self help

“Focus on who you are and what you do well. That is how you succeed. NBA sharpshooters like Kyle Korver and J. J. Redick get paid absurd amounts of money to do one thing: catch and shoot. That’s it. Catch the ball and shoot the ball. And I don’t say that to diminish them. But that is what got them to where they are, and it’s where their greatness lies. Well rounded is overrated. Use your self-awareness to double down on what you do best. Find the one thing you do better than anyone else and continue to pour into that. That is a dying idea. Simon Sinek, believes that we’ve lost the desire—and ability—to excel in one thing. “Giving a lot of one’s self to a small number of things,” he wrote, “seems to have been replaced by giving a little bit of one’s self to a large number of things.”

Excerpt From: Alan Stein. “Raise Your Game.”

“The traditional paradigm for achieving any goal emphasizes discipline and willpower. If we want to succeed, we must (a) religiously follow our plan and (b) resist any distraction that tempts us off plan. Discipline supplies the power to say yes every day to doing the hard stuff. Willpower provides the determination to say no to the bad stuff. We admire, often to the point of amazement, anyone who displays these two virtues to accomplish something difficult or extraordinary: the sibling who loses sixty pounds and keeps them off; the neighbor who accomplishes her lifelong dream of fluency in Italian; the addict who kicks the habit.”

Excerpt From: Marshall Goldsmith. “The Earned Life.”

Invert: Try less before more. Subtract detail even before you act, as with triage.

Expand: Think add and subtract. Nature and Maya Lin show us that these are complementary approaches to change.

Distill: Focus in on the people. Bikes do not balance, but toddlers can. Strip down to what sparks joy.

Finally, persist: Keep subtracting. Can you make less undeniable? Bruce Springsteen made Darkness visible. Costa Rica made neutrality noticeable.

Excerpt From: Leidy Klotz. “Subtract.”

“The basic premise of this infinite field is that it instantly recognizes truth. The infinite field of consciousness registers all that has ever happened throughout time. Every thought, every feeling, every movement, every action is recorded forever. There is no such thing as privacy. Everything radiates out an energy that can be read thousands of years later. We have access to all the information that exists within one second! It takes that long to discover any secret in the universe. To instantly know truth from falsehood is an incredible gift. To not know the difference between truth and falsehood has dragged humanity through endless wars, poverty, savageries, sickness, agonies, suffering, and death. ”

Excerpt From: David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. “The Map of Consciousness Explained.”

“Letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness, with an increased happiness and freedom. It is an actual mechanism of the mind, and everyone has experienced it on occasion. A good example is the following. You are in the midst of an intense argument; you are angry and upset, when suddenly the whole thing strikes you as absurd and ridiculous. You start to laugh. The pressure is relieved. You come up from anger, fear, and feeling attacked to feeling suddenly free and happy.”

Excerpt From: David R. Hawkins. “Letting Go.”

“If I say cave, what is the number?
78.
What word can you make with the number 98?
Beef.
Now you can see that the number
3472 9401215 721110 is as easy as remembering
aMeRiCaN PReSiDeNTiaL CaNDiDaTeS
Do you now see how you can use this to remember any number?
You may be saying, “But now I have to remember a number and a word.” No, it is like learning how to read. In the beginning you really have to work hard to encode the information, but then it becomes easy ”

Excerpt From: Kevin Horsley. “Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive“.

“All memory, whether trained or untrained, is based on association. But that’s stating it too simply. You will be taught many systems of association in this book, but it goes much deeper than that. You see, when people say, “I forgot,” they didn’t, usually—what really happened was that they didn’t remember in the first place. How can you forget something that you didn’t remember, originally? Turn that around, and you have the solution to remembering—if you do remember something originally, how can you forget it? That brings you to forcing yourself to remember originally. How can you do this? The simple systems of association you’ll learn here will do it for you, automatically!”

Excerpt From: Lorayne, Harry;Lucas, Jerry. “The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory at Work, at School, and at Play.”

“As we’ve seen, consciousness reacts decisively to the difference between truth and falsehood. You may instantly reconfirm this by stating your true age (let’s say that you’re 43 years old), “I am 43 years old,” and having someone press down on your extended arm. You’ll stay strong. Now say, “I am 45 years old,” and you’ll instantly go weak. Like a computer, consciousness simply answers 0 or 1, true or false. In all of these exercises, kinesiology reveals the hidden implicit order by making it explicit, disclosing its true nature. The use of the system is self-educative and self-directing. Each answer, it will be discovered, leads to the next question—happily, in an upward and beneficial direction. ”

Excerpt From: David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. “Power vs. Force.”

“I don’t think everyone wants to build the next Apple. I don’t think everyone wants to be the next Elon Musk. I don’t think everyone wants to have a life working eighty to a hundred hours a week for twenty-plus years to build a massive empire. Some people simply want to build a small business that will give them control without having to deal with the day-to-day politics of working for a Fortune 500 company. Others want to build an online business that they can run while traveling the world. Self-awareness is critical to forging your path. When you are honest with yourself, you may realize that being an entrepreneur isn’t the right path for you.”

Excerpt From: Patrick Bet-David. “Your Next Five Moves.”