Here are the first 3 answers I can remember, that I gave to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”:
I think race car driver was the first one. I always had a big picture of a Ferrari F40 on my wall.
Read MoreIt’s one of the most asked questions in recent history. When you google “habits of successful people,” you get 3.6 million results, and it feels like they’re 3.6 million different ones.
I mean look at this:
7 habits here, 9 there, throw these 10 on top, here’s another 50, can’t forget those 12 and oh, here’s another 18, just to be safe.
Bullshit.
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You know how sometimes, within a few seconds, an idea you had taken as true for decades is shattered to pieces? For example, when I was little, my dad told me the glass windows in churches were thicker at the bottom, because glass was actually a liquid. Just last week I told this to a friend. Well, two minutes ago, this false belief burst.
Some of these urban myths are more pervasive than others. Occasionally, even more people will fall for the lie than stumble into the truth. I think passive income might be one of those extreme cases.
Today, we’ll debunk this concept, and replace it with a better one.
I’m doing it again. I can feel it. Like a toothpick, my thumbnail rests in the gap between two teeth. It’s the position it takes right before I bite it. When I catch myself, like right now, I can prevent it. But it’s always a battle.
Often, I’m okay with losing it, as long as it means I’m winning the war with the article I’m writing. After all, what ends up on your screen isn’t a picture of my fingernails, but a (hopefully) helpful blog post.
It wasn’t always a conscious decision though. For over ten years, I bit my fingernails, unaware of the habit. When I started learning about self-improvement in 2012, it was the first habit I made a conscious effort to break. This both required and helped me with one of the most important human capacities: self-awareness.
Today, I’d like to help you cultivate yours, with 27 self-awareness activities, which you can practice on three distinct levels to improve your thinking, mental health and decisions – and thus, your results in the game of life.
This Wednesday, I realized all my current blog post ideas would take more than a day to complete. Between The 4 Minute Folio launch, AniQuote suddenly materializing from the massive mist of ideas in my head and a new side gig I’ve taken up two weeks ago, it’s a week as busy as ever.
Hence, I decided to give myself the following constraints for this post:
Artificially limiting yourself is liberating. Busy weeks come with a lot of learnings, so these rules forced me to go narrow and think really hard:
What’s the biggest lesson from the past 7 days?
Read MoreOn the 14th of May, 2012, one of my best friends, Paul, sent me an article by James Altucher.
In it, he described his daily practice of improving a little bit, every single day, in four areas:
I thought: Let me try that. So I started tracking it on this free website James had made: The Daily Practice.
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Meet Charles Proteus Steinmetz.
Charles was a German-born, American mathematician, electrical engineer, who spent most of his life in Schenectady, New York, as a professor at Union College.
You can thank him for the thing we all most depend on in life: Electricity.
Charles helped shape the development of alternating current (AC), and is the reason you can plug your toaster, blender, TV or lamps into the sockets on your wall.
As soon as General Electric got word of this little (he was indeed just 4 feet tall) genius’s work in New York, they bought out the company he worked for in 1892, and with it, the man’s expertise.
In 1965, a Life magazine reader, Jack B. Scott, wrote in to tell the story of an encounter his father had made with the so-called “Wizard of Schenectady” at Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford’s engineers had a problem they couldn’t fix, and so Steinmetz went down there on behalf of GE. Here’s the excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine:
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In 2010, I wrote down a set of “first principles” for my life. I asked myself:
“Which rules, if I lived by them for the rest of my life, would make me as happy as I can be?”
7 years later, it’s time to reflect and see which ones stood the test of time.
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Coming up with ways to make your brain sharp is a way to exercise your mental faculties in and of itself. But it’s not the only thing I do.
Here are 7 more ways I send my brain to the gym:
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As I was coming up with an example of a personal story I could tell where hard work beat intelligence (and I can think of a few), I realized something:
It doesn’t matter.
Why? Because hard work is your only option, either way.
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