They’ll Never Buy the Cow If You Give Them the Milk for Free (Know Your Value)
1.If you don’t know your own value, you’re leaving money (and mind) on the table.
2.Your value doesn’t have to remain static. You can move to higher and better uses, whether that is defined by what the market will pay you for your time or how you personally value it.
3.While financial comparisons can be helpful to a point, life is about much more than money. Identify the intangibles you value, and make sure you are optimizing across these as well.
Surveying Your Boundaries (Embrace Your Limits)
1.Exercising meaningful control over your mind starts with understanding, and indeed accepting, the limited boundaries of that control.
2.Nobody can force you to spend your mind on something. Only you can do that. You can choose to give away this superpower or fully embrace it yourself.
3.In order to set and maintain your own boundaries, you must first REST.
- Recognize what is in your control and what isn’t.
- Exert control where you actually can.
- Stop spending your mind on areas you have no control over.
- Track your progress in developing this key skill.
When It Is the Best of Times, Get Ready for the Worst of Times (Prepare Ahead of Time)
1.The more and the better you prepare, the less uncertainty you will face.
2.Despite even the best preparation, unforeseen and unforeseeable events and circumstances can and will arise.
3.OWN your preparation by taking these steps:
- Define your Objective.
- Think through everything that can go Wrong in the pursuit of that Objective, and do what you can ahead of time to prevent them or at least minimize their likelihood of occurring.
- Nail the skills you will need as you pursue your Objective.
A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste (Every Catastrophe Creates Opportunity)
1.Every human being suffers hardship and numerous crises throughout life.
2.Rather than lament or bemoan this fact of life, you have the opportunity to develop a strong internal locus of control. By doing this, you can turn each crisis into an opportunity and in the process make yourself better and stronger.
Why Suffer More Than Once? (Limit the Downside)
1.Suffering is an inevitable part of life. While you can lessen it, you can never avoid it entirely.
2.What you can avoid is suffering the same thing more than once, whether that means “pre-suffering” before the event even occurs, “post-suffering” by ruminating on some past suffering you can now do nothing about, or both.
A Lannister Always Pays His Debts (Be Grateful for All That Occurs)
1.Acceptance of your circumstances is not enough. The truly Stoic approach is to be grateful for all that comes to you.
2.The benefits of gratitude are many and diverse, and the more you practice gratitude, the more grateful you become.
Nonattachment to Results (Focus on the Process, Not the Outcome)
1.You learn the wrong lessons if you look only at outcomes and not at the processes that produced them.
2.The fixation on outcomes is called “resulting,” and it can have deadly consequences.
3.To begin practicing nonattachment, you should start by exploring the things whose processes are so rewarding and worthwhile for you that the result is almost irrelevant.
Live Where You Are (Sow Your Own Seeds)
1.Failing to live where you are is a recipe for discontentment. Whether the grass is actually greener elsewhere is meaningless. All that matters is the grass below your own feet.
2.There is no outside white knight or savior who can or will magically hand you the results you seek. Only you can do that.
3.To cultivate the garden that is your mind and make it bloom effectively, you must first SOW your own seeds.
- Stop looking elsewhere for the solution.
- Own where you are right now.
- Work diligently to make where you are the place you want it to be.
Live When You Are (Be Present)
1.Life is lived solely in the present.
2.The present is a present, meaning a gift, but as it is constantly given to you and familiarity breeds contempt, you are apt to take this for granted and waste the present by dreaming of an uncertain future or replaying a nonexistent past.
3.Rather than put off seizing the opportunity today and waiting for the “right time,” you can make the time right now by using the “regret minimization framework” made famous by Jeff Bezos.
Less Is Less, and Less Is Better (Appreciate What You Already Have)
1.Thanks to hedonic adaptation, chasing after “things,” material or otherwise, in the long run won’t make you any happier.
2.Given this truth, the surest path to happiness and success is not to pursue more, but rather to appreciate what you have and to focus your limited time and mind on less. Choose the single great thing over the many good ones.
3.To develop this way of thinking, a form of the Stoic practice of negative visualization can help.
- Create a list of the things you have and value today.
- Think about the items one by one; imagine how your life would be if you lost each item.
- Revisit each item with a newfound appreciation and joy.
Lower Your Bar (Avoid the Perfection Trap)
1.Perfect is the enemy of good, often serving as an excuse for not doing something at all rather than a motivating force to do something better.
2.To overcome “analysis paralysis” or freezing in the face of a blank page, start by lowering the bar to determine what the first step needs to be.
Action Isn’t Everything—It’s the Only Thing (Words Aren’t Enough)
1.Talk is cheap. Action is everything, and the only thing that matters.
2.When you are a leader, people won’t always do as you say, but they will always do as you do.
3.To identify your own gaps in words and action, and to close them, use the Bridging the Gap exercise.
- State the value.
- Identify the conflicting action.
- Find a circumstance in which you have matched a value and action in the past.
- Map how to bridge the gap between the value and action.
- Track and refine as needed.