If someone else could do something, then I could try and work out how.
It starts with believing in yourself.
First thing successful people do in the morning
• Eat the Frog
Tackle the hardest problem on your plate. -Mark Twain
• Visualize
Visualize how you will make your day. -Tony Robbins
• Work Out
I do it just to clear my head and relieve me of stress. -Barak Obama
Five simple steps that apply order to chaos
1. Capture – Collect What Has Your Attention
Use an in-basket, notepad, or voice recorder to capture 100% of everything that has your attention. Little, big, personal and professional – all your to-do’s, projects, things to handle or finish.
2. Clarify – Process What It Means
Take everything that you capture and ask: is it actionable? If no then trash it or file it as reference. If yes, decide the very next action required. If it will take less than two minutes, do it now. If not, delegate it if you can; or put it on your next action list to do when you can.
- Do work that pushes you to your edges.
- Waste zero time on the past.
- Focus on being masterful at one thing versus mediocre at many things.
- Spend more time around art.
- Read biographies of lives greatly lived.
- 20X your goals, plans and dreams.
- Associate with game-changers, visionaries and titans.
- Celebrate how far you’ve come versus the distance still to go.
- Cause a little trouble by disrupting the status quo.
- Accept the project you fear the most.
- Leave an inspirational quote on a stranger’s windshield.
- Stop watching the news.
- Think a decade ahead rather than a day in advance.
- Start a movement.
- Wow a customer.
- Install a new habit.
- Remember that the mother of genius is simplicity.
- Know that the thing that is easiest to do is rarely the thing that is best to do.
- Speak less and listen better.
- Do a dream collage with images of your ideal moments.
- Record your ideal day in your journal.
- Forgive someone.
- Thank someone.
- Don’t confuse money with meaning nor income with impact.
- Spend the first 20 minutes of your day in exercise.
- Do your “Nightly 3”, writing 3 good things that happened to you during the day that’s ending.
- Speak your truth even when your voice shakes.
- Join Traffic University and leverage time commuting to learn and grow via audio programs.
- Visit a new city.
- Discover a new restaurant.
- Get good at being alone.
- See your work as your craft.
- Watch the movie “Searching for Sugar Man”.
- Do meeting standing up so they end quicker.
- Stop using the words “can’t”, “impossible” and “hate”.
- Practice harder (mastery isn’t a natural gift, it’s a daily devotion).
- Write handwritten thank you notes.
- Publish a book.
- Thank a mentor.
- Call your parents.
- Get out of the office and go invest in your personal development.
- Stop complaining.
- Use social media to uplift, encourage, teach and share.
- Less TV. More reading.
- Join a mastermind group.
- Spend the first 90 minutes of the next 90 days focused on your single largest opportunity.
- Remember that for every one masterpiece, Picasso painted 1000 paintings.
- Don’t listen to naysayers.
- Live like you mean it.
Show Your Work!
10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
Austin Kleon
20140306
About This Book
Show Your Work! puts an end to the destructive myth of the lone genius by showing artists and writers, makers and creative entrepreneurs how to join the new ecology of talent. It is about getting found by being findable, about using the network instead of wasting time networking.
The key is process, not product. Share something new every day (but don’t turn into human spam). Keep an amateur’s mind – where the possibilities are limitless. Be a connector, a teacher, an open node. Don’t hoard.
In ten vital new principles, Show Your Work! shows that you have to be open, generous, brave – an artist that other artists will steal from.
1. You Don’t Have to Be a Genius
If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas. Good work isn’t created in a vacuum. Creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
2. Think Process, Not Product
Audiences not only want to stumble across great work, but they, too, long to be creative and part of the creative process. By letting go of our egos and sharing our process, we allow for the possibility of people having an ongoing connection with us and our work, which helps us move more of our product.
You can’t expect to become great at something without practicing it over and over.
But, practice in the same way you always have and you’ll get the same results you always have.
Excellence requires more than just a lot of practice. It requires the right kind of practice.
Anders Ericsson, the psychologist behind the 10,000 Hour Rule, explained this important caveat by saying, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal. You have to tweak the system by pushing, allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.”
If you want to create the life of your dreams, then you are going to have to take 100% responsibility for your life as well. You have to take the position that you have always had the power to make it different, to get it right, to produce the desired result.
E + R = O
(Event + Response = Outcome)
The basic idea is that every outcome you experience in life is the result of how you have responded to an earlier event or events in your life.
If you don’t like the outcomes you are currently getting, there are two basic choices you can make.
- You can blame the event (E) for your lack of results (O).
- You can instead simply change your responses (R) to the events (E) until you get the outcomes (O) you want.