...that distinction between amateur and professional is an essential piece of advice I have gotten, first from Steven Pressfield’s writings and then by getting to know him over the years. There are professional habits and amateur ones. Which are you practicing? Is this a pro or an amateur move? Ask yourself that. Constantly...
...Then in 2016, she and her colleagues reported that they had found oxidation in the livers, lungs and small intestines of sleep-deprived rats. Markers of inflammation are often found floating around in tissues after sleep deprivation, Everson said, but their source has never been clear. If oxidation is out of control somewhere in the body, the resulting crisis of cellular damage could cause that boost...
...Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts...
...Hope isn’t just passive wishful thinking. It’s also inextricably tied to action — helping others and turning an upside down world right side up...
...Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn...
...Fast eats time. One consequence of fast is that we make poor decision after poor decision. Those decisions don’t go away never to be seen again. It’s not like we make a bad decision and we’re done with it. No, the consequences are much worse. Poor decisions eat time. They come back to haunt you. They create issue after issue. They feed into the perpetual motion machine of busyness. And in a culture where people wear busyness as a badge of honor bad decisions actually lead us to think that we’re doing more...
...We know that the median is often not the same as the mean, but in describing a population, it also pays to differentiate between the average person and a typical one...
...Integrity is the fundamental building block of leadership. Without integrity, you simply cannot lead. Do the right thing. Always...
...Many times, we only had a few minutes to communicate that recommendation — then, if the executive was interested in digging deeper, we could present more details...
...Decisions about time and money are present in all of our lives. Sometimes we cannot choose our priorities; we might need to choose the better-paying job and sacrifice having more time to socialize with our friends and family. Society needs to work harder to make us all feel like we have the choice to prioritize time over money. However, when we do have the ability to choose which resource to prioritize, the data is clear: Valuing time is likely to bring us greater joy both in the moment and in the long term...
...Here’s a quick check-list with some do’s and don'ts when preparing a presentation...
...people are paying attention to its value...
...The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impossible to do. And the best way to create a good habit is to automate it so you never have to think about it again...
...Against this challenging backdrop, new grads in your life will almost certainly benefit from any efforts to help them begin the rest of their lives on solid financial footing...
...They’re not necessarily a warning that you’re failing to take care of yourself, or drowning in sleep debt. Sometimes they’re a sign that your mind is at peace, your body is at rest, and you’re lucky enough to have a half-hour to spare in the middle of the afternoon...
...If leaders take these practices seriously, they will be able to inculcate new norms much more quickly. Doing so is not only important for employee safety but for the health of your business...
...Footprints might be a fine compass, but they’re not much of a map. That’s on us...
...Be strategic, have a plan, and evolve...
...we are often terrible judges of our own work...
...The first and most important is probably that incentive structures should take the idea into account. This is a fairly intuitive (but often unrecognized) idea: Far-away rewards are much less motivating than near term ones...
