Daily Dose of Positivity: Don’t try to avoid or escape

Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame. Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it.

To try to avoid pain is to give too much thinking about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give too much thinking about the pain, you become unstoppable.

Like the road not taken, it was the issues not given too much thinking that made all the difference.

Daily Dose of Positivity: Be honest in confronting your pain, fear & anxiety

Very few animals on earth have the ability to at least think, but we humans have the luxury of being able to have thoughts about our thoughts.

We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty.

George Orwell said that to see what’s in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle. Well, the solution to our stress and anxiety is right there in front of our noses.

 Because there’s an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don’t measure up, that we’re not good enough, that things aren’t as great as they could be. And this rips us apart inside.

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.

Pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make.

The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there.

As the existential philosopher Albert Camus said 

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it?

Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point.

Everything worthwhile in life is won through overcoming the associated negative experience.

..\..\Books\The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck.pdf

Daily Dose of Positivity: Thinking more or less

Thinking too much about more things at a time is good for business. While there’s nothing wrong with good business, the problem is that thinking too much about more things at a time is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction.

The key to a good life is not thinking too much about more things at a time; it’s thinking about fewer things at a time, thinking about only what is true and immediate and important.

Daily Dose of Positivity: Making difference through Response

Every time you choose a response instead of reacting, you move closer to freedom.

Impulsive reactions give way to conflicts; mindful responses give way to understanding.

People do not want an instantaneous reply, they want the best reply. Pause and choose it so that you need not regret it later.

“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” – Sheryl Sandberg

Daily Dose of Positivity : Must the end of life be the worst part? Can it be made the best?

At 53, Eugene O'Kelly was in the full swing of life. Chairman and CEO of KPMG, one of the largest US accounting firms, he enjoyed a successful career and drew happiness from his wife, children, family, and close friends. He was thinking ahead: the next business trip, the firm's continued success, weekend plans with his wife, his daughter's first day of eighth grade. 

Then in May 2005, Gene was diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer and given three to six months to live.

O’Kelly resigned from KPMG and began planning his death as rigorously as he planned his life, managing the logistics of settling his estate and the spiritual work of coming to terms with his “transition,” as he called it. He ultimately chronicled that final leg of his journey in a bestselling book, Chasing Daylight

O’Kelly put great care into creating “perfect moments” with the people he valued most. He made each of these moments personal and memorable, with the understanding it would be the last time he would see that person. 

• Everything changes in an instant. Don’t wait for the “right moment”.
• Remove negative energy from your life. Resolve to be happy, not “right”.
• Recognize what is most important.

Eugene died on September 10, 2005 of terminal brain cancer.

At least Kelly did know when he would die! But many of us don’t have that luxury. Therefore, it is more important that we live each moment in our life meaningfully.

Daily Dose of Positivity: Ideas and their execution

 “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

— Raymond Joseph Teller

Ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive. The ability to execute separates people, not the ability to come up with ideas.

"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas."

— Marie Curie

Daily Dose of Positivity: Good Study Habits

 The worst study habits we have and what to do instead

 1. Staying up late and waking up early to study

2. Counting hours and massing

3. Not knowing what to study

4. Counting the volume of studies

5. Procrastinating till you have all the notes or planning too much

6. Not chilling, partying, gaming, dating, etc.

7. Neglecting food, water, and exercise

 The best study techniques and strategies science has to offer

 1. Spaced repetition: revise information with increasing gaps in between

2. Interleaving : Study multiple related topics simultaneously

3. Chunking: Study small coherent groups of information together in small sizes

4. Meta-cognition: Sit back and think about your learning

5. Retrieval practice: Prove you can remember what you’ve learned

6. Mood, Arousal, & Fun: Keep having fun and make learning relatable & meaningful

 What if your concentration is poor and you are easily distracted?

 1. Make information challenging

2. Study with background music

3. Use a combination of interleaving & spaced repetition in short study sessions

16 Worst and Best Study Tips, Techniques & Habits [How-To] - Cognition Today

Daily Dose of Positivity: Managing emotional responses

Being able to manage our emotional responses, even in the face of adversity, is a foundation of emotional capacity building. Being able to manage our emotional responses, even in the face of adversity, is a foundation of emotional capacity.

People who constantly overreact emotionally are also less likely to receive the feedback they need to improve.         

If a person breaks into tears every time we give them feedback, most of us would come to dread those feedback conversations, and eventually might avoid them altogether. 

Learning to handle feedback—and proving to others that you can handle adversity and difficult situations—is a huge part of building your capacity, personally and professionally. 

Like many things in life & business, emotion has a time and place. It’s crucial to have your emotions be seen as an asset and not a liability. 

“Take control of your emotions before your emotions take control of you.” – Scott Dye

"If criticism from outside proves devastating, it is because it so readily joins forces with an infinitely more strident and more aggressive form of criticism that has long existed inside of us."

Daily Dose of Positivity: Assume positive intent always

We have a choice. We can assume negative intent from others, and be proven right when things go wrong. Or, we can assume positive intent and occasionally be let down, but build more positive and productive connections along the way.   

Is there an area in your life where you are increasingly assuming negative intent? Do you have a sense of what it is costing you and how you might assume positive intent instead? 

“When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.” – Indra Nooyi 

"If we take man as he really is, we make him worse, but if we overestimate him …. If we seem to be idealists and are overestimating, overrating man, and looking at him that high, here above, you know what happens ? We promote him to what he really can be."

Daily Dose of Positivity: Morality- A collective phenomena

 Over decades of focused research, the field has demonstrated that evaluating the moral compass of individual participants does little to advance our understanding of the morality or the actions of a large movement. Only by assessing the goals, tactics, and outcomes of movements as collective phenomena can we begin to discern the distinction between “good” and “bad” movements.

John Stuart Mill’s Philosophy of Equality

It allows everyone to decide how they can best contribute to society. “The loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious.”

The story of Özlem Cekic, one of the first women with a Muslim immigrant background to be elected to Denmark’s parliament. Almost immediately after taking office, Cekic’s inbox filled with hate mail, including xenophobic comments and threats. Cekic courageously reached out and invited senders of this hate mail to have coffee with her, meetings she called “Dialogue Coffee.”

She learned through these meetings to separate a hateful viewpoint from the person expressing it in order to gain perspective. 

She also learned that people fear people they don’t know, and generalizations can lead people to dangerously demonize entire communities.

“The bad news is nothing lasts forever. The good news is nothing lasts forever.” 
– J. Cole

Daily Dose of Positivity: Effort and Talent

 If someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try. I’m not saying that talent isn’t a meaningful differentiator, because it certainly is, but I think people generally underestimate how effort needs to be poured into talent in order to develop it. So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours."

The biggest change in my professional maturity came when I became Actually Responsible for things. ... I gained a lot of appreciation for people who make things, and lost a lot of tolerance for people who only pontificate. I found myself especially frustrated with my past self, whose default was to complain and/or comment, then wonder why things didn’t magically get better."

 “Most people never pick up the phone. Most people never call and ask. And that's what separates sometimes the people who do things from those who just dream about them. You have to act. You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn. With people on the phone or starting a company, if you're afraid you'll fail, you won't get very far."

— Steve Jobs

If you worked as hard at doing difficult things as you did avoiding them, you’d become unstoppable.

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”

— Karen Lamb

Daily Dose of Positivity : Interaction vs Reciprocation

Every interaction you have with another human being is merely a mirrored reciprocation

"All you have to do if you want everything in life from everybody else is first pay attention; listen to them; show them respect; give them meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Convey to them that they matter to you. And show you love them. But you have to go first. And what are you going to get back? Mirrored reciprocation."

The world is so damn simple. It’s not complicated at all! Every single person on this planet is looking for the same thing. Now, why is it that we don’t act on these very simple things?

Daily Dose of Positivity : Multidisciplinary in thinking

How many mistakes do you make when you understand something? You don’t make any mistakes. Where do mistakes come from? They come from blind spots, a lack of understanding. Why do you need to be multidisciplinary in your thinking? Because as the Japanese proverb says, “The frog in the well knows nothing of the mighty ocean.” You may know everything there is to know about your specialty, your silo, your “well,” but how are you going to make any good decisions in life—the complex systems of life, the dynamic system of life—if all you know is one well?

Munger calls “the big ideas” from all the different disciplines. You needn't be the master of all disciplines. You can have an idea of all disciplines to the extent your job or life demands.

Daily Dose of Positivity : Never lie to yourself- Assess yourself constantly

There’s a reset button at every level. Meaning you can be the best in class. And when you go to the next level you’re then at the bottom. And the difference between amateurism and professionalism is you have people looking after you and holding your hand as an amateur. Professionally, no one does. ... What matters is, what you do and how you apply yourself consistently.

“If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule: never lie to yourself.”

— Paulo Coelho

A big skill, if you want to play for a long time, is just being honest in assessing how you're playing. If you wait until the coach tells you you're not playing good, a lot of times it's too late.

The best decisions have little to no immediate payoff.

The best choices compound. Most of the benefits come at the end, not the beginning.

The more patient you are, the bigger the payoff.

Daily Dose of Positivity: Complacency and Conscious inaction.

 In life, many of the best decisions are the ones we consciously didn’t make.

The person we didn’t believe.

The item we didn’t buy.

The job we didn’t take.

The emotional e-mail/text we didn’t send.

The thing we didn’t say etc.

There is an important difference between complacency and conscious inaction.

Sure, if our inaction is based on fear or insecurity, we need to push through. However, if we are being pulled to do something that is not aligned with our values or that will not help us achieve our desired outcome, then the conscious decision not to act is often the best one. Especially if we are being drawn to something that is urgent but not important.

Daily Dose of Positivity: Priority and Tradeoff

Many things in life are a tradeoff and when we try to make everything a priority, nothing gets our full attention. 

If you take the day off to attend a party with friends, your family and work will take a temporary backseat. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s a good illustration of how having a truly full life means not trying to have everything at once; each week might have a shifting set of priorities.  

“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.” – Betty Friedan

Daily Dose of Positivity: Spending our life time with positive attitude

Why would people not go positive and not go first when there’s a 98 percent chance you’re going to benefit from it, and only a 2 percent chance the person’s going to tell you to screw off and you’re going to feel horrible, lose face, and all the rest of that? And that’s real. That’s why we don’t do it. He said there’s a huge asymmetry between the standard human desire for gain and the standard human desire to avoid loss. Which one do you think is more powerful? 98 percent versus 2 percent!

If I’m not willing to be vulnerable and expose myself to that 10 percent, I’m going to miss the other 90 percent.”

You’ve got one lifetime. How do you want to spend your one lifetime? Do you want to spend your one lifetime like most people do, fighting with everybody around them? No. I just told you how to avoid that. And in exchange have what? A celebratory life. Instead of an antagonistic fighting life, all you have to do is go positive, go first, be patient enough. You know we have to be patient for a week with this puppy. Do you know how long it usually takes for a human being to do all the probing and testing that Puppy was going to do and to find out that you’re for real? It takes six months. This is why nobody does it. “Oh, it takes too long.” Compared to what? Look at the plan B that everybody uses. It’s terrible! It doesn’t work. They spend their whole lives fighting with everybody.

Clinical psychology reads, “If you could see the world the way I see it, you’d understand why I behave the way I do.”

Great African proverb. It’s the definition of win-win. “If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Live your life to go far together. Don’t live it to go quickly alone. Most people grow up wanting to go quickly alone. It doesn’t work. 

What really matters is to have people pay attention to you, listen to you, and respect you; to show you that you matter; and to love you. And to have it be genuine, not bought.

Turkish proverb. “No road is long with good company.” 

It involves going positive and going first.

Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said, “To understand is to know what to do.”

— The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking

Daily Dose of Positivity – Simple Vs Smart

 In reality, many things in our life are very simple to explain. But we reject them saying “This is too simple. It can’t be this simple.”

If you think about things being complex as being sophisticated like most people do, you think the more complex it is, the more sophisticated it is.

 

Albert Einstein once listed what he said were the five ascending levels of cognitive prowess. The lowest level of cognitive prowess is being smart. The next level up, level four, is intelligent. Level three, next up, is brilliant. Next level up, level two, he said is genius. What? What’s higher than genius? He must have that backward. No, he doesn’t.

 

Level-5 Smart, Level-4 Intelligent, Level-3 Brilliant, Level-2 Genius, Level-1 Simple

 

Number one is simple. Simple transcends (surpasses) genius.

Daily Dose of Positivity – Compound interest in life

 What’s the most powerful force that we as human beings, both as individuals and groups, can potentially harness towards achieving our ends in life?

Albert Einstein said, “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” But that’s not all he said about compound interest. He not only said that it’s the most powerful force in the universe, he said it’s the greatest mathematical discovery of all time. He said it’s the eighth wonder of the world. And he said that those who understand it get paid by it and those who don’t pay for it.

We can say that compound interest is persistent incremental constant progress over a very long time frame.

The problem that human beings have is we don’t like to be constant. If you can be constant, you can achieve anything in your life.

Daily Dose of Positivity - Fear of being misunderstood

 “We create fear or make fear go away depending on what story we tell ourselves…”

The key observation is that as long as you are right, being misunderstood by most people is strength - not a weakness.

If you're not seeking approval, they have no power.

The right thing to do is often obvious. It’s not the choice that’s difficult so much as dealing with what the choice means.

We have to have a hard conversation. We have to break someone’s heart. We have to do something hard.

We have to break out of the prison of how other people think we should live.

The price of avoiding these things is making yourself miserable. While the pain of dealing with reality is intense, it’s over rather quickly. The suffering of miserableness never really goes away.

The choice of being miserable is the bargain you strike with yourself to avoid pain.

Daily Dose of Positivity: Intrinsic motivation- Media effect

 Once upon a time, just the act of experiencing or accomplishing something was enough to make us feel good about ourselves, without any external validation. These moments gave us intrinsic satisfaction; happiness or enjoyment that comes from within us, not from anywhere else. Pictures we could share wouldn’t even arrive for months.

However, the omnipresence of social media—enabled by equally ubiquitous smartphones—has dulled this intrinsic reward. For many of us today, it has become difficult to enjoy something beautiful, exciting or fulfilling in the moment. Rather than absorbing these moments for our own benefit, today, we reflexively share them with the world, seeking public affirmation of our lives, actions or achievements. 

More concerning, these public announcements demonstrate a growing cultural dependence on extrinsic motivation, where we require affirmation and accolades from others to feel good about our choices or accomplishments. Unlike intrinsic motivation, which comes from our internal drive for things we want, extrinsic motivation is not sustainable. If your satisfaction comes from others’ approval, you will always need more of it. 

We do things not because they bring us satisfaction, but because we are seeking attention and approval from others. Then, those same people who approve of our posts often feel they are missing out on the very things they see us doing. 

Ironically, many are disappointed that they aren’t experiencing our staged highlights, which we are not even fully enjoying in the moment. (It may create hatred or jealous about us which creates trouble in relations)

In what’s become a very public world, we desperately need private moments. Moments where we simply enjoy ourselves or share the moment with others who are present. Moments to praise in private, moments to celebrate and reflect & Moments where the moment itself, and our enjoyment of it, can be enough. 

-       Robert Glazer
Founder & CEO, Acceleration Partners

“The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.” – Abraham Maslow

Daily Dose of Positivity: Express yourself- Don’t wait for others to understand you.

We all have weaknesses, and all know hardship. But it’s difficult, even on a good day, to admit we are struggling, to ask for help or to apologize when we are out of line.

Many of us have become even more familiar with feeling vulnerable and have grown adept at avoiding difficult conversations. We may blow up to let off steam, for instance, and not take responsibility for the harm our actions cause. Or we may sulk when people close to us fail at guessing our needs. When setting clear boundaries is in order, many of us may say “yes” to everything only to end up resenting everyone—including ourselves—for having too much on our plates.

Often, the best way to break these cycles is to admit our difficulties to others. That step can be excruciating and frightening, but keeping problems to ourselves can create even more long-term complications. After all, unacknowledged feelings and frustrations rarely stay under the rug. That is why it is important to figure out how to openly articulate one’s feelings or thoughts even when that form of expression leaves us feeling exposed or uncomfortable.

Confessing romantic feelings, for example, could provoke a painful response if these sentiments are not shared, whereas declaring one’s love for pizza is simply an authentic, low-stakes statement.

Daily Dose of Positivity: How to spend time effectively

When employed correctly, time becomes an amplifier. When spent without consideration, it becomes a persistent source of regret.

 Investing in Learning: The upfront costs are real and visible and, like any investment, the future payoff is uncertain. So we tend to skim the surface, thinking this will “save us time” versus doing the real work. Yet this surface-based approach leads to no improvement in our ability to make decisions. In fact, it may harm us if we think we’ve learned something for real. Thus, surface learning is a true waste of time. It’s just that the link to our bad learning is unclear, so we rarely identify the root cause.

 

Relationships: We’re often too “busy” to spend time with the ones we care about. The very parent at the park playing on his iPhone while his children run around playing and laughing is the same one, who, when you fast-forward the axis of time, wants those precious moments back. Likewise, the “busy” 30-something who can’t make time to see their parents wishes to have them back after they’re gone. They wish for more time with them.

 

Time is invisible, so it’s easy to spend. It’s only near the end of our life that most of us will realize the value of time. Make sure you’re not too busy to pay attention to life. 

Wealth is created not by spending your time making money but rather by saving your time to make money

-          https://fs.blog/2017/03/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-time/

Daily Dose of Positivity: Time Vs Money

If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. Money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day: Time.

Unlike the predictable reaction we have to someone throwing away money (they’re crazy), we often fail to think of the person who wastes time as crazy. Yet time is a finite resource. While the amount of time we get is uncertain, we know it’s limited. We can’t make any more of it when it runs out.

 

“A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of his life.” — Charles Darwin

 

The Roman philosopher Seneca said it well in a letter to Paulinus: It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—

 

the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it.

 

When you think about the reason most of us want to get wealthy, you will see it’s not for the money it’s for the time. We want a clean schedule. We want other people to do the things we don’t want to do. We want to spend money to buy time.

 

You will never be wealthy as long as you are spending time to create money. Wealth is best expressed by spending money to create time.

-          https://fs.blog/2017/03/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-time/

Daily Dose of Positivity: Our ambitions

"External ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve. There is an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there are lots to do ahead. 

The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than she used to be."

— Moral Bucket List

Daily Dose of Positivity: Teachings of pain

“You can’t outrun your pain. You are strong enough to face whatever is in front of you. Medicating your pain will only bring more pain. The only genuine shortcut life offers is facing your feelings. They won’t kill you. Feelings are your soul’s way of communicating. Pain is trying to teach you something, and if you don’t listen now, it will speak louder and louder until it is heard."

 — Jewel in Never Broken (p. 377)

Daily Dose of Positivity: What you think of others

It’s easy to see why leaders’ personal struggles get overlooked; when we face difficult situations or setbacks, it's human nature to think of our own point of view first. We tend to focus on how everything affects us, rather than thinking about others.  

Always take a step back to think about what you can control and where you might be able to take ownership. An ownership mindset helps others and empowers you as well.  

When you step outside your own perspective and consider what others are going through, you’ll not just treat others better, but you may establish a deeper and more personal connection that will endure through your life and career.

“The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe