Unimportant stuff

• We’ve always done it that way.”
• “That’s the right way.”
• “Everybody does it this way.”
• “That’s standard practice.”

A subtle form of groupthinking: When we don’t question a norm or standard practice, that’s lazy thinking. 

You can challenge everything you do, you just can’t challenge everything all at once. The whole idea of continuous improvement is based on always looking for ways to do things better. Continuously.

• Touch base often, to catch problems when they're small.
• Build relationships through conversations. Your employees will learn about you and whether they can trust you.
• Have regular one-on-ones with your team members.
• Solve problems as they appear. The smaller, the easier to handle.
• Keep tough conversations private, away from distractions.
• Tailor what you say and do to the person you’re meeting with.
• Treat people with dignity.

Your task is to help your team and team members do good work. You should understand that the mission is important, not you.

As a leader, you’re just there to make things work better.

Coaching should be your primary tool in leading. If your coaching sessions seem more like you’re the therapist and your team member the patient, you’re doing it wrong. 

Your team members should pay attention to how it will be different in the future.

"Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them."

• Increases focus;
• Deeper level of learning, order, action, and release;
• Holding thoughts still so they can be changed and integrated;
• Releasing pent-up thoughts and emotions;
• Empowerment;
• Bridging inner thinking with outer events;
• Detaching and letting go of the past;
• Allowing you to re-experience the past with today’s adult mind.

• Pick one and only one skill at a time to develop.
• Dedicate 15 minutes a day to reviewing your performance on a workplace skill. 
• Isolate micro-behaviors. If you want to give a better presentation, break down what goes into a good presentation and set a goal. 
• Get feedback. Ask people what you can do to improve.

• People think passion has to come from being excited about the tasks you perform. It doesn’t. There are 6 ways to derive passion from your work: Task passion, achievement passion, creative passion, people passion, learning passion and competence passion.
• Purpose is about creating value for others in a way that is personally meaningful to you. It's less about the actual tasks you perform and more about how you frame them.

Successful dieters usually declare certain foods to be completely out of bounds, or allowed only during occasional designated cheat meals, rather than expecting themselves to eat everything in moderation.

When you focus on developing systems and work every day, your work compounds over time, developing exponential growth. 

The more advantages you create, the more your next advantages pay off. A 1% gain every day compounds to almost 38x increase over a year.

Systems are the best way to progress since they reward effort and we control all the variables. However, we need to have a sense of direction in those efforts, to know what we are trying to accomplish. 

Writing daily with no objective is just practice. If you want to achieve something, you need to commit to a certain output, like publishing a post on your blog weekly. At the end of the day, a system is a way to control how to achieve an output.

1. Get a Journal and Writing Utensils
2. Start an Index Page: The backbone of your BuJo system, like a table of contents in a book
3. Create Logs - places where you can brain-dump tasks, projects, goals
4. Pick Signifiers: Many people use bullets for lists of tasks, circles for events, and dashes for notes. 
5. Document Items with Collections: Collections are running lists and anything you want to remember for later(like blog topics, books you want to read etc.)

• A future log helps you keep track of items that aren’t yet on your immediate radar.
• Monthly logs include things like calendars and categorized goal lists for the next 30 days.
• Daily logs may includes entries of to-dos, meetings, and reminders.

Pick some media from different industries. You may find that other industries have problems similar to yours but maybe they were solved in a different way.

You may also find new linkages between your own industry and another, linkages that may lead to innovative partnerships in the future.

Religions are a way for us to understand our relationships with the supernatural and with each other. Learning how such relations are structured can teach you a lot about how people relate to each other and the world around them.

Seeing the reason in other religions can also help you develop mental flexibility.