Last updated April 10, 2022

Status:: { Books MOC Author:: Medium:: #literature/books/ Tags:: Links: { No excuses! The power of self-discipline Application

{ No excuses! The power of self-discipline

Notes

6 - Courage

• Visualize confidence during times of anxiety and fear to shift your mindset
  • “I can do it”
• Small hints of exposure to public speaking paired with a supportive group can help alleviate the issue
• Some fears are bundled together (ex. public speaking and rejection)
• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent
• Courage entails both taking action and knowing when to stay grounded
  • courage to launch, take action, take a leap of faith. The major feeling that holds most people back is that they don’t have the courage to take the first step
  • ability to hang in there after you have gone all-in but have yet to see any rewards
• To accept disasters, we must identify the worst possible outcome, and come to terms with it

Get so busy working on your goals or the solutions to your problems that you have no time to be afraid or to worry about anything

12 - Persistence

• Persistence is self-discipline in action
• Discipline is correlated with persistence, which is correlated with self-esteem
  • Think about growth mindset, persistence during “inadequacy”
• Persistence is it’s own fulfilling reward, pushing yourself despite feelings of wanting to give up
• Learn to move on and bounce back
• Instead of feeling sorry for yourself, search for the valuable lesson
  • Every problem/obstacle contains an equal or greater opportunity and benefit
• Resolve in advance that you will not give up

13 - Time Management

• Time management is life management
• We may claim we value certain things, but nothing is more telling than how a person spends their time everyday
  • Your aspirations to become financially independent mean nothing if you spend 4+ hours mindlessly scrolling social media every day
• Essentially, time management requires us to prioritize the things that are truly the most important, then commit to our values by focusing solely on our schedules
• ALWAYS seek the highest return on results, rewards, and satisfaction from the time you spend
• Before starting something new, ask yourself whether it’s currently the best use of your time
  • Focus on activities that have actual consequences and affect on your life
• If overwhelmed with things to do, actively discontinue and find things that aren’t urgent or important
  • Prompts:
    1. Why am I in this position? What was I hired/chosen to do? What results are expected of me?
    2. Out of everything I do, what are the most important results expected of me in my situation?
       • Consider the 5-7 important areas in your life/career and only work on tasks that support those
    3. What activities achieve the greatest value?
    4. What can I only do, that I must do well, to make a difference?
       • Should only have one answer at all times
    5. What is the most valuable use of my time right now?
       • Every minute of the day?

ABCDE Prioritization

• Should take around 10 minutes to plan an entire day
• A = Must do, serious consequences for not completing
• B = Should do, mild
• C = Nice to do, none
• D = Delegate
• E = Eliminate
• When planning your tasks each day, label each one based on this
  • Have an order for each letter level as well (A-1, A-2, etc
• Never do lower-letter tasks when the upper ones aren’t finished
• Work on the A-1 task in the morning before anything else

14 - Problem Solving

• Emotional thinking like anger shuts down our neocortex, brain portion responsible for decision-making and perception, shuts down
  • What’s left is the emotionally-driven paleocortex which operates in a survival, fight or flight mode
    • You lose the ability to think in different shades of gray
• the peter principle
• In every organization, people get promoted until they can no longer overcome the problems at their level
  • You need to continually seek creative ways to improve your problem-solving skills
• Our problem-solving skills are tied with our self-efficacy
• Leadership is the ability to solve problems

1. Take the time to define the problem clearly
2. Consider whether it really is a problem
   • Fact of life or something under your control?
   • Problem or an opportunity to do something completely new?
3. Find ways to redefine the problem
   • If the problem is lowering sales, another part of the problem could be the increase of competing sales
   • Leads to different possible dimensions and possible solutions
4. How did this problem occur?
   • Prevention, find root
5. What are all the possible solutions?
   • Quantity allows for more potential quality decisions
6. Think of the best solution in the current moment
   • Consider prevention earlier on for future problems
     • Every problem was once smaller and more manageable
7. Make a decision for further action
8. Assign specific responsibilities for each person
9. Set a measure

Good Life

Finding joy and satisfaction through discipline

15 - Happiness

• Tied to our feeling of autonomy, the amount of control we have in our own life

  • Locus of control

• Influenced by the gap between our current situation and our ideals and dreams

• It’s important to determine what constitues your happiness:

  • Author’s proposed influences:
    1. Health and energy: health is usually only cared for when it is deprived. Instead, we need to make sure it’s safe
    2. Relationships: 85% of our happiness?
    3. Meaningful work
    4. Financial independence
    5. Self-actualization: Realizing our true potential

• Maslow hierarchy of needs

  • Constitutes of both deficiency and being needs
    • Self-actualization only occurs when decifiency needs are satisfied
  • Deficiency: Safety, Security, Belongingness
  • Being: Self-esteem, Self-actualization
    • Less than 2% of population achieve self-actualization
      • A never-ending chase to achieve self-actualization results in continous flow and energy

16 - Personal Health

Alameda study on long life found that we should:

• Eat in a consistent schedule

• Not overeat as it leads to sluggishness

• Snack as digestion takes 4-5 hours, drowsiness in the afternoon

• Fitness 30 mins a day

• 1-2 glasses of wine help your health???

• The adrenaline rush from exercising (runners high) occurs 25ish minutes into intense exercise

  • Release of endorphins
    • Achieving this every time makes cardio/exercise a favorable event

20 - Friendship

• Traditional care about people first
• Self-esteem is based on our beliefs, how we think others view us, and reality
• Make people feel important

Action Exercises

2

1. Name three people who you most admire, describe one quality of them that you respect
2. Determine the most important virtue or quality in your life that you strive the most to practice or emulate
3. Identify those situations in which you feel the most confident, in which you feel like the very best person you could possibly be
4. What situations give you your greatest feelings of self-esteem and personal worth?
5. If you were already an excellent person in every respect, how would you behave differently from today onward?
6. What one quality would you like people to think of when your name is mentioned, and what could you do to ensure this happens?
7. In what one area do you need to be more truthful and practice higher levels of integrity than you do currently?

6

1. Identify your three biggest fears in life right now. What are they?
2. Determine what you would do in each of these situations if you were guaranteed of complete success. What actions would you take?
3. What have you always wanted to do but been afraid to attempt? What would you do differently if you were guaranteed success?
4. In what areas of life and work do you most experience the fears of failure and loss? What steps could you take immediately to confront and eliminate those fears?
5. In what three areas of life do you most experience the fears of criticism, rejection, or embarassment? How could you confront these fears and overcome them?
6. What one great goal would you set for yourself if you knew you could not fail?
7. What would you do differently in life if you had 20 million in the bank, but only ten years left to live?

7

1. Identify one area in your life where you need to persist even harder to achieve your goal. Take action in that area.
2. Identify a goal in your life that you did not accomplish because you failed to persist to completion. What steps could you take today to achieve in that area?
3. Identify one big goal that you achieved because you persisted and refused to give up no matter how difficult it became.
4. Decide on your major definite purpose in life. The one goal that, if you achieved it, would have the greatest positive impact on your life.
5. Write down your goal clearly. Make a detailed plan of action to accomplish it, tell yourself that failure is not an option.
6. Make a decision today that you will persist until you succeed no matter what happens because “I am unstoppable.”
7. Resolve to set and achieve one important goal, overcoming the inevitable difficulties, problems, and setbacks you will experience until you succeed. Repeat this process over and over until persistence becomes a habit.

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Created:: 2021-10-25