The Pace of Growth

The best ones in my view are the ones that meet 3 fundamental conditions:

1. They take you out of your comfort zone without putting you in serious danger
2. They provide you an intense, accelerated learning experience
3. They help you develop skills and attitudes that are highly valuable to you in life.

This stimulates your social skills to grow. 

You learn how to talk with all sorts of people and to keep conversations flowing. You  also get better at cues, and you become more skilled at navigating complex social situations.

We usually believe that the more information you have, the better decisions we can make. However, at some point, we cross a threshold where we have too much information. That's when we start to fill in gaps and add weight to information that doesn't matter. 

This makes decision making way more difficult.

You're so prone to continue making the same kind of choices throughout your life that challenging yourself and doing the exact opposite is often the best way to get around this problem. 

The idea here is to confront your default behavior, step outside your comfort zone, and use your imagination to test some completely new ideas.

The best athletes and entrepreneurs aren’t focused on being the best; they’re focused on constant self-improvement.

Concentrating on the process is best for both performance and mental health. It lifts off your shoulders a huge burden, so you can concentrate on the things you can control.

Knowledge is always evolving and advancing — if you want to evolve and advance with it, you need to keep an open mind.

And to keep an open mind, leave your ego at the door. 

Having a life plan makes one get past the distractions and focus on what matters.Set aside an hour to do this planning exercise:

• List 1: Jot down your lifetime goals, listing everything that comes to your mind.
• List 2: Ask yourself ‘How would I want to spend the next five years?’ and note down the unbiased non-judgemental answer that comes in your mind.
• List 3: Ask yourself ‘If I was to die in six months, how would I spend the time I have?’
• List 4: Finally, list your most important goals, finding the common goals and aspirations from the previous three lists.

Looking through the most important goals, find the common thread and draft a plan of action for your life, a compelling Mission Statement, taking as much time as you want. Let it sit there for a few days and do not think about it.

Review the statement after a few days, see if it carries the magic that can be a guiding torch of your life, making any changes if required.

Our personality and life experiences predispose us to dominant modes of thinking, but these can be biased in ways that are unhelpful in the majority of situations.

Maybe you tend to worry people are angry at you when usually this isn’t the case. Or you tend to hesitate too much in making decisions.

When you thoroughly understand your personal thinking errors, you’ll be able to correct these, and this will become easier and almost automatic with practice.            

Streamline your workflow so you can get simple things done without significant willpower.

For example, instead of having a container for pens and scissors in only one room of the house, have these in three different rooms to ensure better tidying.

Strategies like these save time and, more importantly, help free you up mentally.

Gratitude is intended to change three things: your past, your present, your future. 

If you’re not transforming your past, present, and future, then you aren’t fully experiencing the benefits of gratitude.

Stop focusing on what's missing from your life. And rather than measuring yourself against your ideals, measure yourself against where you were before.

When you live in the gain, all you see is progress. What you focus on expands.

Try to see your strengths in relation to what energizes you. Something is a strength if: 

• it makes you feel successful
• you're drawn to it
• it fully engages you
• after doing that activity, you feel energized and fulfilled.

It's difficult for us to see our own strengths, but people around us (friends, coworkers, family members, mentors) will most likely see them clearly.

The goal is to identify things that you wouldn't have thought of on your own—or to find patterns.

The best body language for influence depends on your goal. Make sure your body language matches your words to make you more effective.

• If you want to increase the attractiveness of an offer, think sales-y. Use animated movements. Lean forward. Move and speak quickly.
• If you want to reduce resistance to what you're saying, think calm and authoritative. Specific gestures. Lean back. Move and speak slowly. 

It is important to balance the appearance of authority and warmth.

• You show authority and power by your upright posture, your command of physical space, purposeful stride, a firm handshake, and palm-down gestures.
• You communicate warmth nonverbally with open body postures, palm-up hand gestures, full-frontal body orientation, positive eye contact, synchronized movements, nods, head tilts, and smiles.

We do not all solve a problem in the same way. People usually fall into one of these 4 categories: 

• Prioritizers and planners like to work based on how much time each part of a task will take.
• Arrangers focus on how they’re feeling.
• Visualizers are motivated by considering the big picture.

When your tasks feel overwhelming, it can be difficult to start.

Break down your projects into smaller, actionable steps. Identify one chunk that you could work on in a 10-minute segment to help you get started.