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"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."
We all want to be high performing in every area of our lives. The key, often, is building the right habits.
Habits are the prequel to a successful life. If you have habits that work for you, you are much more likely to be happy, healthy, productive and creative. If you have habits that don’t work for you, it’s going to be more of a struggle.
Strive Life Design is a collection of the best resources to help you build the right habits—TED Talks, book reviews, articles, tools—organized into easy to follow guides to life and how to better it.
Practical takeaways that can help you learn about the dynamics of human behavior—psychology, habit formation, performance improvement and well-being—then apply it to your own life.
"Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential."
These keystone skills have a huge impact on your life and shape how you spend your time each day. They are essential skills that are going to allow you to build the right habits, develop an empowering mindset, and live your life on your own terms.
Socrates held that self-knowledge is so valuable that other pursuits are laughable unless one has it. He goes on to even say that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is.
Before we can change our behavior, we need to be conscious of who we are, why we think a certain way, and how thinking affects our actions. Knowing yourself will have a huge impact on your life. It is what you need for crucial decisions like choosing the right career, the right relationship, or the right people to be around.
Learn to understand your mind and body, and it will pay dividends for the rest of your life.
Motivation fails, habits succeed. Willpower fails, planning succeeds. If something matters to you, don’t rely on motivation or willpower. Plan, and form a habit. Whether you want to get more sleep, be more productive or get in better shape, habits make change possible.
Everything known about habits, from neurologists studying amnesiacs and organizational experts remaking companies, is that if you understand how they function, any of them can be changed. We have the ability to choose our habits, once we know how.
Learn about the strategies you can use to overcome, address and counteract bad habits, and create good habits. It takes work to make a habit, but once that habit is set, we can harness the energy of habits to build healthier, more productive, more fulfilling lives.
Our lives will always be found to be related to our inner state. We are where we are in our lives because of our thoughts. The habits and actions required to accomplish whatever you want to accomplish, all starts with the right thoughts.
There is a reason why this message lies at the foundation of 99% of all self-development books ever published. With the right thoughts you can achieve financial freedom, advance in your career, establish a positive outlook on life, fulfilling relationships, and lasting happiness. Almost anything is possible with the right thoughts.
It’s not just our talent and abilities that bring us success — but whether we utilize a fixed or growth mindset. Those that believe that they ARE great or flawed have a fixed mindset. People that believe their greatness or flaws are a result of action have a growth mindset. People with a Growth Mindset achieve their optimal potential.
Your belief system is the invisible force behind your behavior. Many people have limited beliefs, which will constrain them in some way, and impact their quality of life. Become aware of how your beliefs affect your behavior, and cultivate a belief system that is both real and empowering. Your behavior and your habits will follow.
You can’t manage time, time continues on whether we like it or not, there is only self-management. Time is limited. No matter how rich or poor you are, you only have 24 hours in a day. The way we utilize these 24 hours is what makes us happy or sad, rich or poor. What’s important is learning how to make the most of those 24 hours.
There’s 168 hours in a week. The majority of people sleep about 6-8 hours a day. That means you only have around 112-126 hours each week to focus on your priorities. Those who manage to be the most productive each day don’t have special powers; they’ve just mastered the right habits and created the right systems to accomplish what they value most.
Learning how to use time effectively is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance.
If you study people who succeed, you will see most of them follow systems, not goals. Goals are reach it and be done objectives, while systems are what you do on a regular basis with the general expectation to improve.
Systems are flexible and they leave you open to being open to better ways of doing things. They are skill based, allowing you to transfer skills to future projects & endeavors. Approach each new opportunity with the question: How likely is this going to improve my broad range of skills and increase my odds of success?
Goals are rigid pursuits that shut off your awareness for other opportunities. They are still useful, but only in narrow, simplistic and predictable pursuits. Like simple tasks that are short in duration and have a clear purpose. Goals are terrible for long endeavors like personal health or career success.
Goals will be used for planning your progress, and your systems are built for actually making progress.
Decisions point you in the directions you’ll travel. In any moment, a decision you make can change the course of your life forever. Choose wisely, and your future will reflect that.
Fine tune your decision-making over time. In the beginning, you might make a lot of dumb decisions, but that’s how you learn. Over time your decision-making process will improve.
Learn about the key elements that can help guide you in your decison-making process. You are not a product of your circumstances. You are a product of your decisions.
Why is self-discipline worth possessing? Because those who possess it have the ability to determine what they do with their life. Those who lack self-discipline will have their path determined by someone or something else.
There are key elements—i.e. commitment, focus, persistence, goals, self-control etc—that must be present for self-discipline to flourish and exist. Most people have some or all of these key ingredients, but lack the knowledge of where and how to use them.
“Discipline equals freedom.” -Jocko Willink
Success means different things to everyone. Maybe success to you is working for yourself, advancing in your career or starting a family. To apply this in your own life, first, you must define what success means to you.
However you do define it, it is achievable if you collect the right field tested beliefs and habits. You may not become a billionaire like Bill Gates, but the ceiling is the roof.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs provides the shape of an ideal life lived in harmony. It is a useful tool to turn to whenever you are trying to assess out the direction of your life. The top Need being to reach personal potential and the desire to pass along that knowledge helping others.
At the level of self-actualization, we strive to maximize personal potential. At the level of self-transcendence, we favor service to others. By focusing on things beyond the self—altruism, spiritual awakening, liberation from egocentricity, and the unity of being—we can serve a purpose in life that reaches an existence or experience beyond a physical level.
“Every person is, in part, his own project and makes himself.”
The experience that translates everything is within the mind. The way our mind functions is the ultimate thing the determines the quality of our experience. When the brain works right, you work right. When the brain is troubled, you are much more likely to have trouble in your life.
Our behaviors can accelerate the aging process or decelerate it. You can start to improve your brain health within 2 months of changing to healthier habits and with a better brain, everything in your life is better.
All the things we want the most—calmness, compassion, patience, generosity, happiness. These aren’t factory settings. These are skills that can be trained—You can train your brain and learn how to regulate thoughts, manage emotions, and behave productively, regardless of whatever life may be throwing at you.
No matter what your goals are, having a healthy mind is the key to reaching your greatest potential. As Lao Tzu says, “If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”
We all know the importance of taking good care of our physical health. It impacts every other area of life and it’s not like you can just trade your body in for a new one.
The mind and body have a complex interrelationship. Exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress and even your posture—all influence each other. For example, poor sleep habits lead to a decrease in mental performance, more stress reactive and even lowers your willpower. This creates a negative feedback loop that impacts other areas of your life.
Create a positive feedback loop where the mind and body work together to achieve the best results possible. Keep your body healthy and you’ll be able to get the most from your mind. Keep your mind healthy, and you’ll be able to get the most from your body.
“It’s what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate ten, twenty, and thirty years from now.” -Warren Buffet
Ancient philosophers and contemporary scientist agree that a key and maybe the key to happiness is strong relationships with other people. To be happy, we need to have long-term relationships, we need to feel connected, we need to belong, get support, and just as important, give support. Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
From everyday interactions to personal intimacy, we are constantly building towards healthy relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and society as a whole. As Paul J. Meyer said, “Communication—the human connection—is the key to personal and career success.”
The distinguishing quality of the world’s happiest, and most fufilled people is that they all seem to be aligned towards some primary focus of meaning in their life. People with a strong sense of purpose tend to fare better on several different measures of mental health, well-being, and even cognitive functioning.
Living a meaningful life takes work. It’s an ongoing process. Happiness comes and goes, says writer Emily Esfahani Smith, but having meaning in life—serving something beyond yourself and developing the best within you—gives you something to hold onto.
There will be around 80,000 hours in your career alone—make the right career, and life choices, and you can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life. In the words of Charles Bukowski “…Find what you love and let it kill you.”
Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend. It’s rarely luck, advanced degrees, inheritance or intelligence and more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and self-discipline. The hunger for wealth isn’t immoral. Money provides freedom. It will help you live a better life, take care of your loved ones and give you the opportunity to give back to others.
We all have a personal money blueprint ingrained in our subconscious minds, and it is this blueprint, more than anything, that will determine our financial lives. If you are not doing as well financially as you would like, you will have to change your money blueprint.
Your greatest money making asset is you. Don’t hold back on spending your time or money on education or consulting to get the biggest return on that investment.
Spirituality is a broad concept with room for many perspectives. In general, it includes a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, and it typically involves a search for meaning in life.
Spiritual individuals strive toward a better life and consider personal growth and fulfillment a central goal. Spirituality can be considered to be a path toward self-actualization, because it requires people to focus on their internal values and work on becoming a better individual.
A clear, well-defined life philosophy gives you the guidelines and boundaries that will drive your actions. Study the different traditions and philosophies, and follow the path that inspires you most.
Living a meaningful and effective life doesn’t just happen. You have to make time to cultivate the areas of your life you want to improve, and you can do this by “Sharpening the Saw.”
Sharpening the Saw is the final habit in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” This means to preserve and enhance the greatest asset you have—You. Keep learning, develop, and grow. It’s a life long quest that pays dividends beyond the skills you acquire.
It isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting the right things done. A systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not. This allows you to make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
Your Life System will give you direction and tell you where to distribute your time, energy and focus each day. You are creating a precise blueprint to guide your steps, clarify your ideas, and prioritize the actions that will increase your chances of achieving what you want in life.
"We all have two choices: we can make a living or we can design a life."