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Thrive!
Thrive! is the first book from best-selling author Alan Weiss to deal with self-mastery and taking control of your own life. Hundreds of pragmatic techniques help the reader avoid the victimology; mentality; accept personal accountability; identify and throw baggage off the train (even at the cost of a few cows in the countryside); build self-worth; and master the five traits which Thriving people employ. Example: You will be a ball in that strangely hypnotic Japanese game of Pachinko if you listen to...unsolicited feedback...I've seen people's dreams ruined by those who offer 'help.' It's usually not malicious (though sometimes it is), it's usually done with the intent to help, it's usually focused on 'fixing' you. And it's usually deadly. Alan Weiss takes you through specific steps and techniques he's developed and utilized with thousands of coaching and mentoring clients globally over the past 25 years. In 200 pages and one day you can begin to retrieve control of you life, your relationships, and your career, and escape the pressures trying to make you into someone else every day. George Irish, the former president of Hearst Newspapers (reviewing Alan Weiss's Life Balance) observes, (Alan Weiss)...provides a wealth of information in an engaging and thoroughly readable fashion. He shows that to be successful you don't have to just work, work, work. Learn why real wealth is discretionary time, and why so many people erode wealth by mindlessly trying to simply make money. Come to grips with TIAABB (there is always a bigger boat). Face the fact that decisions, not wishing, move you along the road to your goals. Too many people are merely trying to survive, blaming the economy, technology, the competition, their parents, their kids, or the fates. Don't waste another minute. Start Thriving!
- GenresBusinessEntrepreneurship
239 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 21, 2009
5 people are currently reading
193 people want to read
About the author
Alan Weiss
126 books123 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Alan Weiss is an American entrepreneur, author, and public speaker
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Alan Weiss is an American entrepreneur, author, and public speaker
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 15, 2021
So this is my assessment of the book Thrive - stop wishing your life away by Weiss, Alan according to my 8 criteria:
1. Related to practice - 4 stars
2. It prevails important - 4 stars
3. I agree with the read - 4 stars
4. not difficult to read (as for non English native) - 3 stars
5. Too long (more than 500 pages) - short and concise (150-200 pages) - 4 stars
6. Boring - every sentence is interesting - 4 stars
7. Learning opportunity - 4 stars
8. Dry and uninspired style of writing - Smooth style with humouristic and fun parts - 4 stars
Total 3.875 stars
───────────────
▪ You won’t get attention unless you pay attention
▪ If you’re not failing, you’re not trying
▪ It’s not the failure that thwarts our success; it’s the fear of failure
▪ Trait 1
Resilience
▪ Move three things forward a mile, not a hundred things forward an inch
▪ I want the airplane’s cockpit crew to get the oxygen first, so that they can ensure my safety. I can then reach for mine and thereafter try to help someone else
▪ But it does mean that you are capable, when necessary, of working independently and listening only to your own judgment. True resilience does not require the validation of others. It doesn’t mean that you’re always “up” and that you won’t ever be down. But it does mean that you rebound relatively quickly and don’t suffer lasting adverse effects of defeats and setbacks.
▪ For instance, if you’re trying to market a new service, then get your website in good shape, target your natural buyers, and tell everyone you know what you’re doing. But don’t also try, simultaneously, to open a new office, hire administrative help, and launch a series of workshops.
▪ Ms. Wheatley posits that consciousness is a factor of processing information, and that, therefore, a dog has a higher degree of consciousness than a snail, because dogs are capable of processing much more information than snails
▪ In my vernacular, three things at a time that can be done concurrently.
▪ studies report that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean see America as a land of opportunity and tend to succeed more than nativeborn blacks who receive an indoctrination of victimhood
▪ Consequently, some people have a higher consciousness than others.
▪ The key is to avoid being in a place where you can’t win enough, or be successful enough, or be happy enough. You can’t compare yourself to others, or to some arbitrary standards, or even to your own past performance (we all age, Bunky). You need the self-mastery to inform yourself that you are doing well, you are succeeding, and you are happy, without needing to validate those conclusions against anyone else’s standards and practices.
▪ I won’t argue that you have to compromise at times—after all, you’re never a captain on someone else’s ship—but we tend to compromise too much and surrender too much without request or provocation.
▪ Resilience is not a competency, it’s a behavior
▪ Happiness is personal
▪ Accept the wisdom of making decisions that can be corrected and adjusted, and alleviate yourself of the pressure of having to somehow make the “right” decision in advance, every time
▪ Trait 2
Eternal learning:
▪ Thrive are a belief that you can succeed; the discipline and work ethic required to succeed; and the resilience to keep trying in all kinds of weather
▪ If you want to see things through to completion, start at the end. Choose a results point, an ending date, an outcome time— whatever you choose to call it, and work backwards.
▪ You realize that success is wonderful on your own terms, but it’s never permanent, and only leads to further opportunities and challenges
▪ The grass isn’t always greener, it’s just other grass.
▪ Provide rewards at mileposts. As you achieve key steps (a chapter completed, a new floor installed, reservations confirmed) give yourself a present. Walk the dog, hit the beach, buy a memento, make furious love.
▪ A fundamental trait of masters of their fate is eternal learning
▪ That means you never “dumb down” your abilities, competencies, or brilliance
▪ Eschew distractions. Feel free to put alluring and enticing new ideas and requests on a list, on a back burner, or under a refrigerator magnet, but do not allow the siren to undermine you.
▪ The three things you want to move forward a mile are your actual priorities. Accord them that respect and investment.
▪ Assign another major initiative or project as you complete a prior one. So long as you aren’t pursuing perfection but success, your major issues will be dealt with, will be reconciled, will end. Then you can add another. This keeps the circulation going and your own need for variety fulfilled.
▪ Confidence: The honest-to-goodness belief that you can help others to learn and grow through your talent
▪ The way to Thrive is one day, one issue, one interaction at a time
▪ Arrogance: The honest-to-goodness belief that you can help others through your talent, but you have nothing left to learn yourself
▪ Smugness: Arrogance without the talent
▪ The reality is that we need steps and mileposts to reach our goals and, counterintuitively, they can be small. “Think big” is fine for identifying the destination, but “think of the next move” is important for progress toward it.
▪ However, if you position a drawback, setback, or not being the starting quarterback as something that was ultimately positive—since the episode allowed for another path to emerge, another opportunity to unfold, another important relationship to develop—then life’s vicissitudes can be organized into positive results. The world isn’t out to get you.
▪ Strategy, visions, results, outcomes—these can be big picture, and singular. But the means to get there—tactics, plans, implementation, execution, administration—they need to be routinized.
▪ If you demonstrate you can do it, people will follow you, and if you fail in the attempt, they will identify with you
▪ Bureaucracy is the triumph of means over ends.
▪ It’s tough to Thrive when you’re in a rut. And let me define rut: It’s doing more and more of what you’re already pretty good at, without advancing your technique, effectiveness, or success
▪ Happiness and life balance are about what makes sense for you. There is no objective set of “happiness criteria” by which you gauge your current state of elation.
▪ Trait 3
Self-esteem
▪ The major obstacle then and now is a profound lack of self-esteem. If you want to Thrive, you need to feel good about yourself, irrespective of whether you’re currently experiencing success in the endeavor in front of your nose.
▪ I’m not suggesting that a broken toe is a signal for celebration, or that a lost opportunity is a sign of success. But I am contending that life is not so much about what happens to you, but rather what you do about what happens to you
▪ You are only totally engaged when you are involving your thinking and feeling and taking consequent action. Then you tend to act appropriately for the occasion, with due moderation or outrage, but always as a symbol of reason and passion appropriately and effectively combined.
▪ Empowerment is the ability to make decisions that influence your life and/or the outcomes of your work.
▪ People with high self-esteem are not reliant on that last piece of unsolicited feedback, the shrug or moan into which Gnostic meaning is divined.
▪ That anchor is a combination of your talent and your willingness to apply it. That is, the anchor isn’t sufficient in and of itself. It has to be cast overboard and obtain purchase. The anchor is your stake. It does no good on the boat.
▪ I’m advocating that you don’t even bother trying to come close to perfection. At 80 percent readiness, you move. That’s because the final 20 percent requires a huge expenditure of additional time without proportional return for the investment.
▪ Set the agenda. Simply state, “I know your time is tight, as is mine. I have three issues I’d like to discuss and I imagine you have a few. Why don’t we list them, set some priorities, and then invest our time accordingly?” That immediately establishes you as a peer (our time is tight), and allows you to actually create the music to dance to
▪ People with high self-esteem shout at you, figuratively, to follow them. People with low self-esteem tend to drift into the shadows of daily intercourse.
▪ No one Thrives in shadows.
▪ Acquire and hone skills. The more skills you have (professional, social, technical, interpersonal, and so forth) the better you perform. The better your perform, the more you develop a sense of self-worth, and the more prone you are to develop still more skills.
▪ Build on strengths. Eternally correcting weaknesses is the growth equivalent of Zeno’s Paradox: Make 50 percent progress toward your goal every day and you’ll never reach it. People (and teams and organizations) grow by building on strengths. Identify yours and exploit them.
▪ Articulate your values. Be cognizant of what you stand for and be able to explain it to others. Know when to hold and when to fold. If you’re clear on what’s important to you, you’ll be more assured when you feel the need to defend or move forward.
▪ Expertise” is more than a briefcase and a plane ticket, and is never an infomercial
▪ You don’t have to set records and you don’t have to be the best ever. You simply have to win.
▪ Here’s Jefferson: “ In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.”
▪ That’s right, Thriving is about simply staying in the game.
▪ Think of self-esteem as a verb or action, moving toward a noun or condition called self-confidence.
▪ Trait 4
Perseverance: You win some, you lose some, and some get rained out, but you have to suit up for them all
▪ The reward isn’t in being unscathed, it’s in being left standing at the conclusion.
▪ Any psychologist worth her diploma will tell you that self-esteem is largely a function of creating and maintaining healthy personal relationships
▪ Thriving is about trying. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying!
▪ Life is about success, not perfection
▪ My favorite country song title is, “If I had shot her when I wanted to, I would have been out by now”
▪ And my favorite book title is, Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Goodbye (by Cynthia Heimel). But I digress.
▪ People who Thrive persevere. They overcome bad news, bad outcomes, and bad luck. They overcome loss and sorrow.
▪ When you are facing tough circumstances, you have only these positive options:
▪ Fix. If something has gone wrong and must be restored, then fix it quickly and expeditiously. That can be a machine, a process, or a relationship
▪ First, we don’t grow or fulfill ourselves by “fixing.” We’re not damaged goods. We Thrive through growth based on our strengths and passions.
▪ Second, there are a lot of good ways to do things. Someone else’s ideal doesn’t mean that it should be yours.
▪ Improve. There are conditions that are historically fine but no longer serve us well. We have changed, grown, matured. It’s time to elevate or alter our prior conditions
▪ Occam’s Razor: A close shave is a good thing
Sir William of Occam, a 14th Century British philosopher (what we’d call today in pedestrian prose a “thought leader,” ugh) posited that the easiest route is usually the best, and hence “Occam’s Razor” became a metaphor
▪ Cope. There are issues which can neither be fixed nor improved. We must cope with loss, death, and heartbreak. These are inevitable consequences of living
▪ We need to tuck our egos away, because when they are so exposed and perched on the surface they are vulnerable to every shrug and moan from passing pedestrians. We also need to bury our egos in deep bunkers, so that we know they are safe and even a direct hit isn’t going to cause any damage.
▪ Trait 5
Love:
▪ How do we do this?
▪ Act like the mafia. It’s never personal, it’s only about business
▪ Sixth, you should only trust people with a vested interest in your success. Those are usually people you feel comfortable asking for feedback and advice: People who love you, respect you, work closely with you, want you to succeed.
▪ the philosopher George Santayana, described a fanatic as “someone who loses site of his goals and consequently redoubles his efforts.”
▪ Masters of their fate feel free to love, and do so repeatedly and continually. They form deep relationships and involvements, whether formalized or not. Thriving is about loving life.
▪ Treat questions and objections as signs of interest.
▪ To Thrive you have to free yourself to love. Thriving means taking big bites, making waves, taking risks. You must have passion to engage in those behaviors, and love is the fuel of passion
▪ Separate the factual from the ad hominem
▪ Solve 90 percent of my problems in 10 days and I’m much more grateful than your solving 100 percent of my problems in a year (by which time I undoubtedly have new problems).
▪ Look at the gestalt and never generalize from a specific. One instance, one example, one situation does not symbolize or encapsulate your worth. View your life, your history, your probable future. A single victory or a single defeat does not define you
▪ Speed isn’t of the essence. Speed is the essence
▪ View your entire presence and you’re much more unlikely to allow a single episode to damage your self-worth. A strong, resilient, and protected ego is at the heart of Thriving.
▪ Winston Churchill observed that “success is never final and failure seldom fatal—it’s courage that counts.”
▪ you need just a modicum of courage to succeed these days. In most cases, simply holding your ground will put you ahead of the pack, since the pack retreats
▪ Resilient people do not regard failure as a personal statement about either their worth or their efficacy
▪ Despite every economic crisis in the world, don’t debunk legitimate credit. It is meant to fill in spots where there is uneven or insufficient cash flow when you are confident that future cash will repay the credit. (People who refuse to go into debt aren’t frugal or smart, they don’t trust themselves to repay, don’t foresee the future cash, or are simply anal.) Since the dawn of currency, people have intelligently used credit to offset temporary shortfalls in cash.
▪ One of the most essential keys to Thriving is to accept imperfect success.
▪ People who regard their learning as externally focused are resilient, never take setbacks personally, don’t generalize from negative specifics
▪ you can’t drive at all from the back seat. Grab the controls when you want to steer the conversation or the issue.
▪ You can’t afford to talk to yourself or anyone else in terms of “If only” and “I wish I had.” That’s like watching the rerun of a sporting event and hoping that it turns out differently the second time. You can’t change your personal history, but you can prevent it from ruining your future.
▪ Instead of empty phrases we all need clear beliefs and pragmatic skills to Thrive.
▪ when you hate someone, when you’re extremely angry with them and can’t let it go, you’ve become their slave
▪ Clinical psychologist Frederick Herzberg theorized that the presence of money is not a motivator, but the absence of money is a demotivator. He called this “hygiene theory.” If you extrapolate this, the presence of money does not ensure happy relationships, or success in endeavors, or rewarding friendships. But the absence of money and the concomitant stress almost always weakens and threatens relationships, work, and plans. The lack of money creates a sense of powerlessness, and powerlessness is corrupting and devastating.
▪ Remember, the people who are challenged to a duel have their choice of weapons
▪ We all carry baggage through life. The idea is to make sure it’s positive, supportive, and attractive for our intent and journey. We can’t allow parents or kids to give us theirs or even to influence our own. That may sound selfish, but you can’t fit into others’ outfits and, even if you could, you’d probably look foolish.
▪ Life is short only because we’re not paying attention
▪ Superstitions are merely attempts to organize fears without having to understand them
▪ It’s courage that counts. The courage to face fears logically and rationally, using formal or informal help if you need it. It’s the courage to understand the power of an external locus of learning. And it’s the courage to say, “I’m not here to merely get by and survive. I’m here to Thrive.”
We’re not here to stick our toe in the water. We’re here to make waves.
▪ When our attention span is brief, our life experiences tend to be brief. We think life is short because we’re looking backward in nostalgia or forward in anticipation
▪ We should be looking around in awareness
▪ The Greeks believed that it was glorious to die in battle (go Spartans!), and so they fought to the death, even against overwhelming odds. The Romans believed that your strategy should be to win the war and not merely the current battle, and it was fine to retreat to fight again another day. I’m a Roman in that regard. Apologize and return. It’s crazy to defend something that is wrong.
▪ Moreover, the road to self-esteem is paved with competence. Even though efficacy (ability to do things well) and self-worth (ability to feel good about yourself no matter how you do) can be independent variables, they can affect each other. The more competent you are and the more talents you can apply, the better your rate of success. The better your rate of success, the better you feel about yourself, and the more likely you are to invest in gaining still more competence and tools. That’s the wonderful “Thrive cycle” you can enter if you so choose.
▪ But you have to be on the battlefield in either case, armed and ready.
▪ The figure on the previous page shows very simply how this operates. Skills lead to application, which creates success, which provides motivation for people to feel better and better about themselves. Think of self-esteem as a “verb” or action condition, leading to self-confidence, which is a “noun” or final condition
▪ George Carlin was right: “If it’s someone else’s book, it’s not selfhelp.”
▪ Self-esteem then should be constant, not subject to the lows of your last defeat or the highs of your last victory. You’re good at some things, not so good at others; in fact, you may be better at some things at certain times and not other times.
▪ You can see the somewhat nauseating effect on self-esteem if you “ride the waves” in the upper graphic shown below, and are constantly affected by external events and feedback. When you are sure about who you are and maintain your self-worth through the heady “wins” and the brickbat thrown at your head during “losses,” you possess what I call “self-mastery.”
...
1. Related to practice - 4 stars
2. It prevails important - 4 stars
3. I agree with the read - 4 stars
4. not difficult to read (as for non English native) - 3 stars
5. Too long (more than 500 pages) - short and concise (150-200 pages) - 4 stars
6. Boring - every sentence is interesting - 4 stars
7. Learning opportunity - 4 stars
8. Dry and uninspired style of writing - Smooth style with humouristic and fun parts - 4 stars
Total 3.875 stars
───────────────
▪ You won’t get attention unless you pay attention
▪ If you’re not failing, you’re not trying
▪ It’s not the failure that thwarts our success; it’s the fear of failure
▪ Trait 1
Resilience
▪ Move three things forward a mile, not a hundred things forward an inch
▪ I want the airplane’s cockpit crew to get the oxygen first, so that they can ensure my safety. I can then reach for mine and thereafter try to help someone else
▪ But it does mean that you are capable, when necessary, of working independently and listening only to your own judgment. True resilience does not require the validation of others. It doesn’t mean that you’re always “up” and that you won’t ever be down. But it does mean that you rebound relatively quickly and don’t suffer lasting adverse effects of defeats and setbacks.
▪ For instance, if you’re trying to market a new service, then get your website in good shape, target your natural buyers, and tell everyone you know what you’re doing. But don’t also try, simultaneously, to open a new office, hire administrative help, and launch a series of workshops.
▪ Ms. Wheatley posits that consciousness is a factor of processing information, and that, therefore, a dog has a higher degree of consciousness than a snail, because dogs are capable of processing much more information than snails
▪ In my vernacular, three things at a time that can be done concurrently.
▪ studies report that black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean see America as a land of opportunity and tend to succeed more than nativeborn blacks who receive an indoctrination of victimhood
▪ Consequently, some people have a higher consciousness than others.
▪ The key is to avoid being in a place where you can’t win enough, or be successful enough, or be happy enough. You can’t compare yourself to others, or to some arbitrary standards, or even to your own past performance (we all age, Bunky). You need the self-mastery to inform yourself that you are doing well, you are succeeding, and you are happy, without needing to validate those conclusions against anyone else’s standards and practices.
▪ I won’t argue that you have to compromise at times—after all, you’re never a captain on someone else’s ship—but we tend to compromise too much and surrender too much without request or provocation.
▪ Resilience is not a competency, it’s a behavior
▪ Happiness is personal
▪ Accept the wisdom of making decisions that can be corrected and adjusted, and alleviate yourself of the pressure of having to somehow make the “right” decision in advance, every time
▪ Trait 2
Eternal learning:
▪ Thrive are a belief that you can succeed; the discipline and work ethic required to succeed; and the resilience to keep trying in all kinds of weather
▪ If you want to see things through to completion, start at the end. Choose a results point, an ending date, an outcome time— whatever you choose to call it, and work backwards.
▪ You realize that success is wonderful on your own terms, but it’s never permanent, and only leads to further opportunities and challenges
▪ The grass isn’t always greener, it’s just other grass.
▪ Provide rewards at mileposts. As you achieve key steps (a chapter completed, a new floor installed, reservations confirmed) give yourself a present. Walk the dog, hit the beach, buy a memento, make furious love.
▪ A fundamental trait of masters of their fate is eternal learning
▪ That means you never “dumb down” your abilities, competencies, or brilliance
▪ Eschew distractions. Feel free to put alluring and enticing new ideas and requests on a list, on a back burner, or under a refrigerator magnet, but do not allow the siren to undermine you.
▪ The three things you want to move forward a mile are your actual priorities. Accord them that respect and investment.
▪ Assign another major initiative or project as you complete a prior one. So long as you aren’t pursuing perfection but success, your major issues will be dealt with, will be reconciled, will end. Then you can add another. This keeps the circulation going and your own need for variety fulfilled.
▪ Confidence: The honest-to-goodness belief that you can help others to learn and grow through your talent
▪ The way to Thrive is one day, one issue, one interaction at a time
▪ Arrogance: The honest-to-goodness belief that you can help others through your talent, but you have nothing left to learn yourself
▪ Smugness: Arrogance without the talent
▪ The reality is that we need steps and mileposts to reach our goals and, counterintuitively, they can be small. “Think big” is fine for identifying the destination, but “think of the next move” is important for progress toward it.
▪ However, if you position a drawback, setback, or not being the starting quarterback as something that was ultimately positive—since the episode allowed for another path to emerge, another opportunity to unfold, another important relationship to develop—then life’s vicissitudes can be organized into positive results. The world isn’t out to get you.
▪ Strategy, visions, results, outcomes—these can be big picture, and singular. But the means to get there—tactics, plans, implementation, execution, administration—they need to be routinized.
▪ If you demonstrate you can do it, people will follow you, and if you fail in the attempt, they will identify with you
▪ Bureaucracy is the triumph of means over ends.
▪ It’s tough to Thrive when you’re in a rut. And let me define rut: It’s doing more and more of what you’re already pretty good at, without advancing your technique, effectiveness, or success
▪ Happiness and life balance are about what makes sense for you. There is no objective set of “happiness criteria” by which you gauge your current state of elation.
▪ Trait 3
Self-esteem
▪ The major obstacle then and now is a profound lack of self-esteem. If you want to Thrive, you need to feel good about yourself, irrespective of whether you’re currently experiencing success in the endeavor in front of your nose.
▪ I’m not suggesting that a broken toe is a signal for celebration, or that a lost opportunity is a sign of success. But I am contending that life is not so much about what happens to you, but rather what you do about what happens to you
▪ You are only totally engaged when you are involving your thinking and feeling and taking consequent action. Then you tend to act appropriately for the occasion, with due moderation or outrage, but always as a symbol of reason and passion appropriately and effectively combined.
▪ Empowerment is the ability to make decisions that influence your life and/or the outcomes of your work.
▪ People with high self-esteem are not reliant on that last piece of unsolicited feedback, the shrug or moan into which Gnostic meaning is divined.
▪ That anchor is a combination of your talent and your willingness to apply it. That is, the anchor isn’t sufficient in and of itself. It has to be cast overboard and obtain purchase. The anchor is your stake. It does no good on the boat.
▪ I’m advocating that you don’t even bother trying to come close to perfection. At 80 percent readiness, you move. That’s because the final 20 percent requires a huge expenditure of additional time without proportional return for the investment.
▪ Set the agenda. Simply state, “I know your time is tight, as is mine. I have three issues I’d like to discuss and I imagine you have a few. Why don’t we list them, set some priorities, and then invest our time accordingly?” That immediately establishes you as a peer (our time is tight), and allows you to actually create the music to dance to
▪ People with high self-esteem shout at you, figuratively, to follow them. People with low self-esteem tend to drift into the shadows of daily intercourse.
▪ No one Thrives in shadows.
▪ Acquire and hone skills. The more skills you have (professional, social, technical, interpersonal, and so forth) the better you perform. The better your perform, the more you develop a sense of self-worth, and the more prone you are to develop still more skills.
▪ Build on strengths. Eternally correcting weaknesses is the growth equivalent of Zeno’s Paradox: Make 50 percent progress toward your goal every day and you’ll never reach it. People (and teams and organizations) grow by building on strengths. Identify yours and exploit them.
▪ Articulate your values. Be cognizant of what you stand for and be able to explain it to others. Know when to hold and when to fold. If you’re clear on what’s important to you, you’ll be more assured when you feel the need to defend or move forward.
▪ Expertise” is more than a briefcase and a plane ticket, and is never an infomercial
▪ You don’t have to set records and you don’t have to be the best ever. You simply have to win.
▪ Here’s Jefferson: “ In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.”
▪ That’s right, Thriving is about simply staying in the game.
▪ Think of self-esteem as a verb or action, moving toward a noun or condition called self-confidence.
▪ Trait 4
Perseverance: You win some, you lose some, and some get rained out, but you have to suit up for them all
▪ The reward isn’t in being unscathed, it’s in being left standing at the conclusion.
▪ Any psychologist worth her diploma will tell you that self-esteem is largely a function of creating and maintaining healthy personal relationships
▪ Thriving is about trying. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying!
▪ Life is about success, not perfection
▪ My favorite country song title is, “If I had shot her when I wanted to, I would have been out by now”
▪ And my favorite book title is, Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Goodbye (by Cynthia Heimel). But I digress.
▪ People who Thrive persevere. They overcome bad news, bad outcomes, and bad luck. They overcome loss and sorrow.
▪ When you are facing tough circumstances, you have only these positive options:
▪ Fix. If something has gone wrong and must be restored, then fix it quickly and expeditiously. That can be a machine, a process, or a relationship
▪ First, we don’t grow or fulfill ourselves by “fixing.” We’re not damaged goods. We Thrive through growth based on our strengths and passions.
▪ Second, there are a lot of good ways to do things. Someone else’s ideal doesn’t mean that it should be yours.
▪ Improve. There are conditions that are historically fine but no longer serve us well. We have changed, grown, matured. It’s time to elevate or alter our prior conditions
▪ Occam’s Razor: A close shave is a good thing
Sir William of Occam, a 14th Century British philosopher (what we’d call today in pedestrian prose a “thought leader,” ugh) posited that the easiest route is usually the best, and hence “Occam’s Razor” became a metaphor
▪ Cope. There are issues which can neither be fixed nor improved. We must cope with loss, death, and heartbreak. These are inevitable consequences of living
▪ We need to tuck our egos away, because when they are so exposed and perched on the surface they are vulnerable to every shrug and moan from passing pedestrians. We also need to bury our egos in deep bunkers, so that we know they are safe and even a direct hit isn’t going to cause any damage.
▪ Trait 5
Love:
▪ How do we do this?
▪ Act like the mafia. It’s never personal, it’s only about business
▪ Sixth, you should only trust people with a vested interest in your success. Those are usually people you feel comfortable asking for feedback and advice: People who love you, respect you, work closely with you, want you to succeed.
▪ the philosopher George Santayana, described a fanatic as “someone who loses site of his goals and consequently redoubles his efforts.”
▪ Masters of their fate feel free to love, and do so repeatedly and continually. They form deep relationships and involvements, whether formalized or not. Thriving is about loving life.
▪ Treat questions and objections as signs of interest.
▪ To Thrive you have to free yourself to love. Thriving means taking big bites, making waves, taking risks. You must have passion to engage in those behaviors, and love is the fuel of passion
▪ Separate the factual from the ad hominem
▪ Solve 90 percent of my problems in 10 days and I’m much more grateful than your solving 100 percent of my problems in a year (by which time I undoubtedly have new problems).
▪ Look at the gestalt and never generalize from a specific. One instance, one example, one situation does not symbolize or encapsulate your worth. View your life, your history, your probable future. A single victory or a single defeat does not define you
▪ Speed isn’t of the essence. Speed is the essence
▪ View your entire presence and you’re much more unlikely to allow a single episode to damage your self-worth. A strong, resilient, and protected ego is at the heart of Thriving.
▪ Winston Churchill observed that “success is never final and failure seldom fatal—it’s courage that counts.”
▪ you need just a modicum of courage to succeed these days. In most cases, simply holding your ground will put you ahead of the pack, since the pack retreats
▪ Resilient people do not regard failure as a personal statement about either their worth or their efficacy
▪ Despite every economic crisis in the world, don’t debunk legitimate credit. It is meant to fill in spots where there is uneven or insufficient cash flow when you are confident that future cash will repay the credit. (People who refuse to go into debt aren’t frugal or smart, they don’t trust themselves to repay, don’t foresee the future cash, or are simply anal.) Since the dawn of currency, people have intelligently used credit to offset temporary shortfalls in cash.
▪ One of the most essential keys to Thriving is to accept imperfect success.
▪ People who regard their learning as externally focused are resilient, never take setbacks personally, don’t generalize from negative specifics
▪ you can’t drive at all from the back seat. Grab the controls when you want to steer the conversation or the issue.
▪ You can’t afford to talk to yourself or anyone else in terms of “If only” and “I wish I had.” That’s like watching the rerun of a sporting event and hoping that it turns out differently the second time. You can’t change your personal history, but you can prevent it from ruining your future.
▪ Instead of empty phrases we all need clear beliefs and pragmatic skills to Thrive.
▪ when you hate someone, when you’re extremely angry with them and can’t let it go, you’ve become their slave
▪ Clinical psychologist Frederick Herzberg theorized that the presence of money is not a motivator, but the absence of money is a demotivator. He called this “hygiene theory.” If you extrapolate this, the presence of money does not ensure happy relationships, or success in endeavors, or rewarding friendships. But the absence of money and the concomitant stress almost always weakens and threatens relationships, work, and plans. The lack of money creates a sense of powerlessness, and powerlessness is corrupting and devastating.
▪ Remember, the people who are challenged to a duel have their choice of weapons
▪ We all carry baggage through life. The idea is to make sure it’s positive, supportive, and attractive for our intent and journey. We can’t allow parents or kids to give us theirs or even to influence our own. That may sound selfish, but you can’t fit into others’ outfits and, even if you could, you’d probably look foolish.
▪ Life is short only because we’re not paying attention
▪ Superstitions are merely attempts to organize fears without having to understand them
▪ It’s courage that counts. The courage to face fears logically and rationally, using formal or informal help if you need it. It’s the courage to understand the power of an external locus of learning. And it’s the courage to say, “I’m not here to merely get by and survive. I’m here to Thrive.”
We’re not here to stick our toe in the water. We’re here to make waves.
▪ When our attention span is brief, our life experiences tend to be brief. We think life is short because we’re looking backward in nostalgia or forward in anticipation
▪ We should be looking around in awareness
▪ The Greeks believed that it was glorious to die in battle (go Spartans!), and so they fought to the death, even against overwhelming odds. The Romans believed that your strategy should be to win the war and not merely the current battle, and it was fine to retreat to fight again another day. I’m a Roman in that regard. Apologize and return. It’s crazy to defend something that is wrong.
▪ Moreover, the road to self-esteem is paved with competence. Even though efficacy (ability to do things well) and self-worth (ability to feel good about yourself no matter how you do) can be independent variables, they can affect each other. The more competent you are and the more talents you can apply, the better your rate of success. The better your rate of success, the better you feel about yourself, and the more likely you are to invest in gaining still more competence and tools. That’s the wonderful “Thrive cycle” you can enter if you so choose.
▪ But you have to be on the battlefield in either case, armed and ready.
▪ The figure on the previous page shows very simply how this operates. Skills lead to application, which creates success, which provides motivation for people to feel better and better about themselves. Think of self-esteem as a “verb” or action condition, leading to self-confidence, which is a “noun” or final condition
▪ George Carlin was right: “If it’s someone else’s book, it’s not selfhelp.”
▪ Self-esteem then should be constant, not subject to the lows of your last defeat or the highs of your last victory. You’re good at some things, not so good at others; in fact, you may be better at some things at certain times and not other times.
▪ You can see the somewhat nauseating effect on self-esteem if you “ride the waves” in the upper graphic shown below, and are constantly affected by external events and feedback. When you are sure about who you are and maintain your self-worth through the heady “wins” and the brickbat thrown at your head during “losses,” you possess what I call “self-mastery.”
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January 20, 2015Recommended by Noah Fleming on the John Lee Dumas podcast
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