“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Anytime I hear someone say I don’t have time for that or I am too busy, they are advertising their priorities. If you don’t have time to read or exercise, it is a testament that those activities are not pain points for you. Most of the time, we are not as busy as we think. We live in an age where busyness is a badge of honour. Henry David Thoreau once said, “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
In Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World, American entrepreneur, author and host of The Time Ferriss Show shares a compilation of tools, tactics, and habits from 130+ top performers.From iconic entrepreneurs to elite athletes, artists to billionaire investors, many of the people who answered the eleven questions posed by Tim have not been featured on his podcast yet as of the book’s writing.
Tim is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef and Tribe of Mentors. The Tim Ferriss Show has exceeded 900 million downloads and has been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running.
In life, you don’t soar to the level of your hopes and dreams. You stay stuck at the level of your self-worth.
In her soon-to-be-released book, Worthy: How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life, co-founder of IT Cosmetics and the first female chief executive officer of a L’Oréal brand, Jamie Kern Lima, writes about self-worth and strategies for dealing with and overcoming self-doubt. She has been on Forbes’ list of America’s wealthiest self-made women for six years, started “IT Cosmetics” in her living room with her husband, Paulo, and eventually sold it to L’Oreal for $1.2 Billion.
The greatest risk any of us will take, is to be seen as we truly are.—CINDERELLA
At an average of 400 minutes per user, per day, the world will spend a combined total of 780 trillion minutes using this internet this year, which equates to almost 1.5 billion years of collective human existence.
The average person watches about 141 hours of TV per month, or 1,692 hours per year. Assuming you reach the average U.S. life expectancy of 78, that’s about 15 years of your life. 1 American subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, Netflix has around 260 million paid subscribers worldwide as of the fourth quarter of 2023. 2 According to the What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report, users viewed over 100 billion hours in the first six months of 2023 alone. 3 We spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes on our smartphones, and the top 20% of smartphone users have daily screen time of over 4.5 hours. 4 According to the Digital 2024 Global Overview Report 5, at an average of 400 minutes per user per day, the world will spend a combined total of 780 trillion minutes using the internet this year, which equates to almost 1.5 billion years of collective human existence.
We are getting inundated and overwhelmed with data to consume and fill out every little space of boredom. Our smartphones have become an external limb that we can’t do without. Social Media and the internet are some of the most fascinating and pivotal innovations in the past three decades. They have made our lives easier and will probably be one of the tools that could end our present civilization. We are glued to our smartphones, but we rarely listen to each other as we are engrossed in our echo chamber of narcissism and self-absorption. We have all the resources for life-long learning but are becoming less educated. We have all the productivity tools, but we are short of time.
“If you light a lamp for someone, it will also brighten your own path.” – Ancient Buddhist Proverb
In One Minute Mentoring: How to Find and Work With a Mentor–And Why You’ll Benefit from Being One, authors Ken Blanchard and Claire Diaz-Ortiz share a fictional parable about the power of finding—or being—a mentor. They share a framework for maintaining a mentoring relationship.
In One Minute Mentoring, Ken and Claire tell the story of Josh Hartfield, a young sales rep whose motivation is flagging, and Diane Bertman, a sales executive whose crammed schedule isn’t delivering the satisfaction it once did. As the story of Diane and Josh unfolds, the authors share six action steps to creating a successful mentoring relationship, as developing and finding a mentorship partnership, and strategies for skills and wisdoms of people of all ages.
As the saying goes: “You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to start to get great.” One of the toughest parts of achieving a goal is getting started in the first place. We don’t get started due to many factors, such as procrastination, uncertainty, inertia, fear, and believing that we have more time. One principle that can help get things done is the five-minute rule. The Five Minute Rule involves committing to a task or goal for at least five minutes. The five-minute rule aims to get you started on a task, and if you don’t find the task enjoyable after five minutes, you can take a break.
You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to start to get great -Les Brown
Everyone has an opinion, and it is often cheap. Everyone has the right to their opinion but not the facts. An opinion could be that you would not amount to anything, but the fact is that you are a kind/queen put here to do epic things. You might not be maximizing your potential right now but you have limitless opportunities to become who you are put here on earth to become. It is never too late to be who you might become. You are not too old, young, inexperienced, or experienced to effect change.
“First people will tell you that you are wrong. Then they will tell you that you are right, but what you’re doing really isn’t important. Finally, they will admit that you are right and that what you are doing is very important; but after all, they knew it all the time.” – Jonas Salk, developer of the Salk polio vaccine
You will come across naysayers, doubters and critics on your path to achieving your goals. You have to be mindful of whose opinion, advice or criticism you pay attention to. It is okay to be misunderstood, as the more prominent your vision is, the more people will not understand what you are trying to achieve. It is not what you hear; it is what you listen to. As American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson quipped in Self-Reliance and Other Essays: Emerson’s Essays, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
I was a Manchester United Football Club fanatic and saw almost all their games live. I have supported the club since the 1998/1999 season after the team won the Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Champions League continental treble. I paid attention to almost everything about the club: new signings, the latest news, and merchandise purchases, among others. But in 2018, all that started to change as I was re-prioritizing my values and goals in life. I realized I spent at least 4-6 hours every weekend watching the Premier League, la Liga and other sporting events. Five hours every weekend equals 250 hours per year just watching soccer events; that is 1,000 hours in four years. If I keep up at that pace, every 32 years would have involved a year of my life watching soccer events. Like most humans, I was already going to sleep 1/3rd of my life; add soccer match viewing and other entertainment activities to the mix, and time became scarce.
Obsession is a state in which someone thinks about someone or something constantly or frequently, especially in a way that is not normal. The word obsession comes from latin obsidere “to besiege”, the transferred sense of “action of anything which engrosses the mind”. Developing a healthy obsession to achieve your goal is what is required to bring your vision to life.
You must develop an obsession to go from where you are to where you want to be. One of the hallmarks of the highly successful people in the world is that they chose a craft and became laser-focused on it for a very long time. As the saying goes, “We get rewarded in public for what we deliberately practice in private.” They deliberately practiced for a long time. Overnight success usually takes ten years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in a particular field or endeavour.
In Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, professor of psychology at the University of Miami Dr. Amishi P. Jha suggests flexible 12-minute-a-day exercises lift the mental fog, declutter the mind and strengthen focus.
You are missing 50 percent of your life. And you’re not alone: everyone is.
Implementation Intentions is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.
Implementation Intentions is a self-regulatory strategy popularized by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer in his 1999 research paper: Implementation intentions: Strong effects of Simple Plans 1 Gollwitzer observed when that people encounter problems in translating their goals into action (e.g., failing to get started, becoming distracted, or falling into bad habits), they may strategically call on automatic processes in an attempt to secure goal attainment. This can be achieved by plans in the form of implementation intentions that link anticipated critical situations to goal-directed responses (“Whenever situation x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response y!”). Implementation intentions delegate the control of goal-directed responses to anticipated situational cues, which (when actually encountered) elicit these responses automatically.
According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 10.0 infographic1, a visual representation of the amount of data we generate every waking minute. The data we are generating and consuming is becoming increasingly considerable, and there is no sign of slowing down anytime soon. Here are some of the statistics on the amount of data we generate every minute on the internet:
In High-Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way, high-performance coach Brendon Burchard (The Motivation Manifesto) shares the six deliberate habits of high-performing individuals and teams.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do.Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.—Aristotle
SUCCESS makes you fearful, Of losing your place, Of gambling with stature, Of losing your face.
Bracken Darrell is the CEO of VF Corporation, an American global apparel and footwear company. In June 2023, Darrel was appointed CEO of VF Corp, the parent company of Vans sneakers and Timberland boots. Before his appointment, he was CEO of Logitech, a computer peripherals maker. As the CEO of Logitech, he penned a Seuss-like poem titled “The Secret to Success: Avoid It.” wherein he writes about the pitfalls of success.
In a LinkedIn post about the poem, Darrell quipped:
We all seek success, but the actual experience of thinking you’re successful is potentially performance eroding or even dangerous. That’s true for businesses, teams and us as individuals. In extreme cases, others think you are smarter, more creative, and more often right. You aren’t, of course. You’re the same woman or man as before.
The Fear of Other People’s Opinions (FOPO) is the fear, worry, and anxiety that result from overthinking what others think or say about us. FOPO is one of those fears that stops many of us from moving toward our goals, dreams and aspirations. We make every move based on the perception of how others would perceive or receive it. FOPO can be crippling, and in the age of social media, the fear of being cancelled by the mob makes this fear more debilitating. The reality is that no one is thinking about you, as everyone is also trying to figure it out. As the saying goes, “In your 20s, you care what everyone thinks about you; in your 40s, you stop giving a shit what anyone thinks, and in your 60s, you realize that no one was thinking about you in the first place.”
In your 20s, you care what everyone thinks about you; in your 40s, you stop giving a shit what anyone thinks, and in your 60s, you realize that no one was thinking about you in the first place.
