Be More
Simple Operating
System (SOS)
- It All Starts With Time
Self
- You are enough.
- You can be all you can be. No more, no less.
- Live life. Love life. Become all you can. Be the best you, and try your hardest. It will be worth it!
- Put your own mask on first.
- ‘I AM’ are the two most powerful words in the world.
- Forgive. Especially yourself.
- Be humble.
- It doesn’t matter where you go, there you are.
- It’s who you are that gives you what you have.
- Don’t compare yourself to others. Compare yourself to your potential.
- Stop aspiring to be anything but your own best self.
Smile
- Life is better when you do.
Rest
- Don’t feel guilty about naps, or breaks.
- Have cheat days.
- Schedule breaks, and then take them.
- Get enough sleep, even if it isn’t cool to do so.
Perspective
- When you are young, it’s not what you think about you that matters. It’s not even what other people think about you that matters. It’s what you tell yourself other people think about you that matters. So be kind to yourself. When you are old, it only matters who you really are, because by then you know.
- Watch out for chameleons, the problems that look like one thing, but are really another.
- Limits force creativity.
- Important vs Urgent
- Your life may not be exactly what you envisioned, but the amazing thing is it’s yours. You have the great opportunity to do with it as you please.
- The power of ‘get’.
- The power of ‘yet’.
- This too shall pass.
Choose More
Change
- Change is inevitable, but progress is a choice.
- What I do today, didn’t exist when I graduated from University.
- The first 100 days.
- A degree or two a day and eventually spring turns into summer, and fall turns into winter.
- Nothing happens until someone gets pissed off.
- Fear is like fire, it can motivate you to change.
- Always improve your position.
- It’s not about perfection, it’s about progress.
- What got you here, won’t get you there.
Be Different
- To live an exceptional life, you have to be the exception.
- Stand out, or fit in.
- Be the ‘extra’ in extraordinary.
- Life is a mirror.
- You are the barrier.
- Don’t drive with the parking brake on.
- How can you move forward if you’re always looking backwards.
- Don’t wave in the dark.
Choices
- You are where you are because of the choices you’ve made
- The choices you make are yours. Own them.
- What do you do, when no one else is looking.
- You always have a choice, even if it’s only how you perceive something.
- Not deciding is a choice.
- Opportunity cost.
Don’t Settle
- Born on 3rd base
- Being in the middle is the least motivating place to be.
- Being good enough is not always good enough.
- Be uncomfortable.
- Curse of competency.
Do More
Work
- Choose your path.
- Acceleration by elimination.
- Find algorithms.
- Productive, not busy.
- Core values
- GWC
- Never say ‘That’s someone else’s job.’ Ask ‘What else can I do?’
- Free, perfect, and now.
- What would I do to disrupt me?
- The things that get scheduled are the things that get done.
- Don’t just aspire to make a living. Aspire to make a difference.
- Love what you do.
Do
- You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.
- Do the work, but there is no point in doing the work, if you’re not going to use it.
- Walk the path.
- Eat the frog.
- Eat the elephant.
- Be the light.
- Re-active vs Pro-active
- Not deciding is a decision
- Never, ever quit.
- Decide – use the Jahari window – important / urgent
- The only thing you can do is your best.
- Just because you’re doing a lot more, doesn’t mean you’re getting a lot more done. Don’t confuse movement with progress.
- Act as thought it was impossible to fail. But when you do fail, don’t take it personally. Learn, and continue to do.
Business
- What should you be doing in running your business? Just what you always do: Widen the moat, build enduring competitive advantage, delight your customers, and relentlessly fight costs.
Time
- Today is the untold potential of tomorrow, the best of yesterday, and the wonder of the moment all at the same time.
- Control your day – what you need to do, at the detriment to all else, is accomplish your goals first
- A quarter (3 months) is 1% of 25 years.
- 1000 months is all you get.
- 168 hours, 1440 minutes, 86400 seconds
- The only truly scarce resource is time.
- Parkinson’s law: a task will shrink or expand to the time allocated for it.
- Own your schedule.
- People overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in a decade.
- The small wins and the big wins take the same amount of time.
- If not us, who? If not now, when?
- There are only 3 days, yesterday, today, and someday. Yesterday is history, what did you learn that you can bring to today. If you focus on today, someday will take care of itself.
Leadership
- True leaders make other leaders.
- Man-Kind.
- Great-Full.
- Have a heart of service.
- How do you get other things (automate), other people (delegate) or stop doing the wrong things (eliminate) to help you get the results you want?
- You get what you tolerate.
- It’s lonely at the top, and there’s nothing to block the wind.
- Take full responsibility.
- Calm is contagious.
- What gets measured gets done.
- The greatest leaders schedule time to think. Daily.
- If you don’t believe it, nobody else will either.
- Be the leader you wish you had.
- If you want to be a great leader, study leadership.
- Clarity of vision. Certainty of intent. The power of values.
Dream More
Create
- Write your own story. It will change, but start with an outline.
- Create something every day.
- Who’s it for? What’s it for? What change am I trying to make?
Our Deepest Fear
- It’s not what you think
Inspire, and Be Inspired
- 5 Monkeys (your circle of influence)
- Find a mentor.
- Study your inspiration’s inspiration.
- The wisdom of others – wisdom is a framework.
- Help 5, have 5 peers, and 5 people who are where you want to be.
- OQP – only quality people
- Develop your communication skills. Once you open your mouth, you tell the world who you are.
Dream
- Dream big. Really, really, really big.
- Be awe-struck.
The Future
- Do something today for tomorrow you.
- Be a good ancestor.
- Are you doing something for your first name, or your last name?
- Who you were yesterday, is not who you are today, or who you will be tomorrow.
- Plant trees under which who’s shade you do not intend to sit.
- Impossible things happen.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Quantum thinking. The future is an infinite number of possibilities. What you choose to manifest is what will happen.
Get More
Habits
- What habits you create, create you.
- Grand Canyons of Belief
- Habits are laziness.
- The first 100 days
- What are your triggers? What are your rewards?
- Good habits are hard to form, and easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form, and hard to live with.
- A choice becomes a discipline. A discipline becomes a habit. A habit becomes a temperament. A temperament becomes a personality trait. A personality trait is who you are.
Discipline
- Make your bed.
- Busy is a lack of preparation.
- Discipline is the secret.
- Inspiration gets you started, discipline is what gets you finished.
- Discipline is the key to happiness.
- Do something today that tomorrow you will be grateful for.
- Talent is not enough. You need disciplined execution.
- Self discipline is the ability to make yourself do, what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.
- Discipline is not punishment.
- Occasionally, with great discretion, misbehave.
Strength
- You are stronger than you think.
- Use the appropriate amount of force.
- Be someone else’s rock.
Goals
- If you don’t know where you’re going, I’m pretty sure you won’t get there.
- We get what we must.
- How far you’ve come vs how far you have to go
- Where you set your goals, is where you choose your suffering.
- Look farther ahead, you’ll lose focus on the obstacles when you focus on your goal
- Who are you looking up to? What are you looking forward to? And who are you chasing?
- 5 meter, 100 meter, 1000 meter targets
- Have an accountability partner.
- It’s not about the goal. It’s who you have to become to achieve that goal.
Process
- Win the morning.
- 1-10-10-10 – get up early, be grateful, and exercise
- Deliberate practice
- Make it simple.
- Write the outline, then flesh out the details.
- Strategic Thinking System
- Knowledge + Action = Power
Give More
Faith
- Prayer
- Religion
- Make the best of it
Love
- He who dies with the most love, wins.
- Love is like investing. You can only lose what you give, but the upside is infinite.
- Find your person.
- A hug is worth a thousand smiles.
- Love is not a zero sum game. Your heart can grow to love more people.
God
- God is life
- Ask for what you want.
- God is love, love is blind, Ray Charles is blind… but that does not make him God.
- Lessons repeat – You will be presented with the same lesson over and over again, until you learn it.
Relationships
- Everyone is thinking about themselves.
- The way to get someone to like you, is to get them to think about you.
- You can only do 100% of your 50% in any relationship.
- No matter who your parents are, you can choose what kind of child you want to be. You can’t choose your neighbors, but you can choose what kind of neighbor you want to be.
- Treat those closest to you better than you would a stranger.
Community
- Where to spend your funds, time, and resources
- Consider both home and away
- Where can you give, that it will be appreciated
Other People
- Help others get what they want.
- Be careful about labels.
- Everyone has problems.
- Make friends throughout your life.
- Expectations – lower the bar for others, and raise them for yourself.
- You can do more together than you could ever do on your own.
- Treat other people as the best versions of themselves, even if they’re not quite there yet.
Have More
Numbers
- Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe.
- Leading, live, and lagging indicators.
- What gets measured, gets done.
Stuff
- What you own can own you.
- It’s OK to want more.
- Life is not a zero sum game.
- Abundance is reality.
- Who do I have to become, to get what I want?
- Love what you have, because if you get more, you have to know how to love it too.
- Everything you have you hold in trust for the next generation. You never really own anything.
Money
- Money is an amplifier.
- Money creates options
- Money creates time
- Time = Money. Time = Freedom. Therefore Money = Freedom.
- Money is an illusion
Purpose
- Happiness is a by-product – It is a by-product of a meaningful life filled with purpose. Doing what you love, makes you happy.
- A life worth living. – Happiness is the symptom, not the cause. The cause is a meaningful life filled with purpose. Having that purpose will bring you happiness. That is the real secret of life.
- With a big enough why, you can handle any what.
- Figure out what you’re good at. Figure out what you love to do. Figure out what the world needs. Figure out how to make money at it. If you figure those 4 things out, your passion becomes your purpose, becomes your living, becomes your life.
- Someone to love. A cause to embrace. Meaningful work.
- A life that is filled with purpose, is a full life.
Success
- Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.
- Success leaves clues.
- People remember their own failures, but everyone else’s successes.
- Suck and Success look the same until you’re halfway through.
Learn More
Growth
- 1%
- Think exponentially, not linearly.
- Exponential growth looks a lot like zero until it doesn’t.
- Fix the zero. Any amount of effort, multiplied by 0, equals 0. Fixing the zero if there is one, rather than applying effort elsewhere, is the best place to start.
- Viral coefficient.
Mindset
- You can, you can. You can’t you can’t.
- The stories you tell yourself are the truth, whether they are true or not.
- Have a mindset of abundance.
- Think about what you think about.
- What I think. How I act. What I love.
- Stay in the mindset of the moment.
- You become what you think about most of the time.
Genius
- The highest level of genius is simple.
- Break it down.
- Look for the pattern.
- Everything around you was created by someone no smarter than you.
- Stand on the shoulders of genius’
Capacity
- Build your capacity.
- What is your capacity for boredom
- 100 decisions per day.
Learn
- Ask. Questions are the key to knowledge. Ask better questions.
- Control your inputs, to get better outputs.
- Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. If you were better, it would be easier.
- Be curious.
- Garbage in, garbage out.
- Most people are ‘T’ shaped. They usually know a little about everything, a lot about one thing. Learn what they know.
- Books are algorithms.
- The world is your library.
- The truth changes.
Train
- You don’t rise to the occasion, you fall back to your highest level of training.
- Fear eliminates creativity and forces you to function at your highest level of training.
- Put in the reps. Do the homework.
- Focused practice, with corrective feedback, combined with discipline, will make you great.
Overcome More
Failure
- You will suck at something.
- Failure is a lesson.
- Bring the lessons forward.
- Mistakes happen. Not learning from the mistake is the real mistake.
- You will lose, but what did you learn?
- Strength Comes From A Wound
- Life is suffering, but only if you let it be.
- You can fail at something you don’t love, so you might as well work at something you do love.
Overcome
- The Struggle
- You will grow through what you go through.
- Being flexible is hard.
- The journey is the destination.
- The obstacle is the way.
- As Martin Luther King Jr. said, if you can’t fly, run, if you can’t run walk. If you can’t walk crawl but by all means keep moving forward.
- When you’re going through hell, keep going!
- Opportunity comes in the hard times.
- Luck is about preparation
- Freedom lies on the other side of fear.
Pain
- What’s good in the long term, often doesn’t feel good now.
- Delight in the pain. It means you’re growing.
- The only ways the highs in life are so high, is by how low the lows are in contrast.
- Don’t start counting reps until it hurts.
Rejection
- Rejection is like the weather. It happens to all of us, but how well equipped are you to deal with it?
- They aren’t rejecting you, they are rejecting the offer.
- Positive thinking doesn’t always work, but negative thinking always does.
Death
- The journey ends the same way for all of us.
- Live the dash.
- The journey of life. Enjoy it, it’s one heck of a ride.
- Who will you meet at the end of your days? Is the man you could have become, the man you are?
- Plenty of mistakes, but no regrets.