In its March/April 2021 edition, Fast Company curated a list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world. The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies address a society remade by COVID-19. Many of them pioneered business models that are now accelerating: Peloton and Zwift, for example, are riding at-home fitness in new directions.
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
When things go wrong, they seem to happen all at once, back to back; like murphy’s law states, whatever would go wrong would go wrong. Life is a roller coaster ride; sometimes you are up, sometimes you are down, sometimes you want to smile, but you can only cry. Life can be extremely rough and tough, but the key to navigating life’s vicissitudes is to know that everything in life is impermanent. Tough times don’t last, but tough people do; this too shall pass; whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. The sun will rise tomorrow, every wound would heal, and the challenges are not here to stay; they are here to make you a better version of yourself.
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Here are 30 great quotes on Adversity:
“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.” – Indian Proverb
Depending on the part of the world you live in, you have about 30,000 days to be alive. According to Life expectancy and Healthy life expectancy data published by World Health Organization in December 2020, Japan has the longest life expectancy (84.3), and Lesotho has the shortest life expectancy (50.7). The average life expectancy is around 82 years; if you multiply 82 by 365 days, that equates to roughly around 30,000 days, and if you are lucky, it could be more.
Life Expectancy: The number of years a person can expect to live.
We cannot control the length of our lives, but we can control its width and depth. Our time here is limited, but we mostly live like we have all the time in the world, so we waste it. As the Buddha once said, “The trouble is you think you have time.” We overestimate what we can achieve in the future and underestimate what we can achieve in the present. We delay living; we say someday I’ll, and we eventually realize that someday becomes never.
“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice.” – Indian Proverb
In 2009, the author Robert D. Smith had a paradigm shift about his life on his 54th birthday; he realized that he has been alive for nearly 20,000 days, 480,000 hours, 28,800,000 minutes, and 1,728,000,000 seconds. 20,000 Days and Counting by Robert D. Smith is a short and precise book on the art of living life to the fullest. Robert shed light on the need to use our time efficiently, live a legacy in the world, and become better every waking day of our life.
The Basic premise of the 20,000 Days and Counting book: Live every day like it could be your last, and do not take any moment for granted because life is very transient and temporary. We overestimate what we can achieve in a year but underestimate what we can achieve in a day.
“One of the illusions [of life] is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday. – RALPH WALDO EMERSON AMERICAN ESSAYIST, LECTURER, POET B. MAY 25, 1803, D. APRIL 27, 1882 (HE LIVED EXACTLY 28,827 DAYS
Here are my favourite take-aways from reading, 20,000 Days and Counting by Robert D. Smith:
Aristotle once quipped, “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence then is not an act but a habit. You do not need to be great to start, but you need to start to be great. We get rewarded in public for what we refine and practice in private. We are what we do when no one is watching; we develop character, integrity, and strength by following through with our commitments day in and day out.
Earl Nightingale once said: “Success is the progressive realization of a worthwhile goal.” We all have different goals in life; one of the greatest things about successful people is that their success leaves clues that we can all learn from. One of the major traits most of them exhibit is a bias for action. Former USA President John F. Kennedy commented, “There are risks and costs to action, but they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.
Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do.
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In What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. Ben Horowitz is the co-founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building―the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.
“Culture is about actions. If the actions aren’t working, it’s time to get some new ones. ”
Here are my favourite takeaways from reading,What You Do Is Who You Are;
A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. The opposite is also true. Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence.
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Author and Partner at Collaborative Fund Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money; the book’s major theme is that we can better understand money through psychology and history than finance. In 2018, Morgan wrote a report outlining 20 of the most important flaws, biases, and causes of bad behavior towards money titled The Psychology of Money; the report went viral; the book is an expanded version of the report.
In investing you must identify the price of success—volatility and loss amid the long backdrop of growth—and be willing to pay it.
The Book’s premise is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. A genius who loses control of their emotions can be a financial disaster. The opposite is also true. Ordinary folks with no financial education can be wealthy if they have a handful of behavioral skills that have nothing to do with formal measures of intelligence.
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” – Bill Gates
Here are my favourite take-aways from reading,The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel:
“Success is getting what you want; Happiness is wanting what you get.”
Happiness is an emotional response to an outcome; if you win, you become happy. If you don’t, you become unhappy. It is an if-then, cause-and-effect proposition that is not sustainable because every time you attain a certain level of happiness, you raise the bar, and it is an endless loop. We also schedule and delay our happiness; we say when this happens, I will become happy. If this then that, Someday I’ll when so and so happens, I would be happy when I get married we change it to when we have kids, then when the kids leave home to when there are grandkids, there is always a reason to postpone. It is a constant moving target.
“Happiness is not a goal…it’s a by-product of a life well-lived.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Author Gary Keller, in his book “The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results,” shares a great anecdote on happiness through the story of the begging bowl:
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Former Yale Professor, William Deresiewicz in his book Excellent Sheep delves into the issues facing the Ivy League admission process, the facade, the pressure on students to succeed, the American elites, and other thought-provoking insights on higher education. The book was inspired by an essay William wrote in the American Scholar: “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.”
As schools shift focus from the humanities to “practical” subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it.
“The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”
Here are my favourite take-aways from reading, Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz:
Your attitude determines your altitude, how far you go in life is determined by your outlook in life. Attitude (noun): a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person’s behavior. The word Attitude is equal to 100, A + T + T + I + T + U + D + E (1 + 20 + 20 + 9 + 20 + 21 + 4 + 5 = 100%) Attitude is everything.
Author John C.Maxwell, in his book Today Matters writes:
A mother and her adult daughter were out shopping one day, trying to make the most of a big sale weekend before Christmas. As they went from store to store in the mall, the older woman complained about everything: the crowds, the poor quality of the merchandise, the prices, and her sore feet. After the mother experienced a particularly difficult interaction with a clerk in one department store, she turned to her daughter and said, “I’m never going back to that store again. Did you see that dirty look she gave me?
The daughter answered, “She didn’t give it to you, Mom. You had it when you went in!”
When we interact with others, our attitudes often set the tone for how we treat one another. Smile at people when you meet them, and they often smile back. Act combative, and they are likely to snap back at you. If you want to enjoy mostly pleasant interaction with people as you go through your day, treat others well. It works more often than not.
“Your attitude is a choice. If you desire to make your day a masterpiece, then you need to have a great attitude. If it’s not good now, you need to change it. Make the decision. ”
Here are some great quote on Attitude:
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In Motivation Manifesto, high-performance coach and trainer Brendon Burchard reveals that the main motive of humankind is the pursuit of greater Personal Freedom. We desire the grand liberties of choice—time freedom, emotional freedom, social freedom, financial freedom, spiritual freedom. Only two enemies stand in our way: an external enemy, defined as the social oppression of who we are by the mediocre masses, and an internal enemy, a sort of self-oppression caused by our own doubt and fear.
The Motivation Manifesto is a pulsing, articulate, ferocious call to claim our personal power.
The Author identified three sets of people we should be wary of on our path to greatness and freedom: The Worriers, The Weakling, and The Wicked. He highlighted some of our limiting behaviours such as fear, Loss Pain vs anticipation of hardship. Life Roles: Observer, Director, Guardian, Warrior, Lover, and Leader.
The 9 Declarations of the Motivation Manifesto
Here are my favourite takeaways from reading “The Motivation Manifesto by Brendon Burchard”
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” – Albert Einstein
A lot of us talk a great deal, but talk they say is cheap. At the beginning of the year, we are all pumped up about all the goals we will achieve in the year. Still, as the day goes by, we begin to renege on the promise we made to ourselves; we do this because of a lack of deciding what we really want and a lack of commitment and the integrity to follow through.
When it is time to execute, we do not follow through with relentless work habit, when you honour your word, you build pride and joy for yourself and respect from other others, but if you do not honour your words, you begin to lose pride and also lose respect from others. I am a firm believer in showing and not telling, let your results speak for you: Your Results would cancel the Insults. If you say you will do something, go ahead and do it: Honour your Word.
Here are some great quotes on Integrity:
Edward F. Stuart is a Professor Emeritus of Economics at Northeastern Illinois University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1986. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in International Economics and Russian and Eastern European Studies.
Capitalism vs. Socialism : Comparing Economic Systems
The course covers the important economic systems in the world today. It also addresses the historical background and big ideas that created the different economic systems.
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Blue Ocean Strategy is a book published in 2004 written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors at INSEAD. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne are Professors of Strategy at INSEAD, one of the world’s top business schools, and co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute in Fontainebleau, France.
The Blue Ocean Strategy is one of the most impactful business book have ever read, my first reading was around 2010, and have since read the book more than 3 times, and it keeps resonating each time. Blue ocean strategy breaks from the stranglehold of competition. At the book’s core is the notion of a shift from competing to creating new market space, making the competition irrelevant.
Blue ocean strategy challenges companies to break out of the red ocean of bloody competition by creating uncontested market space that makes the competition irrelevant. Instead of dividing up existing—and often shrinking—demand and benchmarking competitors, blue ocean strategy is about growing demand and breaking away from the competition.
Here are my favourite take-aways from reading, Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne:
Goal: Read 100 Books by December 31st 2021.
100 Books Reading Challenge 2020
January – 8
February -10
March – 11
April – 11
May – 14
June – 12
July – 13
August – 11
September – 13
October
November
December