The Placebo Effect

What minimizing your life will bring you:

• More Efficiency: You finally have enough time to do what’s truly important.
• More Time: Owning and doing things carry high costs. Doing less frees up your time to focus on the essential few.
• Less Stress: No more overloaded schedules, running from one place to the next, always rushing.
• Better Health: having and doing less calms your mind and brings clarity.
• Freedom: things don’t own you anymore, you only own things you love. 

Feeling too much passion and attachment towards something can skew our perception of it.

And that's risky because it can make us unwilling to see the flaws in our plan.

If you’re spending more time putting out fires than building the right foundations, you’ll never get out ahead of your to-do list.

Spend time building relationships, identifying opportunities, time for prevention and planning.

Investing in do-nothing time will help us slow down and experience a different pace of life, in which time’s value is not measured by its productivity.

Less stress leads to less anxiety.

Regular meditation helps reduce anxiety and anxiety-related mental health issues like social anxiety, phobias and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

Some types of meditation can improve depression and help you maintain these benefits.

• Two studies of mindfulness meditation found decreased depression in over 4,600 adults.
• One study found that participants experienced a long-term decrease in depression.

1. In-tune with your own passion. When people are genuinely passionate about the problems that your company is trying to solve, they will be energized by any challenge that stands in their way.
2. Always questioning how it can be done better. The average person rarely considers how ordinary things can be made better or improved--those with the entrepreneurial spirit can't help themselves.
3. Optimistic about all possibilities. They don't spend time thinking about what they can't do, but instead ask themselves, "Why can't I?"
4. Taking calculated risks. They make calculated moves while understanding that there are never any guarantees of success.
5. Above all, execution. They realize that execution is everything when it comes down to success or failure.

• We might be overreacting in some ways while underreacting in others.
• Good and bad news can exist together. Some can look at the progress while others look at the setbacks.
• You can be terrified about the short term and optimistic about the long term.
• We can desire to stay informed while also wanting to ignore it.
• You can be wrong about something you believed a few hours ago. Don't beat yourself up, understand that we're all figuring this out as we go.
• You can have a plan while acknowledging you have no idea what the world will look like tomorrow.

If you don't know what your goals are, most likely you won't be able to identify and prioritize the specific tasks you need to work on to achieve those goals. 

Write your major goals down and break them into tasks. Your goal tasks are your frogs, the things you want to work on first thing every day for greater productivity and success.

... to make better short-term decisions.

If you question the consequences of doing/not doing a to-do before you start on it, it not only makes it easier to find your frogs, but it also makes it easier to find time-wasting tasks that are better deleted from your list or delegated to someone else.

Lucky people act on their intuitions across many areas of their lives.

Intuition is when your body and brain have detected a pattern before you have deliberately considered it.

You are more likely to be successful if you are optimistic about your opportunities.

When you think things will work out, you are more apt to persevere. You are also open to new opportunities.

Start just by sitting on a chair, or on your couch. Or on your bed. If you’re comfortable on the ground, sit cross-legged. It’s just for two minutes at first anyway, so just sit. Later you can worry about optimizing it.

Place the attention on your breath as it comes in, and follow it through your nose all the way down to your lungs. Try counting “one” as you take in the first breath, then “two” as you breathe out. Repeat this to the count of 10, then start again at one.

Pessimism is defined as the anticipation of good or bad things to happen in the future, while optimism is generally considered the opposite. Optimism can be defined as the individual difference variable reflecting the extent of which we hold positive expectancies for the upcoming event.

The ways in which we think affects our health, well-being and success, even though the situations are the same.

• A positive impact on many aspects of physical and mental health.
• Provides motivation to work harder.
• Greater career success in life.