Distractions are the biggest risk
“The biggest risk to your future isn’t your competition. It’s the distractions you insist on keeping in your life rather than doing the things you know you should be doing but aren’t. People delay doing things they don’t like for longer than it takes to do them.”
- People often delay tasks they find unpleasant, even though the time spent avoiding them usually exceeds the time needed to complete them. You may dread writing a report and put it off for days, but when you finally start, you realise it only takes an hour to finish.
- The solution: to reduce the time between thinking you should do something and doing it, between decision and action.
- Positive reinforcement from starting: Once you start a task, it often becomes easier to complete, creating a positive feedback loop that encourages you to begin tasks more quickly in the future
- The definition of Power: Power can be defined by how quickly you can turn your thoughts into actions. The omnipotence of God for example is derived from the fact that when he “thinks” things are. The smaller the gap between thinking and doing, the more control you have over your life.
Outcome vs. Input Focus
- It’s more effective to focus on actions that directly lead to your desired outcomes than on the rituals or routines that might not be essential.
- Rule of 100: you can utilize this rule to focus on these high-value actions. The idea is to produce high-volume(e.g., making 100 calls, creating 100 pieces of content, sending 100 emails, ….)
- Use the open-to-goal approach: High achievers work until they reach their goal, regardless of how long it takes. This approach emphasizes persistence and dedication. Example: A basketball player keeps practising free throws until they make 100 in a row, no matter how long it takes.
- To use the rule of 100 or open goal approach you need to figure out for the outcomes you want, what are the actions you need to do more of to get closer to your goal. If you want to get 10 customers, the actions that can lead to this input can be: make 100 cold calls, follow up with 100 leads …
Don’t let bad things ruin everything
“Bad things grow in trees. Bad things happen, people don’t know how to cope and they allow one bad thing to snowball into more. Bad stuff sucks. The only thing worse is letting one bad thing ruin many good things”
- People don’t know how to cope with bad stuff. A bad event can happen in your life (a loss, a breakup, an accident, …) and people let that lead them to other bad events (they stop being good at work, gain weight, indulge in excessive drinking, …).
- This is because people don’t know how to manage their emotions. They let how they feel dictate their behaviour.
- Instead, you should think: this bad thing occurred, how can I decrease the likelihood that something else bad occurs in the meantime and figure out the actions and activities you have to take.
See opportunity in every failure
Successful people see opportunity in every failure and normal people see failure in every opportunity. Both are right. Only one gets rich.
Reframing pain and anxiety:
- When you’re growing it’s very painful. When you’re stagnating and stuck it’s very painful. When you’re declining it’s very painful. All conditions of reality are painful.
- Pain is a signal that we are alive. It is not a problem.
- The way we get over pain and discomfort is ideally not thinking about it. You just do what you have to do and the thought of how you feel doesn’t cross your mind. Or at a lower level reframe it.
- “Things are not what they are. Things are what we think they are” Framing and reframing is everything.
- How you perceive challenges can significantly impact your performance. For instance, interpreting anxiety as excitement can turn stress into a positive force.
- Feeling a lot of anxiety before doing something may mean you did not prepare enough. You have to prepare over and over again until you’re so bored and sick of it that the thought of anxiety doesn’t even cross your mind.
Achieving confidence:
- To become confident, you do what you want to be confident at enough times that it becomes unlikely that the thing should happen won’t happen.
- You start doing it 5 times and ⅖ times goes well. You then do it 10 times and 5/10 times goes well. You increase the reps until the probability nears 100%
Enjoy the Life You Have
“You once wanted the life you have and if you don’t like the life you have, you will probably not like the one you want but don’t have either”
- External circumstances, like wealth or status, have little effect on long-term contentment. Your happiness levels tend to stabilize over time, regardless of changes in your situation. (Hedonic adaptation)
- Having nothing left in the tank is the biggest satisfaction. Reframing hard work as the goal itself, rather than a means to an end, can lead to greater satisfaction and personal growth.
- If you focus on working hard every day rather than on specific achievements, you can feel fulfilled by the effort you put in, regardless of the outcomes.
- Winning externally (e.g., beating others in competition) might feel empty if you know you didn’t push yourself to your full potential.
- While working hard and fast is important, it’s equally crucial to ensure your efforts are aligned with the right direction.
How to work when nobody’s watching
“ We don’t rise to the standards we have when others are watching, we fall to the standards we have when no one is watching. The only work that matters is the work that no one sees. It shows you who you really are rather than who you say you are”
Authenticity:
- A lot of people feel like imposters because what say, what they think and what they do are completely different.
- Authenticity comes from aligning what you think, say, and do. This alignment builds confidence and trust, both internally and externally.
- Your authentic self is how would you behave if there’s no punishment.
Social obligations
- There are no true social obligations, only consequences for your choices. Understanding this can help you make decisions that align with your values.
- People will ask you for things all the time. Learn to say no to protect your time and be real that you really don’t want to go their event, hang out, ….
How to get true revenge
“If you want revenge for the bad things that have happened in your life start with the version of you that hasn’t lived up to your potential”
- Wherever you point the finger of blame for your life power follows. Relinquishing control of your life starts by pointing the finger at you.
- If you feel dissatisfied with your life, the best revenge is to improve yourself rather than blaming external factors.
- By focusing on changing yourself, you can influence how you perceive and interact with the world, which can lead to changes in your external reality.
People are jealous of the trophy but not the work
“Everybody is jealous of what you’ve got. Nobody is jealous of how you got it”
- The climb matters more than the view.
- If you want you can stop and enjoy the view from time to time. But what matters is that you do what you want to do.
- Once you achieve freedom from obligations, the challenge is to define what you truly want to do with that freedom.
- The payoff for persistent effort often comes slower than expected but can be far greater than imagined once it arrives.
Finding work that you love
Internal Memo of Tim Cook “ There’s a saying that when you do what you love you will never work a day in your life. At Apple, I learned that it’s a total crock. You will work harder than you thought possible but the tools will feel light in your hands.”
- There’s a huge time delay between behaving like a winner behaves and when we start winning. The problem is that the bigger the goal, the bigger the delay.
- Most people don’t get the fast feedback loop that they are on the right path when they are taking the first steps.
- A leading indicator of a successful person is the ability to act when nothing is happening.
- The payoff for persistent effort often comes slower than expected but can be far greater than imagined once it arrives.
Why You Shouldn’t Fear Criticism
“Being an asshole is a weak person’s idea of strength. Complaining is their connection. Never let yourself be held back by other people’s fears. People criticise what they are afraid to do themselves because bold actions remind them of their own inaction. If you’re afraid to be criticised why do you care about the opinion of those who are too timid to do it themselves? If you are the criticiser, does tearing down someone who has the courage you lack make you better” – Mark Mason
- People criticise because it helps them justify the risk they chose not to take hoping it will dissuade you from doing it so you can stay in the same position as them.
- Dealing with negative people: negative people, who often complain or criticize, use these behaviours as a form of connection or to project a false sense of strength.
- Consistency over intensity: success in the long term depends more on consistency than on short bursts of intense effort. Many people suffer unnecessarily by trying to achieve success too quickly.
- Embrace uncertainty: personal development, especially in entrepreneurship, involves making decisions with incomplete data. You must get comfortable with uncertainty and make the best decisions you can with the information available
- The Advantage of Having Nothing to Lose: When you have nothing to lose, you are in a powerful position to take risks. People often overlook the opportunities this presents.
Investing Your Time Wisely
“Reminder to anyone debating weekend plans. If you don’t want to go, don’t go if they care whether you go or not, they don’t care about you. And if they care about you, they don’t care if you go or not Just because you have free time doesn’t mean that anyone who asks for it is entitled to it”
Time is an asset
- Your time is your most valuable asset, especially when you don’t have much else. It’s crucial to spend it on activities that align with your goals rather than giving it away freely.
- In the beginning, if you don’t have money, the only thing you have is time.
Skill mastery and feedback loops:
- As you develop skills, your environment provides more positive feedback, which reinforces and accelerates your progress. The more you master a skill, the more you enjoy and engage with it.
- The faster the feedback loop, the faster you improve.
- The difference between experts and beginners is that experts have more ways to reward themselves in any given condition. An experienced salesperson can find satisfaction in every interaction, from closing a sale to handling objections, because they’ve developed a high level of skill and awareness.
Break it down into skills
- Complex traits like confidence or charisma are often bundles of smaller skills. By breaking down these traits into specific behaviours, you can make them more manageable and attainable. And that’s how you do personal development
- You are not, not confident, it’s just that you have not mastered these x number of skills of becoming confident.
- Example: Instead of trying to “be more confident,” you could focus on specific actions like maintaining eye contact, speaking clearly, and preparing thoroughly for presentations.
Precisely defining terms:
- Look at the terms you refer to frequently and define them by the behaviours you have to do.
- Anyone who spends time defining what terms actually mean to them, gets a clearer view about the world.
- Learning = same condition, new behaviour (phone rings, you say ABC. You’re asked to say DEF instead. Phone rings, you say DEF => you have learned)
- Intelligence = rate of learning = how many times you need to be exposed to a condition to change your behaviour. If you want to be smart, decrease the amount of time that you do not change your behaviour under the same conditions.
- Motivation = is the equal opposite of deprivation. We are most motivated when we are deprived of something. And the deprivation comes from your reference point.
- If you want to motivate someone, look at what they lack.
- We are the hungriest when we are deprived of food – We are the most motivated to sleep when we are sleep-deprived.
- We are the most motivated to work when we are deprived of money. But there are a lot of rich people who are still motivated to work. The deprevitation comes from our reference point. It’s how much you perceive your deprivation around money.
Find the others
If you want to be exceptional:
- The more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider.
- Many people want to be exceptional but they are afraid of being the exception. It’s wanting the outcome without the requirements that the outcome has.
- You need to be willing to do the exceptional behaviours to have the exceptional results. If you do what everybody does, you end up with average results.
- If you have a belief and you cannot explain why you believe it it’s not yours it’s someone else’s. Most people parrot other people’s words for the majority of their lives without thinking about them.
The journey is long and people only see you at the finish line
- The reason the goal is not coming to you fast enough is that you only see the goal the moment they accomplish it.
- It usually takes a long time and people don’t notice when you’re failing at the beginning that’s why people who succeed look like overnight success. So don’t even worry about what they think, they are not even paying attention to you yet.
- Documenting your progress helps you appreciate how far you’ve come and makes it easier to share your story with others. It also helps counter the perception that success comes easily or overnight.
The price of doing business
- Until you get great at anything, you realize the tremendous amount of work hours it takes to get there. If you’ve never had that experience you don’t know how to gauge it.
- One of the most powerful ways to help people overcome an excuse or limiting belief is to tell them that you believe them. It makes them face the reality.
There’s No Perfect Way to Live Your 20s
“Working it up” or “living it up”
- You must choose between focusing on work “working it up” or enjoying life “living it up” in your 20s. The key is to accept these trade-offs and understand that there are no do-overs.
- Dedication to work in your 20s and 30s helps accumulate valuable skills and insights.
What work-life balance should be like
- Rather than striving for daily work-life balance, consider balancing over longer periods (years or decades). Focus on specific periods of intense work or play, which can be more productive and less stressful.
- The more you extend the time horizon the more you can be flexible with your achievement of it as long as you focus on what matters most. And you can focus on prioritizing them rather than be overly obsessive on such a narrow window of time.
- Sadness: perceived lack of options. You feel stuck and don’t see a way out.
- Anxiety: many options and no priority. You can’t decide.
- You want to go to the gym, make progress on your side hustle, work hard for that next promotion. You want to balance it all in a day or a week and you will feel anxious because you are making progress in none. If you say I am a gym guy for this month or quarter, I am an entrepreneur for this period, I will be the best employee for the next two months, you will prioritize by default what’s most important in that period and over a long time horizon it balances out.
- The amount of effort it takes to maintain a skill it is 1/10 the amount it takes to build it. Don’t be scared of losing it when you are deprioritising.
General ambition vs specific goals
- General ambition can cause anxiety due to its vague nature, while specific goals provide clear direction and reduce anxiety. Recognizing and pursuing specific ambitions is crucial for progress.
The way to solve male problems
“You really can solve a lot of male problems by getting in shape and making a lot of money. You will still have other small problems but you will have resources to handle them.”
- The skill of getting in shape and making money requires other subskills that you can use to solve a lot of life problems.
- Something can be both painful and empowering. Saying this is my fault and my responsibility for all the bad things in your life can be painful but also empowering because you, yourself, can act and change it.
Achieving goals is about stacking skills
- When you have a big goal, and you are going from point A to point B, you need to build the bricks of the bridge. The bricks are the different skills you have to build along the way and you can reward yourself more often once you master each skill.
- The bigger your goal, the bigger the timeline has to be. The bigger the timeline, the easier it is.
Go to Bed on time
“If you want to avoid tons of problems in life, go to bed on time”
- Leverage is how much you get from the effort you put in. You should find high-leverage behaviours that lead to many positive outcomes. And going to bed on time is one of them.
- If you go to bed on time, you avoid drinking and all that comes with it, messing up your work because you don’t sleep well, less likely to have health issues …
- Set your alarm for when you go to bed and not when you wake up. (you will naturally overtime wake up at the same time)
Having a clue is over-rated
“There’s this funny myth that people actually know what they are doing. I’ve spent time around the richest and highest-stakes people on the planet. And let me tell you, it’s idiots all the way up. Normalize saying I don’t have a clue, and go workout how to do it anyway”
- One of the green flags of high intellect is someone saying they don’t know. (contrary to what we are used to in school)
95% of self-work
- A lot of self work can be summarized into: thoughts aren’t true:
- feelings don’t require actions
- things aren’t good or bad they ust are
- our greatest enemy is ignorance
- to change your life, change your surroundings
- our actions and not our past define who we are”
- To change your life, change your surroundings:
If you want to behave a certain way, you have to increase the likelihood that that thing will occur. If you want to get fit, surround yourself with fit people, you’ll feel less fit then you’ll feel motivated to workout - Feelings don’t require action:
Create a gap between feelings and actions. When you feel something, pause don’t act immediately.- You may feel hopeless but you need to continue doing the activities that are aligned with your goals.
- You may feel angry but you know retaliating has no positive outcome
Useful links
- Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO5m-roVzjg&t=6s
- 100M$ offer book by Alex Hormozi book review: https://thethinkinglab.co/100m-offer-by-alex-hormozi/
- 100M$ leads book by Alex Hormozi book review: https://thethinkinglab.co/100m-leads/
