You wouldn’t believe the overwhelming response I received to my email last week. It was great to sit in my office on Monday morning and read through and respond to them all – all of them positive, thanking me and some even applauding me for investing in my own personal growth.
On the back of all the email responses, and the fact the ASX200 continues to do little, I decided to write down a few more things I learned during the two days. Don’t worry, I have no plans to become some personal development authority guy.
So in no particular order, here we go again … some of my own notes below are in italics.
- 3 Measures of Success:
- Not what I can make, but what can I give away
- Not about success I achieve, but the legacy I can leave
- Not about what the world thinks of me, but going to bed having done what you were destined to do.
- To live a full life, you need to ‘live, love and matter’. At the end of each day you could ask yourself whether you have ‘lived, loved and mattered’.
- Generally, there are three different types of life: a caged life, comfort or charged.
- Live each day with intention
- There are two types of freedom: financial freedom and time freedom
- Find people who will have your back. They are people who:
- care about you
- work to help you
- tell the truth
- hold you accountable
- Many speakers spoke about leaving a legacy. One speaker asked, “how many of you can name your great grandfathers?” I bet if they left you something, you would know their name. I hear people all the time telling me that you may as well spend everything you have / earn because you cannot take it with you. I haven’t believed this for a long time as I have thought I can leave a legacy for my children and beyond.
- “Live full, die empty”
- “Feeling doubt is normal, listening to it is a choice.”
- “Self-doubt = the decision to not take action or try.”
- In a Business Study at Harvard, they decided on what defines a great day. It is making process on one thing that matters to you.
- Many people believe that confidence is a personality trait, is fixed and starts with belief. In reality, confidence is a skill, is situational and begins with actions.
- Humility is the greatest strength we can have.
- Common sense is often not common practice. I have said this for a long time myself, “common sense is not so common”
- People will believe in negative things 5 times as much as positive things. Think of news …
- Method to develop new skills:
- Always be reading
- Open yourself to being changed
- Be an eternal student
- Take immediate action
- Give to charity. If you run a business, consider donating to charity – generally, companies who donate money are better supported by customers
- One of the great obstacles to people achieving greatness is being middle class – there is a major problem with being middle class – where does the motivation come from? Think of the ‘comfort’ life in the bullet point near the top
- CNN should be known as the Crisis News Network. Why would you allow the media companies to infest your mind with all of that negativity? They shouldn’t get the privilege. They are drug pushers, and the negative news is their drug. This is something I believe very strongly in. For many years now, I haven’t watched or read any news. People I know cannot believe I don’t follow the news as they wonder how I know what is going on. My response has always been that the news is often so negative and depressing and therefore I don’t want to watch. If something really important happens, people will tell me … therefore, that is how I find out. It is really difficult to not hear about North Korea or recent weather in the USA. You have to find something to talk about during a 4 hour round of golf.
- If you hired a consultant to watch you very closely for a week, what would they report back to you?
- Finally, when you are at work, it is important to master your transition from one task to the next. You should ‘release tension, set the intention’. You could consider having something you do (even if only for 5-10 secs) which acts as a circuit breaker between one task and the next.