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