Unwritten rules of a happy life

1. A $50 watch and a $5000 watch both can tell you the time. But neither can buy you more time. So focus on living each day and each moment fully. And that buys you time and happiness.

2. A $20,000 car and a $200,000 car can both take you to your destination. But neither can take you to your dream. So focus each day on getting a closer to that. And one day you’ll reach it.

3. A $500 TV and a $5000 home entertainment system can both entertain you. But neither can make you happy. So focus each day on being happy. Then you won’t need as much entertainment

4. A $200 outfit and a $2000 outfit can both make you look attractive. But neither can make you a beautiful person. So focus each day on becoming beautiful not just attractive and you will.

5. A $50 pair of sneakers and a $500 workout outfit can both enable you to exercise. But neither can give you health. So focus each day on building health and enjoy it.

6. A $50 night out or a $500 night out with friends can be fun. But neither will guarantee friendship. So focus each day on being a friend. And you’ll have friends.

7. A $200,000 house and a $2,000,000 house will each provide you a place to live. But neither will guarantee you a happy family. So focus each day on building family. And you’ll have it no matter where you live.

8. A $500 wedding ring and a $50,000 wedding ring both signify you’re married. But neither will guarantee you love. So focus each day on building love. And you’ll have a happy marriage.

Advice for my children

 

1. Son or daughter, don’t engage in pleasure, avoid it at all costs—for pleasure is always here. Many young men and women found it and it consumed them and left them poor. Then it waited for other young men and women and consumed them too, for the appetite of pleasure is insatiable.
2. Son or daughter, beware of con men and con women—you know, the ones who will pounce on you like hungry wolves when they discover you have money, and pretend they love you but what they’re really after, is your money. Then as soon as they realize the damage they’ve caused you, they disappear into thin air like ghosts.
3. Son or daughter, life becomes meaningless when you stop loving yourself. Until you understand this important secret, you’ll remain poor and isolated for the rest of your life. Love yourself first, and other people will love you.
4. Son or daughter, laugh with all, but trust no one. Trust is something that requires the test of time. Remember, everyone must earn your trust before you can trust them.
5. Son or daughter, love your father and mother and honour them for bringing you into the world. It’s not a perfect world, but love them still, because no one else is there for them. Remember, you’re a continuation of them. If they failed, you’re there to succeed. If they made some mistakes, you’re there to correct them.
6. Son or daughter, do something useful for your life, invest in your life, invest in education, and most importantly, invest money. And if you don’t have money, don’t fuss. Go work for it. Don’t just sit around. Cut grass. Just do something until you get money.
7. Son or daughter, avoid bad friends, who are just there to consume your money and run away from you when your money is gone.
8. Son or daughter, good friends are rare and difficult to find. If you find one or two, keep them for the longest time possible. Keeping good friends reduces your stress and carelessness.
9. Son or daughter, have fun but also have limits. Remember, a person without limits will soon go over the cliff.
10. Son or daughter, keep away from vipers and rattlesnakes. Vipers and rattlesnakes are people who eat with you on the same table and backbite you the moment they leave your table. Vipers and rattlesnakes are people who are jealous of your progress and would celebrate to see you dead.
11. Son or daughter, don’t marry before you accumulate financial stability. Remember, if you struggled to feed yourself when you were just single, feeding two mouths will be even a greater challenge. What about when the children begin to arrive? What about when your children will want a good education? By then, you will be looking like you’re twenty years older than you actually are.
12. Son or daughter, teach yourself a valuable skill, for a good skill will take you places, but more importantly, teach yourself business, for business will look after you when you’re old, better than your mother ever could.
13. Son or daughter, you will make many mistakes and many things will not go your way, but the worst mistake you can make is to give up and blame yourself. When you make a mistake, don’t beat yourself up. Move on, and you will soon realize as you move that, life is not perfect.
14. Son or daughter, you’re still young and time is on your side. The greatest skill is to understand the value of time, for time is money and money is part of life. Therefore, the greatest sin should be time wastage.
15. Son or daughter, learn from whatever they teach you in school, college or university, but more importantly, learn from the school of life, for the school of life is where the best education is to be found. The school of life teaches you the difference between good and evil, fortune and poverty, success and failure, fame and disgrace.
16. Son or daughter, don’t seek knowledge just for the sake of it. Seek knowledge for the sake of profit and for helping others. Anyway, with the proliferation of the Internet, knowledge has been rendered free. More importantly, seek wisdom, for it will protect you, correct you when you go wrong, protect your life, protect your money, and above all, it will preserve your dignity.

5 ways to be more creative and innovative

 

1. Don’t wait for inspiration as there is no such thing as “the muse”. Turn up every day and do the work.
2. Be remarkable. This doesn’t mean eccentric or odd but is based on building meaningful relationships with clients.
3. Thrash out a project at the beginning so that you have buy-in early and the CEO is not asked to approve something when a project is about to launch.
4. Guard against the error of inaction and worry less about work being perfect. Ship it into the world when it is “good enough”.
5. Focus on “real skills” before technical ones: empathy, connection, humanity, trust, integrity and emotional intelligence.

The seven “C” attributes

Calm. 

Your folks, your employees, your customers, your suppliers, are going to be looking to you as a leader to project a sense of calm through this difficult, uncertain situation.

Confidence. 

You have to be calm, but not still-water calm. You have to project confidence that you’re going to be able to see this through successfully, with a minimum amount of hurt to the company, but also to all of the stakeholders who are relying on your leadership to get them through the difficult days and months ahead.

Communication. 

You have to relentlessly communicate, communicate, communicate. This is to avoid rumors developing that muddy the waters.

Collaboration. 

This is a time for you to call on the resources, the capabilities of all of your employees, all of your team members, and bring them together in taskforces, sub-taskforces, and potentially have a role for everyone in which they feel they can contribute to overcoming the uncertainty, overcoming the crisis.

Community. 

All of us live in communities. so it’s extremely important that we set an example, model behaviors that are community friendly and supportive.

Compassion 

is extremely important at this time. We may rise to the occasion if we’re fortunate to have a good team around us, but there are many people in our organizations who are depending upon us, who are not necessarily that resilient. Compassion at a time of crisis is a very important manifestation of leadership.

Cash. 

The most obvious commercial C of the 7 Cs is Cash. Whatever you can do to conserve cash is going to be critical, because that’s what’s going to determine whether your employees are going to be paid next week.

7 hard truths

1. Everyone has an enemy. You dont have to hurt someone in order to gain an enemy. You might be the nicest person in the world and still have someone who prays for your downfall. An enemy stays close, super close. Watch everyone's actions at all times. Don't trust blindly.
2. You will never feel content if you compare your life to others. How successful they are, how rich they are or even how happy they are. You will only feel content if you focus on yourself and your growth.
3. Your mind can be poisonous if all you feed it is negativity. Be kind to yourself. You deserve it! We are far too critical of ourselves. Treat yourself the same way you would treat someone you love.
4. No matter how hard you try, failure is inevitable. But keep going. Persistence is everything. We don't learn from winning but from our failures.
5. Some people are using us. Whether it's for wealth, time passing, or even as a step for their success. Be attentive to how much you support others and people's motives.
6. No one really cares about you (excluding family). Nobody is interested in your life journey. Nobody gives a toss. But that doesn't mean you should stop your journey and fret about people not valuing you. Care about yourself. Look after yourself. Do it for you! Don't woŕry what others think if they don't care about you in the first place.
7. Grow thicker skin. Don't take everything to heart. Your heart should not endure pain given by people who mean so little to you. Sometimes the ones that really matter do everything to keep you happy. Those who hurt you often are the toxic ones. It hurts but showing that you're tough will take you a long way.

Final message worth summarising:

5 principles that truly make someone happy

 There are 5 principles that truly make someone happy:

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#1 - Live your life the way you want to.

When you are totally free of trying to impress anyone and when you can do whatever you want to, when you want to, for whatever reason you want to do it, that is when you can be the master of your own fate.

You will finally be free of the social expectations and the expectations you have of yourself! But with that freedom comes a lot of responsibility.

Your life truly becomes your own and you can live it the way you think is best. You will learn more about yourself this way and step on the fast-track to happiness.

For ages people sought freedom even though it wasn’t always easier. But when we can take control of our own lives then happiness is in our own hands.

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#2 - Worry less about things that don’t matter.

A lot of the joy in our day-to-day lives simply gets restricted by the stress and worries we put on ourselves.

It’s not that we aren’t happy to begin with and have to find happiness, but rather that we were happy and are restraining it right now with stress, worries, fear and anger.

When you realize that most of the things in life won’t kill you, that most of the worries and problems won’t be so bad, that you still have decades of your life left in front of you and that most things will not matter in the end, your happiness will come from within.

When you take it easier you give yourself room to feel joy! It has always been there but you worry too much to let it out. Take a deep breath and know everything will be okay.

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#3 - Be grateful for what you have.

Gratitude and fear or anger cannot exist simultaneously. The only thing that can coexist at the same time with gratitude is joy.

Become grateful for what you have and that you are alive right here, right now. There is a magic to this world that you can only understand when you become happy with what you have.

It will show you that you do not need that much to be happy and that you could have been happy all along. It will reframe what matters and put it in a different light, making it easier for you to experience real joy.

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#4 - Achieve personal success in what matters.

Chasing success, finding victories in the battles that matter and growing to become greater than you were before is closely tied to happiness.

Most of us are sadly chasing the wrong kinds of success because we never thought about what really matters to us. We chase and receive and then chase again, never reaching true bliss because every victory is not what we wanted.

It’s like we are sailing across the ocean without a map and then getting upset that we aren’t where we wanted to be.

Find out where you want to sail your ship first so you can experience the joy of getting closer to where you want to be.

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#5 - Say ‘Yes’ to what scares you and ‘No’ to what bores you.

Getting outside your comfort zone and exploring who you are is frightening but freeing. It allows you to test your limits and remove some shackles that you thought you had.

You have done this before when you worked out more than you thought you could or when you finally asked that person out that you have been crushing on for months.

This is another form of freeing your mind from restricting beliefs!

When you do what you think you can’t it opens you up to more freedom, more possibilities and more power in your life, the same way as saying ‘No’ to things that do not interest you does.

Whether you say ‘Yes’ to what scares you or ‘No’ to what bores you, both strengthen your belief in yourself and your decisions. And when you have more power to match the responsibility of being free, you have more opportunities to truly live out that freedom.

Become so good they can't ignore you

 Ignore the frustration, comparing yourselves to others, and looking for "short cuts." 

 

Instead…

 

Focus on becoming good. Really damn good.

 

When you focus exclusively on that, recognition and success will come so fast, that it might just overwhelm you.

 

Here are the two biggest ideas I got from the book:

 

Big Idea #1 Understand and then Innovate.

 

Putting in the time isn’t enough. Grinding isn’t enough.

 

You must understand and innovate.

 

Steve wasn’t just memorizing punch-lines for standup comedy, he was figuring out the essence of what made things "funny." 

 

He then used these insights to move past the punchline formula that everyone was using in comedy at the time.

 

Without this understand and innovation, Steve would have just been "another good comedian," instead of the legend he is now.

 

Big Idea #2 Stay Focused.

 

Steve Martin is quick to clarify that working hard over a long period of time was not the key to his success.

 

He constantly fought the urge to start working on other projects, jumping into "exciting opportunities," and looking for shortcuts.

 

Martin makes it extremely clear with this quote:

 

"If you don't saturate your life in a single quest, you'll dilute your focus to a point where becoming outstanding becomes out of reach."

 

His three-step system for success is quite simple:

 

1. Understand

2. Innovate

3. Stay Focused

 

If you’re looking to become world-class in whatever it is that you’re doing, there is only one thing you need to focus on:

 

Becoming so good they can’t ignore you

#StayHumble

 It takes zero talent to work hard and zero talent to stay humble; if you get those things right you will always do well in your journey.” Further advice is to “Learn to fail fast” and “Own as much of the supply chain as you can.”

The lessons: Staying humble is far harder the more success and fame you achieve. Keep things as simple as possible for as long as possible, scale with demand, and remember where you came from. Never underestimate the contribution of those around you and the fortune you’ve been granted.

Proudly exclude everyone except your target audience so you can focus solely on them. Double down on the customer experience. Test your site, and test some more. Utilise the best technology to create exceptional customer touchpoints, via your website and in-person. If you do mess up, own the mistake, respond in an exceptional way and carry on.

Plan your calendar of activity far in advance and be prepared to respond to last-minute events with hard-hitting campaigns. Explore everything that your target audience is already talking about and work out how to make it relevant to your brand in a big way.

The global brands set up before the 2000s didn’t have chance to document their journeys in such detail, but if they had they might be stronger today. Documenting every part of a brand’s journey lets its customers feel like they are getting an inside look. Use social media to be transparent. Everything you do can be remarkable content as long as it’s planned and executed exceptionally.

Never too early nor late to learn

 

1. Passion is a love of life not an obsession over someone or something. If you love life you’ll do your best to exercise and stay healthy. If you love life; you’ll see others for the miracle they are, even if they are mean or don’t particularly like you. If you love life; you’ll love to share how great things are with friends. If you love life; your partner will know how wonderful you think they are, and will love your passion.
2. Be kind. If you’re kind you’ll never lack true friends. Be kind to yourself. Forgive yourself when you mess up. Be kind to those less fortunate than you. Be kind to those that depend on you to do the right thing. Being kind doesn’t mean others won’t sometimes betray you. But friends of mean people are always looking to betray them.
3. Defy authority or temptress if they ask you to be mean. If they ask you to Betray those counting on you, don’t do it; no matter the promised payoff. If you do, you’ll become their slave. I’ve seen many live in big mansions, have money and cars but at the end of the day they were some evil persons slave or became that evil person themselves. I have also seen many ruin their lives, and their kids lives for a life of misery for excitement of cheap cheating sex.
4. Forgiving people helps you more than it helps them. Move on.
5. You can rebuild if you’ve kept your passion and love of life you can find other things to be passionate about if you grow too old or lose a position or you simply fail at something.
6. Be vulnerable but do so with your heart, mind and life. Life will always ask you to take risk, you cannot hide from risk. Choose those risk wisely. You can never have anything you will value without taking risk.
7. Perfectionism has great opportunity cost. If you only do things you can be perfect at you will never be great at anything. Greatness requires you to learn and build on failure. Perfectionism guarantees a failed life.
8. Life is full of misery and suffering for all, but don’t let that define you. Let your life be defined by , your Loyalty, Kindness and Passion.
9. Curiosity helps you enjoy the abundance of the world and knowledge show you all the miracle around that are still deep mysteries Giving helps you appreciate that abundance in your life.
10. Find someone you can love completely. But there is nobody perfect for you. Perfectionism in choosing a partner is futile and ensures failure. Don’t play games or try to manipulate people as that’s not Love either.
11. You can live your life either as if Life itself is and everything in Life is a miracle or nothing in life is. Choosing Life as a miracle is much more enjoyable.

No more procrastination

How to avoid ‘precrastination’

The key here, Bailey says, is to identify when zipping through tasks is a good idea, versus when it’ll actually end up costing you more time in the end. Here are his recommendations for getting stuff done without precrastinating:

1. Ask yourself, Would this task benefit from added time? Precrastination happens when we’re working on autopilot. Though it may seem counterintuitive on busy days, stop and consider all the tasks on your plate. Those that require creativity, thoughtfulness or emotion will benefit from a slower response.
2. Know which tasks you can rush through. If a task takes just a few minutes to complete, it can be helpful to get it done quickly in favor of clearing your attentional space.
3. Keep a calendar and to-do list. This might not seem revelatory, but externalizing what’s cluttering your mind is a wonderful thing. Tracking appointments, tasks, distractions and ideas using a notepad or smartphone app allows you to step back and organize. In addition to freeing up mental space, these tools can help you decide where to channel future energy.

Ultimately, avoiding precrastination is all about working with intention—and if that means slowing down, so be it

What a CEO does

A good CEO spends most of his or her time thinking, analysing, and designing. Not running things. Not making a hundred little decisions. Not putting out fires. Not schmoozing with customers. Not playing politics.

The CEO’s main job is to design and establish an organisational machine that always achieves the goals of the company.

This includes designing systems that work all the time and rarely fail to deliver. This includes finding and developing the right people. People who don’t have to be constantly supervised, monitored, or motivated. It includes designing work processes that don't have to constantly be fixed. It includes designing work processes that normal people can operate without super-human efforts and major stress. The word for all this is robust. Robust means the systems can take challenges and not break or fail to achieve goals.

The CEO must be ever alert for problems and opportunities. There are always a few problems coming at the corporation that will seriously challenge its ability to survive. A good CEO sees them very early. Earlier than everyone else. He already has the strategy and fixes in place before they arrive. The good CEO also sees those very few opportunities that will make or break the company over the long haul. Again, the good CEO sees them earlier than everyone else. He capitalizes on them quickly and decisively.

A good CEO can sometimes make a single decision in his or her career that decides the fate of a company for the next ten years. They can make a single decision whose economic impact can pay their salary forever. I have done it on more than one occasion.

What a CEO should do is handle strategic issues. These are things that are unknown to the average worker.

A good CEO must also have a deep understanding of what business the company is in and insure that the business strategy does not drift or creep away from the core business.

Rediscover Your Purpose In 15 Days: What You Need To Know

Day 1: Define purpose On average, people spend 90,000 hours on the job over the course of their lives. So it’s no wonder that nine in 10 workers would take a pay cut if it meant having the opportunity to participate in more purposeful work. But what is “purpose,” and do we really have to have it? Day 2: Establish what you have Before you can rediscover your purpose, you should identify your passions, your talents and what you have: a job, a career or a calling. One isn’t better than another, but it’s important to know which one you have and which one you want. Day 3: Remember what drives you Now that you’ve established what you have and what you want, it’s time to sit back and reflect on the last time you felt a sense of purpose and when you lost it. By looking at yourself from a different perspective, you’ll be able to do just that. Day 4: Put purpose in perspective Are you setting the bar too high when it comes to finding purpose at work? Learn how many meaningful moments people actually need, according to research, in order to love their work—and their lives. Day 5: Take stock of your days If meaning is found in particular moments, you should account for how you’re spending yours. Grab a pencil and paper and get ready to sketch out your typical day through these three exercises, meant to reveal the times you’re most likely to rediscover your purpose. Day 6: Understand how you fit This may sound like a simple matter, one that can be resolved by reviewing an organizational chart, but understanding how you fit in your organization is about much more than knowing to whom everyone reports. To truly gain insight into how you fit in, you should have a conversation with your manager. Day 7: Craft your tasks You don’t have to change jobs to rediscover your purpose—in fact, sometimes all it takes is a little redesign. This is your guide to the first phase of job crafting: task crafting. Day 8: Invest in your career At a time when the skills you need to succeed change more quickly than you can update your resume, career development is an absolute must. But investing in your professional growth is about much more than making yourself marketable—it’s something you do for you and can help you find fulfillment at work. Day 9: Craft your relationships A relationship strategy is probably not an explicit part of your career development plan, but it should be. Learn how to create one and how to align your daily interactions with your purpose. Day 10: Find your balance When you take care of yourself outside the office, you lay the foundation for your career to thrive in the long term. Here are a few simple strategies anyone can utilize to create a better work-life balance. Day 11: Craft your perceptions You can do all the task and relationship crafting you want, but if you don’t do the same with your perceptions, you’re not going to get all that far. Perception crafting is all about changing the way you think about your job and about when and how you experience meaning at work. Day 12: Connect with something bigger When just four in 10 employees say the mission of their company makes them feel as though their job matters, it’s no wonder so many people spend their days questioning their role in the bigger picture. The good news is that you can take steps toward bridging this gap. Day 13: Look outside the office If you’re struggling to rediscover your purpose inside the office, why not look outside? No, that doesn’t necessarily mean a job search is in order—volunteer work or even a side project you’re passionate about should do the trick. Day 14: Learn how to say what you want At a time when employee turnover costs companies upwards of $600 billion annually, chances are that your boss would rather make a few adjustments to your role than risk losing you and affecting the company’s bottom line. The key is to take everything you’ve learned about what drives you and present your redesigned role to your manager in a way that will benefit both you and the business. Day 15: Embrace the journey You’ve defined purpose, taken stock of your days and crafted every aspect of your job. But it’s likely that what you consider to be fulfilling today will change over the course of your life. Whether or not you’ve been reminded of the “why” behind your work, embrace the journey.

Dark lessons that life will show you

1. From ages 7 to 17, it's all anticipation; from 17 to 27, it's all heartache and regret.
2. The walls of a hospital have listened to more devotional prayers than a place of religion.
3. I could have endured the darkness if I had never seen the sun.
4. Not all wrongs can be forgiven, yet not all hurts can be healed, and there is always something that time can do nothing about it.
5. An outlier is either a beast or a god.
6. Not everyone who falls to their knees can get up right away, but at least they can try not to get down.
7. What is so physiologically irrational about humans? People can have the sexual desire to the ones whom they don’t have emotionally attached to.
8. Who you can forgive bottomlessly is someone who can hurt you bottomlessly.
9. The scariest thing in the world is that people who are better than you work harder than you.
10. Fortunate people are healed by childhood all the time, while unfortunate people are healing their childhood all the time.

Which 10 things we should never do?

1. A corporate leader once told me, “Never write anything in a company-related email that you wouldn’t want published on the front page of the newspaper”
2. Don’t hurt anyone. Just don’t. Physically or emotionally or mentally. I don’t care what they did to you. (Unless it’s self defence assault)
3. Don’t hurt yourself. Don’t think thoughts that feel horrible, stay away from people who make you feel small and please for the love of God—take care of your health and don’t kill yourself. You are worth the world.
4. Even if it’s just a mile away, do not even consider driving with alcohol in your system.
5. If you own a business or work with finances, keep your paperwork clean. Fraud and deceit may look tempting but they’re also fast tracks to jail.
6. Get married, have kids AFTER you get over your addictions. Heal yourself completely. Nobody needs your crap.
7. My mother said to me, “When it comes to situations outside the family, there are 3 people you must never ever lie to— your teacher, your doctor, and your lawyer.”
8. I’ve said this before in an answer and I’ll say it again, do NOT pee in that toilet you see in your dream.
9. I cannot constitutionally tell you to NEVER do this because you have rights— but please think twice or thrice or a million times before bringing your conservative signs and protests to abortion clinics or LGBT rallies. People have different ideas about how they want to live, and also you look like jokers when you stand outside in the freezing cold shouting psalms into a microphone. All religions, at the core, promulgate love and acceptance.
10. Never ever ever ever ever hurt a dog.