Living a Fulfilling Life

• What can I do better than others? Think about what you're really good at, and how you could use the skills where you have an edge in order to get results.
• What problems do I want to solve? This question is productive because it helps you identify your values and the issues you care about, without confining you to a narrow role.
• How do I want to be known? What you do for a living often informs other people’s impressions of you—as well as your own self-image. For example, if you want people to think you’re a helpful, trustworthy, caring person, you might want to consider a job in a classic “helping” field, like being a kindergarten teacher.

Some people allow fears to keep them stuck in their situations. Fear has the ability to keep you stuck and control your mindset.

You can silence it by stating this fear out loud and becoming familiar with the worst-case scenario.

“You Don’ t need permission to chase your dreams. Go execute.”

With the whole world focused on success, instead of excellence, or happiness or personal growth, one has no choice but to strive to be successful.

While success is easy to define, as it has set metrics that are measurable, excellence is much harder to define because it is rare, difficult to scale, and ambiguous.

Today’s career landscape isn’t a lineup of tunnels, it’s a massive, impossibly complex, rapidly changing science laboratory. 

Time. A typical career will take up somewhere between 20% and 60% of your meaningful adult time.

Quality of Life. Your career has a major effect on all your non-career hours.

Impact. Whatever shape your career path ends up taking, the world will be altered by it.

Identity. We tell people about our careers by telling them what we are.

Much can be learned from how you each deal with conflict, and avoiding it keeps you from that knowledge. 

An inability to resolve conflict is a major reason why in-love feelings fade away.

Ask the important questions -- about values, money, children, religion/spirituality, past relationships.

If you are afraid to be forthright in your questions, then the fear itself is letting you know that your fear of rejection may be in charge -- which means you have more inner work to do.

• Be Optimistic. Confronted by a bad situation, optimists perceive it as a challenge and try harder.
• Find Meaning In What You Do. When you find true meaning in your work — when it’s not a job, it’s a calling — you don’t burn out.

• Double Down On Relationships. Those who increase their social activity when things get hard handles stress the best.

• We see organizations and the engineers who work in them steering towards big data, so it is commonly assumed that data means acumen and direction.
• Any Data, by itself, does not bring clarity. Data is just information, not reality. It does not represent anything in the field of actuality.
• Data is also, never complete. Getting more and more Data does not equate to getting more clarity.

Our brains like to fill up incomplete information based on our prejudice and confirmation bias.

As all data is inherently incomplete, we use our minds to fill the missing information, based on the existing data we have, and that can go obverse.

"Good habits are hard to form but easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form but hard to live with." 

If you immediately check your email or social media accounts when you wake up in the morning, you’re starting your day off in reactive mode instead of proactive. It means spending the best part of the day on other people's priorities.