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23 Smart Ways To Increase Your Confidence, Productivity, and Income - Medium
Defining "Success"
“Success” isn’t just having lots of money.
Success is continuously improving who you are, how you live, how you serve, and how you relate.
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Key Ideas
Defining "Success"
“Success” isn’t just having lots of money.
Success is continuously improving who you are, how you live, how you serve, and how you relate.
Putting "first things" first
Start the day with your #1 priority.
Getting up early isn’t enough. You need to put first things first. When you put your top priorities first, then you ensure they make it into the bucket of your day. After your main priorities have been completed, the rest will fill the gaps.
Approaching learning styles
- Most people have a growth mindset about the learning style they are comfortable with: if you like math and learn in analytical ways, you probably believe you can get better at math and seek opportunities to do so.
- Most people have a fixed mindset about the learning styles that aren't comfortable with: if you don’t like writing, you probably believe you can’t get better at it.
Define your "Why"
Think about what it is you want, and ask yourself this simple question:
What about ___________ is important to me?
Then put your answer into the same question. It’s good to go at least 7-questions deep into this exercise.
The Expectancy Theory
You get in life what you expect you will. This theory is based on 3 things:
- How bad you want something
- How much you believe you can actually have/do what you want
- Your belief that the means by which you seek your goal will actually bring about the desired result
Reaching Mastery
Mastery comes from embracing difficult emotions. You’ll face difficult emotions because, in order to gain true mastery, you must understand all sides of something.
You need to be able to integrate what you know with tons of new information and to be able to quickly connect your understanding with things from seemingly disconnected domains.
Giving and serving
Why you should give to others:
- You genuinely want to help other people.
- You believe in humanity.
Why you shouldn't give to others:
- Don't give to boast.
- Don’t give to put others in debt to you.
- Don’t give to get ahead.
- Don’t give to make others feel inferior.
The THANK YOU economy
- People are getting more used to having everything at their fingertips
- People are getting used to having their needs met quickly, and cheap
- People are also lowering their standards for the quality of services they are getting (and information they are consuming), because so much stuff is now available for free
Prepare for the next day
The success of your morning begins the night before.
All you have to do is spend a few minutes making FIRM decisions about what you’ll do when you first wake up. You don’t need a huge to-do list. You just need to know the FIRST thing you’re going to do.
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Track and limit your time spent
Only around 17 % of people are able to accurately estimate the passage of time.
Using the right tool can help by letting you know exactly how...
Take regular breaks
Taking scheduled breaks can actually help improve concentration.
Some research has shown that taking short breaks during long tasks helps you to maintain a constant level of performance.
Set self-imposed deadlines
A manageable level of self-imposed stress can actually be helpful in terms of giving us focus and helping us meet our goals.
For open-ended tasks or projects, try giving yourself a deadline, and then stick to it.
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Habits define your energy levels
Tine is not the basis for productivity. Energy is.
Having all the time in the world won’t help you if you’re exhausted for most of it. Having good habits help in keeping yo...
Sleep is the foundation of our energy
Poor sleep means you will start to underperform.
Research says 7-8 hours are pretty much mandatory if you’re going to stay cognitively sharp in the long-run.
Napping benefits
Even if it may feel lazy, napping has a range of cognitive benefits.
This is particularly true if you’re doing a lot of learning since the short burst of sleep can help with memory.
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Zen to Done (ZTD)
It's a productivity system that teaches how to take a simple approach to improving your productivity, by encouraging you to focus on forming one productivity-boosting habit at a time.
The Minimalist Habits of Zen to Done
- Collect: Get ideas and to-dos out of your brain and onto a list.
- Process: Review your list daily and decide how to act on each item.
- Plan: Pick a few high priority items to accomplish each week and every day.
- Do: Schedule time to accomplish your selected to-dos without interruptions.
The Collect Habit
To clear your mind and improve focus, get your ideas and to-dos out of your mind and onto a list.
Documenting to-dos in the moment lessens the likelihood that you'll forget to do something and gives you a master list of to-dos to reference when you're trying to decide where to direct your time.
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Influence at work
To be effective in organizations today, you must be able to influence people. Your title alone isn’t always enough to sway others, nor do you always have a formal position.
Having infl...
Build connections
Work on cultivating personal connections with your colleagues, and allow them to get to know you.
You don’t have to be “the greatest person in the room” or make sure “everyone is blown away by your charisma.” You just need to have good rapport with your colleagues. That way, they won’t impute negative intentions or motives to you.
Listen before you try to persuade
Start by giving them your undivided attention in one-on-one situations. Turn your body toward the other person, freeze in place, and listen.
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Do a yearly review
Ask yourself:
- What went well for me last year?
- What accomplishments did I have?
- How did I improve my life?
- How did I improve my relationsh...
Finish what you started
Which of your projects, errands and general to-do items do you still have left from the previous year that you may be able to complete in less than 2 hours? Do them now to enable you to give yourself a fresh start.
Be realistic
Dreaming is great, but if you want to accomplish some improvements, you need to make your dream more realistic.
Break your dream down into milestones: if you want to work from home, what steps do you need to take? Break those steps down further into actionable steps and start working towards making your dream a reality.
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The Money We Need
We don't really need massive amounts of money to live a happy life.
A good level of freedom and self-confidence can be attained by a relatively small figure of money.
We can take the mi...
Confidence and Freedom
Many 'high-achieving' people lack flexibility, freedom, and confidence to change things in their life when they want. This is due to the build-in traps and insecurity of living a high achievers life.
A life full of complexity and self-protection lacks confidence and independence.
What Confidence Means
- It means not equating money with happiness, being self-assured, to understand that you cannot change the world but your response to everything you experience determines your happiness.
- It means being in control of your lifestyle, to be able to learn new skills, to understand that you can be anywhere, live anywhere, work and make friends anywhere.
- It is a self-assurance that your kids will be just fine, and the real goal of your life is not to earn money but to attain happiness.
Confidence means believing that you have the personal power to get things done and that your true goal is to live happily.
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“Keystone” Habits
The primary keystone habit is regular exercise. People who exercise habitually start changing other unrelated patterns in their lives, even unknowingly. They eat better, use their credit car...
Do the most important things first
Willpower is limited. It is highest early in the day but decreases as we make more decisions. Most self-control failures happen at night.
Do the most important things first. As the day goes on it will only get harder to face big challenges.
Don't Use Willpower
Research shows we don’t use much willpower when something is a habit.
Build new habits by manipulating your environment so as to make what you should do easy and what you shouldn’t do hard. Remove the cookies from eyesight and put your running shoes next to the bed.
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"You're going to love helping me!"
Don't try and convince someone how much they will enjoy helping you. It reeks of control and is presumptive. It drains their joy out of helping.
How they feel is for them to decide.
A small favor
One common tactic is to portray the help we need as so small, that it is barely a favor. "Would you add these updates to the database? It won’t take you more than five minutes.”
It is conveying that you think the work the other person does is easy, quick, trivial and not very taxing. That’s not a great way to enlist help. You might also underestimate the size of the favor. Do not presume it won’t take them very long the next time you ask them for help.
Scorekeeping
While reciprocity does make people more likely to comply with the request, it also makes us feel controlled, which takes all the fun out of it.
Reminding someone that they owe you a favor does not create good feelings. Scorekeeping is fundamentally bad for relationships.
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Working Harder isn’t the Answer
We do it because it's the most visible form of productivity.
It is a way to prove to others that you are doing stuff and checking things off the list.
The Dose-Response Theory
Hard work is necessary in order to be productive, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
At some point, you start to be negatively productive.
Prioritize Tasks by Energy Level
It means scheduling your time according to your natural rhythms:
- Do your most important work at the beginning of the day if you are a morning person.
- Don't feel bad about sleeping in because you stayed up late at night to work if you are a night owl.
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Slow Down
You can't be in constant motion and be at your best. You need to know when to take your foot off the gas and just rest a little.
Ironically slowing down can also mean we get m...
Declutter
Too much physical and mental clutter is not good for us.
Streamline and declutter regularly. If you don't need it or it doesn't serve a positive purpose, eject it.
Forget the Small Stuff
Pareto's 80/20 rule states that in any particular pursuit that we undertake, approximately 80 percent of the results may come from just 20 percent of our efforts.
If we identify and focus on the 20 percent that really matters we are more likely to live a simpler life more on our own terms.
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