Not to Try, and I was still soaking things in and slowly shifting my worldview. This question really accelerated the process. Some questions that counter-grinding question provoked: Wasn’t everything supposed to be a grind? If…
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Punctual gratification
Be happy today. Be happy now. Don’t put it off, because you’re not going to do it. Pay yourself first with your time, with your happiness, with your energy. If you said you were going to treat or reward yourself, keep your promise. Sometimes, it feels sad to actually try to be happy, excited, or…
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A job is a job
If you’ve committed to a new project, congratulations! You’ve just started a new job. You can call this an informal apprenticeship, an internship, or whatever. It’s a job. Even if it doesn’t pay you every two weeks. Even if you need to work on weekends. Even if it feels risky and unstable. Even if it’s…
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Patience is power
Of all virtues, patience might be the easiest to talk about and agree upon, and the most difficult to actually practice. The ability to stick with things—you can call it perseverance, persistence, consistency, or whatever—is really grounded in patience. You can’t control how talented you are, who you’re born to, or what natural inclinations you…