Part I: Build Yourself

1.1 Adulthood

• When you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is this: “What do I want to learn?”  The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take a risk when choosing where to work.
• Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.
• The critical thing is to have a goal.  To strive for something big and hard and important to you. Then every step you take toward that goal, even if it’s a stumble, moves you forward.
• Take risks early in your life.

1.2 Get a Job

• Find a business that’s starting a revolution, not one that’s making a better mouse trap.
• What you do matters.  Where you work matters.  More importantly, who you work with and learn from matters.
• You should know where you want to go, who you want to work with, what you want to learn, who you want to become.

1.3 Heroes

• Students seek out the best professors on the best projects when getting their Masters or PhD, but when they look for jobs, they focus on money, perks, and titles.  However, the only thing that can make a job truly amazing or a complete waste of time is the people.  Focus on understanding your field and use that knowledge to create connections with the best of the best, people you truly respect.  Your heroes.  Those rock stars will lead you to the career you want. 
• Follow your curiosity.  Once you’re armed with that knowledge, then you can start hunting down the people who are the best of the best and trying to work with them. 
• Make a connection.  Continue to share something interesting.  Something smart. 
• Be persistent and helpful.  Not just asking for something but offering something. You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged.  You can always trade and barter good ideas; you can always be kind and find a way to help.

1.4 Don’t (only) look down

• Look up – look beyond the next deadline or project and forward to all the milestones coming up in the next few months.  Then look all the way down to your ultimate goal: the mission.  Ideally it should be the reason you joined the project tin the first place.  As your project progresses, be sure the mission still makes sense to you and that the path to reach it seems achievable.
• Look around – Get out of your comfort zone and away from the immediate team you’re on.  Talk to the other functions in your company to understand their perspectives, needs, and concerns.  This internal networking is always useful, and it can give you an early warning if your project is not headed in the right direction.
• The sooner individual contributors look up, the faster and higher they’ll advance in their career.
• Your job isn’t just doing your job. It’s also to think like your manager or CEO. You need to understand the ultimate goal.  That’s helpful in your day-to-day – knowing your destination lets you self-prioritize and make decisions about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.
• Start with internal customers. You’re somebody’s customer – so talk to whoever is doing work for you. Try to understand what their roadblocks are and what they’re excited about.

Part II: Build Your Career

2.1 Just Managing

• You don’t have to be a manager to be successful. There are alternatives that will enable you to get similar pay and authority.
• Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. Instead, you’ll be digging into how others do them, helping them improve.  Your job is lots of communication x34, recruiting, hiring, and firing, reviews, one-on-ones, setting goals, conflict resolution, and how can I help you?
• Being a manager is a discipline.  Management is a learned skill, not a talent. You’re not born with it. You’ll need to learn a whole slew of new communication skills and educate yourself with websites, podcasts, books, classes, or help from mentors and other experienced managers.
• Being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement.  Your job is to make sure the team produces high quality work.  It only turns into micromanagement when you dictate the step-by-step process by which they create that work rather than focusing on the output.
• Honesty is more important than style. You can be successful with any style as long as you never shy away from respectfully telling the team the uncomfortable, hard truth that needs to be said.
• Don’t worry that your team will outshine you.  It’s your goal.  You should always be training someone on your team to do your job.  The better they are, the easier it is for you to move up and even start managing managers.
• When you’re a manager, 85% of your time should be spent managing.  If it’s not, then you’re not doing it right.
• As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product.  The outcome is your business. How the team reaches the outcome is the team’s business. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the results, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement.
• You have to find what connects with your team.  How can you share your passion with them, motivate them?  The answer comes down to communication. You have to tell the team why.  Why am I this passionate?  Why is this mission meaningful? 

2.2 Data vs. Opinion

• Data driven – you can acquire, study, and debate facts and numbers that will allow you to be fairly confident in your choice.  These decisions are relatively easy to make and defend and most people on the team can agree on the answer.
• Opinion driven – You have to follow your gut and your vision for what you want to do, without the benefit of sufficient data to guide you or back you up.  These decisions are always hard and always questioned.
• Many people don’t have either a good gut instinct to follow or the faith in themselves to follow it. It takes time to develop that trust. So, they try to turn an opinion-driven business decision into a data-driven one.  But data can’t solve an opinion-based problem. So, no matter how much data you get, it will always be inconclusive.  This leads to analysis paralysis – death by overthinking.
• When there are times one person has to make the final call, it’s your responsibility as a manager or a leader to explain that this isn’t a democracy, that this is an opinion-driven decision and you’re not going to reach the right choice by consensus. 
  • Tell the team your thought process.  Walk through all the data you looked at, all the insights you gathered, and why you ultimately made the choice.  Take people’s input.  Listen, don’t react.
  • “I understand your position. Here are the points that make sense for us, here are the ones that don’t.  We have to keep moving in this instance and I have to follow my gut.  Let’s go.”  Communicate the why behind the decision and move on.
• Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them.  Because if you follow your gut, and your gut is wrong, then there’s nowhere else to cast blame.  But if all you did was follow the data, and you still failed, then clearly something else was wrong. Someone else screwed up. This is often a tactic for people who are trying to cover their asses.

2.3 Assholes

• When dealing with assholes, deal with them in this order:
  • Kill’em with kindness – give them the benefit of the doubt and make sure you’re not the problem.  See if you can rearrange things to no longer hear their input.
  • Ignore them – stop involving them in your decisions.  Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
  • Try to get around them – find others that agree this person is an asshole and talk to their peers, HR, talk to their boss. 
  • Quit – tell HR and your boss that you can no longer work with this person. If you’re valued and useful, leadership will probably scramble and try to keep you and find a way to diffuse the situation. 
• How to stop political assholes – need to build an alliance and make a plan to step up your game.  Need to craft a good story and walk into meetings to support each other. Gather up data to back up word against theirs.

2.4 I Quit

When you know you should quit:

• You’re no longer passionate about the mission.  You’re staying for the title/paycheck, but every hour at the desk feels like eternity, then save yourself.  Whatever you’re staying for is not worth the soul-sucking misery of a job you cannot bear to get out of bed for.
• You’ve tried everything.  You’re passionate about the mission, but the company is letting you down.  You talked to your manager, other teams, HR, senior leadership.  Your project is going nowhere, or your manager is impossible, or the company is falling apart. Leave the job and find another team on a similar journey.
• Find a natural breakpoint in your project – the next big milestone and aim to leave then. 
• Network with people.  Not to find a new job, but because you’re naturally curious.  You want to know how other teams at your competitors work and what people do.  You want to see how your competitors are taking a different approach. Talk to your business partners, customers, their customers, etc.
• Have a good story for your next role and what your next job needs to be inspiring: this is what I want to learn, this is the kind of team I want to work with, this is part of the mission that truly excites me.

Part III: Build Your Product

3.1 Make the Intangible Tangible

• Don’t just make a prototype of your product and think you’re done.  Prototype as much of the full customer experience as possible. Make the intangible tangible so you can’t overlook the less showy but incredibly important parts of the journey. You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product.  It all matters.
• Don’t tell me what’s special about this object.  Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.  The whole user experience.
• Ask: why should I care? Why should I buy it? Why should I use it? Why should I stick with it?
• Create customer personas with names, faces, kids, interests, jobs, what brands they love, etc.

3.2 Why Storytelling?

• A good product story features three elements:
  • It appeals to peoples rational and emotional sides.
  • It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.
  • It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved – it focuses on the “why.”
• The “why” is the most critical part of product development – it has to come first.  Once you have a strong answer for why your product is needed, then you can focus on how it works.  You can’t just hit the customers on the head with the “what” before you tell them the “why.”
• Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter?  Why will people need it? Why will they love it?
• Appeal to emotions: connect with something they care about.  Their worries, their fears.  Or show them a compelling vision of the future. Walk through how a real person will experience the product.
• Analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling: “1,000 songs in your pocket” from Apple.

3.3 Evolution vs. Disruption vs. Execution

• You can continue evolving a product for a while, but always seek out new ways to disrupt yourself.
• To maintain the core of your product there are usually one or two things that have to stay still, while everything else spins and changes around them. You need some constraints to force you to dig deep and get creative, to push envelopes you hadn’t thought to open before.
• When you can see the competition nipping at your heels, you have to do something new.  You have to fundamentally change who you are as a business. You have to keep moving.

3.4 Your First Adventure – and Your Second

• When you launch, you will be guided by vision, customer insights, and data (in that order.)
• Once you start iterating on a second version, you will still be guided by the same tools, but in different order: data, customer insights, and vision. 
• Write a press release. Write it when you start. To write a good press release you have to focus. The press release is meant to hook people. You have to get their attention.  You have to be succinct and interesting, highlight the most important and essential things that your product can do. Consult with marketing and PR people if you have to.  They’ll help trim it down to the essentials.

3.5 Heartbeats and Handcuffs

• Plan your project in bigger chunks – weeks, months – not half days things will take.  Nobody can accurately estimate their time or all the steps they’ll need to perform.
• Make your schedules predictable.  Allows your team to know when they should be head down working and when they should be looking up to check with other teams to make sure they’re headed in the right direction.

3.6 Three Generations

• Products go in three stages – V1 is finding product/market fit.  V2 is getting the product fixed up and properly marketing it to a wider audience.  V3 is then optimizing the business so it can be sustainable and profitable.

Part IV: Build Your Business

4.1 – How to Spot a Great Idea

Three elements to every great idea:

1. It solves for “why.” Long before you figure out what a product will do, you need to understand why people will want it.  The “why” drives the “what”
2. It solves a problem that a lot of people have in their daily lives.
3. It follows you around.  Even after you research and learn about it and try it out and realize how hard it’ll be to get it right, you can’t stop thinking about it.

• The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. 
• Vitamin pills are good for you, but they’re not essential. You can skip your morning vitamin for a day, a month, a lifetime and never notice the difference. 
• But you’ll notice real quick if you forget a painkiller.  Painkillers eliminate something that’s constantly bothering you.  A regular irritation you can’t get rid of.
• The “why” always has to be crisp and easy to articulate.  You have to be able to easily, clearly, persuasively explain why people will need it.  

4.2 – Are You Ready?

• You can survive for awhile without a team. But you can’t make it without a mentor.
• Find at least one person who you deeply trust and who believes in you.  Not a life coach or an executive leadership consultant or anyone that charges by the hour (and not your parents).  Find an operational, smart, useful mentor who has done it before, who lives you, and wants to help.

4.4 – You can only Have One Customer

• You can only serve one master. You can only have one customer.  The bulk of your focus and the whole of your branding should be for consumers or business, not both.
• Understanding your customers – their demographics and psychographics, their wants, and needs and paint points if the foundation of your company. Your product, team, culture, sales, marketing, support, pricing – everything is shaped by that understanding.
• For the vast majority of businesses, losing sight of the main customer you’re building for is the beginning of the end.

4.5 – Killing Yourself for Work

• Personal balance while working: to reach some level of personal balance, you need to design your schedule, so you have time to eat well (hopefully with family and friends), exercise or meditate, sleep, and briefly think about something other than the current crisis at the office.
• Whenever someone has a great idea, I’d write it down.  Next to the list of that week to do list and tasks, there was a working library of all the things we couldn’t wait to begin. Great for team morale (paid attention to their ideas and kept thinking about them).
• Every Sunday evening, I would go through my handwritten notes, reassess, and reprioritize all my tasks, rifle through the good ideas, then update those papers on a computer and print out a new version for the week.
  • When there’s too much, things have to be prioritized and forced to keep my eye on the bigger goals and milestones ahead of us, not just the fires at our feet.
• Then Sunday night, I’d email the whole list to my management team. Each item had a name on it.  Everyone could look at the top of the list to see what I’d be focused on that week, what they were accountable for, and what the next major milestone was.
• And every Monday, we’d have a meeting about it (4 Disciplines of Execution Method). 
• Started as a one-sheeter and grew top eight pages, to ten pages.
• Schedule time on your calendar dedicated to feeling human.
  • 2-3x a week – block parts of your schedule during your workday so you have time to think and reflect. Meditate. Read the news on some subjects you don’t work on. Learn, and stay curious.
  • 4-6x a week – Exercise. Go biking or running or weighting or cross-training or just take a walk.
  • Eat well – Don’t eat too much – don’t eat too late. Cut down on refined sugars, smoking, alcohol.  Just try to keep yourself from physically feeling like garbage.

4.6. Crisis

• Keep your focus on how to fix the problem, not who to blame. That will come later and is far too distracting early on.
• As a leader, you’ll have to get into the weeds. Don’t be worried about micromanagement – as the crisis unfolds, your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it. However, very quickly after everyone has calmed down and gotten to work, let them do their jobs without you breathing down their necks.
• Get advice. From mentors, investors, your board, or anyone else you know who’s gone through something similar. Don’t try to solve your problems alone.
• Your job once people get over the initial shock will be constant communication. You need to talktalktalk (with your team, the rest of the company, the board, investors, and potentially press and customers) and listenlistenlisten (hear what your team is worried about and the issues that are bubbling up, calm down panicked employees).  Don’t worry about overcommunicating.
• It doesn’t matter if the crisis was caused by your mistake or your team or a fluke accident, accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize.

Part V: Build Your Team

5.1 – Hiring

• Three Crowns: Crown 1 – interview with hiring manager.  Crowns 2 and 3 were managers of the candidate’s internal customers.  Feedback is collected, shared, and discussed and the Three Crowns meet to decide to hire.
  • Fadel interviews to understand who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. 
    • Most important question – what are you curious about? What do you want to learn?
    • Why did you leave your last job? (Need clear and crisp story) If they complain about a bad manager or being the victim of politics, I ask what they did about it. Why didn’t they fight harder? And did they leave a mess behind them? What did they do to make sure they left in the right way?
    • Why do they want to join the company? Need compelling story, about what they’re excited about, who they want to work with, and how they want to grow and develop.
    • Pick a problem to solve together.  Choose a subject that both of you are familiar with but neither is an expert in.  Understand what questions do they ask? What approaches do they suggest? Do they ask about the customer?  Do they seem empathetic or oblivious?
  • You need to move quickly from “this isn’t working” to “now I’m going to do everything I can to help you find a job you like that’s better for you.”

5.3 Design for Everyone

• Deploy design thinking – identify your customer and their pain points, deeply understand the problem you’re trying to solve and systematically uncover ways to solve it.
  • Ask why at each step – why is it like this now? How can it be better?
  • Think like a user who has never used tried this product before; dig into their mindset, their pain and challenges, their hopes and desires. 
  • Break it down into steps and set all the constraints up front.
  • Understand and tell the story of the product
  • Create prototypes all along the way.
• Avoid habituation – Life is full of tiny and enormous inconveniences that you no longer notice because your brain has simply accepted them as unchangeable reality and filtered them out (fruit stickers on apples).  As a designer, you stay wake to the many things in your work and life that can be better. You find opportunities to improve experiences that people long ago assumed would just always be terrible.

5.4 A Method to the Marketing

• Marketing cannot just be figured out at the very end.  It should be put together from the very beginning.  You should continue to use marketing to evolve the story and ensure they have a voice in what the product becomes.
• Use marketing to prototype your product narrative. This should happen in parallel with product development – one should feed the other.  Create a messaging activation matrix.
• The best marketing is just telling the truth. 

5.5 The Point of PMs

• Product managers or product marketing managers – most important role is to be the voice of the customer.  They also figure out what the product should do, create the specs, work with teams to be worked on and brought to market, and messaging.  Hardest people to find – they have to understand all aspects of the business.
• Project Manager – coordinates tasks, meetings, calendars, and enables individual projects to get done on time. Also important for the project manager to alert of potential problems that can stall or derail the project and to help find solutions.
• Program manager – oversees groups of projects and project managers, focusing on both long-term objectives and short term deliverables.

Part VI: Be CEO

6.1 Becoming CEO

• The job is to give a shift. To care. About everything.
• Th other commonalities of successful leaders are just as straightforward:
  • They hold people (and themselves) accountable and drive for results.
  • They’re hands-on, but to a point.  They know when to back off and delegate.
  • They can keep an eye on the long-term vision while still being eyeball-deep in details.
  • They’re constantly learning, always interested in new opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new people.  And they do it because they’re engaged and curious, not because those things end up making them money.
  • If they screw up, they admit it and own their mistakes.
  • They’re not afraid to make hard decisions, even when they know people will be upset and angry.
  • They (mostly) know themselves.  They have a clear view of both their strengths and challenges.
  • They can tell the difference between an opinion- and data-driven decision and act accordingly.
  • They realize that nothing should be theirs, even if genesis was with them. It all has to be the teams.  The companies. They know their job is to jubilantly celebrate everyone else’s successes, to make sure they get credit for them, and to hold little for themselves.
  • They listen.  To their team, to their customers, to their board, to their mentors.  They pay attention to the opinions and thoughts of the people around them and adjust their views when they get new information from sources they trust.

6.2 – The Board

• If there was any potential surprising or controversial topic, the CEO should go to every board member, one-on-one, to walk them through it before the meeting. That allowed them to ask questions offer different perspectives, and then the CEO had time to take those thoughts back to the team and revise their thinking, presentation, and plan.

6.3 Buying and Being Bought

• Trust, but verify.  Assume people have the best intentions, then make sure they’re following through on them.

6.4 – Fuck Massages

• Benefits are things that really matter and make an impact to your employee’s lives (401K, health insurance, maternity leave, etc.).  Perks are pleasant surprises that feel special and novel (free food, parties, gifts, etc.). 
• Some people can become obsessed with believing perks to be a right, not a privilege.  Then when times get tough, they become outraged that their “rights” are being taken away.
• When people pay for something, they value it.  If something is free, it is literally worthless. So, if employees get a perk all the time, then it should be subsidized, not free.
• If something happens only rarely, it’s special.  If it happens all the time, the specialness evaporates.  So fi a perk is only received occasionally, it can be free. But you should make it very clear that this is not going to be a regular occurrence and change up the perk so that it’s always a surprise.

9/10 – Unique book to time management.  Avoid the efficiency trap and productivity hacks.  Embrace our limits and figure out what you really want to accomplish. Be present.

Part I – Choosing to Choose

Chapter 1: The Limit-Embracing Life

• Our troubled relationship with time arises largely from this same effort to avoid the painful constraints of reality.
• After all, it’s painful to confront how limited your time is, because it means that touch choices are inevitable and that you won’t have time for all you once dreamed you might do.
• And so, rather than face our limitations, we engage in avoidance strategies, in an effort to carry on feeling limitless. We push ourselves harder, chasing fantasies of the perfect work-life balance.
• The more you believe you might succeed in “fitting everything in,” the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time – and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you don’t especially value.
• Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default – or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.

Chapter 2: The Efficiency Trap

• Efficiency trap – the process of “getting through your email” actually generates more email.
• Rendering yourself more efficient – either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder – won’t generally result in the feeling of having enough time because, all else being equal, the demands will increase to offset any benefits.  Far from getting things done, you’ll be creating new things to do.
• Once you stop believing that it might somehow be possible to avoid hard choices about time, it gets easier to make better ones.  You begin to grasp that when there’s too much to do, and there always will be, the only route to psychological freedom is to let go of this limit-denying fantasy of getting it all done and instead to focus on doing a few things that count.
• If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’re never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.
• Resist the urge to consume more and more experiences.
• You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

Chapter 3 – Facing Finitude

• Spend each day “as if” it was your last. It always might be.  Don’t depend upon a single moment of the future.
• Rather than taking ownership of our lives [finitude], we seek out distractions or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind.
• If you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities.
• It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives.
• After the sudden and premature death of his friend David, he would find himself stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but wondering: “What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?”
• Turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place (you’re still alive).

Chapter 4 – Becoming a Better Procrastinator

• So the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most.  The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.
• The Art of Neglect
  • Principle 1 – Work on your most important project for the first half hour of each day, and to protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments cant intrude.
    • If you plan to spend some of your four thousand weeks doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’re just going to have to start doing it
  • Principle 2 – Limit the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. No more than three items.  Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of those three items have been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. 
    • A happy consequence – I found myself effortlessly breaking down my projects into manageable chunks. 
  • Principle 3- Avoid second tier priorities at all costs because they’re the ambitions insufficiently important to you to form the core of your life yet seductive enough to distract you from the ones that matter most.
    • Learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you only have one life.
• If you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax, because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job.  So, you might as well make a start.
• To refuse to settle – to spend a decade restlessly scouring online dating networks for the perfect person – is also a case of settling, because you’re opting to use up a decade of your limited time in a different sort of less-than-ideal situation.
• You must settle upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving; you can’t be an ultra-successful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential regards of other careers.
• In consciously making a commitment, they’re closing off their fantasies of infinite possibility in favor of what I described as the “joy of missing out”: the recognition that the renunciation of alternatives is what makes their choice a meaningful one in the first place.
• When people finally do choose, in a relatively irreversible way, they’re usually much happier as a result.

Chapter 5 – The Watermelon Problem

• Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. 
• So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.
• Involuntary attention: “attention economy”: a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about.
• The attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful. It distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face. These distorted judgments also influence how we allocate our offline time.

Chapter 6 – The Intimate Interrupter

• The intimate interrupter:  that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels,” promising an easier life if only you’d redirect your attention away from the meaningful but challenging task at hand, to whatever’s unfolding one browser tab away.
• Boredom comes when it demands that you face your finitude.  You’re obligated to deal with how your experience is unfolding in this moment, to resign yourself to that reality that this is it.
• No wonder we seek out distractions online, where it feels as though no limits apply.
• The way to find peaceful absorption in a difficult project, or a boring Sunday afternoon, isn’t to chase feelings of peace or absorption, but to acknowledge the inevitability of discomfort, and to turn more of your attention to the reality of your situation than railing against it.

Part II – Beyond Control

Chapter 7 – We Never Really Have Time

• Worry is the repetitious experience of a mind, attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future. 
• But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win.  You can never be truly certain of your future.
• You can’t know that things will turn out all right.  The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one, which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.
• Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for.
• But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaningful life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people.
• All a plan is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

Chapter 8 – You Are Here

• The future-focused attitude, “’when I finally” mind” (e.g., when I finally get my workload under control/find the right romantic partner”, then I can relax and the life I was always meant to be living can begin”
• They’re attempting to achieve that sense of security means they’ll never feel fulfilled, because they’re treating the present solely as a path to some superior future state – and so the present moment won’t ever feel so satisfying in itself.
• Treat every such experience with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it. And indeed there’ a sense in which every moment of life is a “last time.”
• Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now – that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order.
• The problem is that in the effort to be present in the moment, that it obscures the experience itself.  It’s likes trying too hard to go to fall asleep and therefore failing.  You’re too busy self-consciously wondering whether you’re being present enough or not.

Chapter 9 – Rediscovering Rest

• Enjoying leisure begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future.
• In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.
• The important thing awe can do as individuals, in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instances.  This discomfort isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it though. It’s a sign that you definitely should.
• We might seek to incorporate into our daily lives more things we do for their own sake alone – to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself (hobbies).
  • Hobby should probably feel a little embarrassing; that’s a good sign you’re doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome.
  • Hobbies should also be fine (and perhaps preferrable) to be mediocre at them.

Chapter 10 – The Impatience Spiral

• Since the beginning of the modern era, people have been responding not with satisfaction at all time saved, but with increasing agitation that they can’t make things move faster still (warming up microwave dinner from 60 to 30 seconds).
• We grow anxious about not keeping up – so to quell the anxiety, to try to achieve the feeling that our lives are under control, we move faster. But this only generates an addictive spiral. We push ourselves harder to get rid of anxiety, but the result is actually more anxiety, because the faster we go, the clearer it becomes that we’ll never succeed in getting ourselves or the rest of the world to move as fast as we feel is necessary.
• When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed.  You begin to acquire…patience.

Chapter 11 – Staying on the Bus

• The capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time the take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfillment to the future.
• If you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself.
• Three Principles of Patience
  • Develop a taste for having problems.
    • A life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore, be meaningless.
  • Embrace radical incrementalism.
    • It was precisely the students impatient desire to hasten their work beyond its appropriate pace, to race on to the point of completion, that was impending their progress.
    • Stopping helps strength the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again, and thus sustain your productivity over an entire career.
  • Originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.
    • Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction – perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes – and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own. What’s the solution? “It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.” A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.
    • Yet if you always pursue the unconventional in this way, you deny yourself the possibility of experiencing those other, richer forms of uniqueness that are reserved for those with the patience to travel the well-trodden path first.
• To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person.

Chapter 12 – The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad

• Having all the time in the world isn’t much use if you’re forced to experience it all on your own.  To do countless important things with time (socialize, go on dates, raise children), has to be synchronized with other people.
• More freedom to choose when and where you work makes it harder to forge connections through your job, as well as less likely you’ll be free to socialize when your friend are.
• For one thing, you can make the kinds of commitments to remove that flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of community, by joining sports teams, campaign groups, or religious organizations.

Chapter 13 – Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

• Ask the most fundamental question of time management: What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?
• What you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much – and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
• Overvaluing your existence gives rise to an unrealistic definition of what it would mean to use your finite time well.  It sets the bar much too high. It suggests that in order to count as having been “well spent,” your life needs to involve deeply impressive accomplishments, or that it should have a lasting impact on future generations.
• Once you’re no longer burdened by such an unrealistic definition of a “life well spent”, you’re free to consider the possibility that a far wider variety of things might qualify as meaningful ways to use your finite time.

Chapter 14 – The Master of Time

• You have to accept that there will always be too much work to do; that you can’t avoid tough choices.
• In exchange for accepting all that, you get to actually be here.  You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.

Ask the following questions of your own life. It doesn’t matter if answers aren’t immediately forthcoming. The point is to live the questions.

1. Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort, when what’s called for is a little discomfort?
   • Does this choice diminish me or enlarge me? 
   • Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.
2. Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
   • Let your impossible standards crash to the ground. Then pick a few meaningful tasks from the rubble and get started on them today.
3. In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
   • There’s no point in waiting to live until you’ve achieved validation from someone or something else.
   • Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront the personality, the strength and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasm you find yourself with, here and now, and follow where they lead.
4. In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you’re doing?
   • If the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all – to put bold plans into practice, to stop erring on the side of caution.
5. How would you spend your days differently if you didn’t care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition? (e.g., parenting, community-building)

• How to live: quietly do the next and most necessary thing. If you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. Do the next right thing.

10 Tools for Embracing Your Finitude

1. Keep two to-do lists, one “open” and one “closed.” The open list is for everything that’s on your plate and will doubtless be nightmarishly long.
   • Feed tasks from the open list to the closed one – that is, a list with a fixed number of entries, ten at most.
   • Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work (e.g., leave work at 5:00pm)
2. Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next.
3. Decided in advance what to fail at
   • Replace the high-pressure quest for work-life balance with a conscious form of imbalance, backed by your confidence that the roles in which you’re underperforming right now will get their moment in the spotlight soon.
4. Focus on what you’ve already completed, not just on what’s left to complete (keep a done list)
5. Consolidate your caring – pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.
6. Embrace boring and simple-purpose technology (e.g., kindle to read)
7. Seek out novelty in the mundane
   • Find more novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
   • Childhood involves plentiful novel experiences, so we remember it as having lasted forever; but as we get older, life gets routinized – we stick to the same places of residence, the same few relationships, and jobs – and the novelty tapers off.
8. Adopt an attitude of curiosity when presented with a challenging or boring moment.
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity.
   • Whenever a generous impulse arises in your mind, act on the impulse right away, rather than putting it off.
10. Practice doing nothing.

Introduction

• Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
• The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.
• Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

PART 1: The Idea

Chapter 1: Deep Work Is Valuable

• In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.
• Two can be attained: those who can work creatively with intelligent machines and those who are stars in their field.
• Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
• If you want to become a superstar, mastering the relevant skills is necessary, but not sufficient. If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive — no matter how skilled or talented you are.
• The two core abilities depend on your ability to perform deep work.
• Deliberate practice actually requires.
• 1. your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill you’re trying to improve or an idea you’re trying to master;
• 2. you receive feedback so you can correct your approach to keep your attention exactly where it’s most productive.
• To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.
• High – Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)
• Something I noticed in these interviews is that the very best students often studied less than the group of students right below them on the GPA rankings.
• “People experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task,” and the more intense the residue, the worse the performance.
• To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction (deep work).

Chapter 2: Deep Work Is Rare

• The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.
  • Why?  You can get an answer to a question or a specific piece of information immediately and run your day out of your inbox (feels productive, but not advancing goals).
• Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner (answering emails).

Chapter 3: Deep Work Is Meaningful

• Elderly subjects were not happier because their life circumstances were better than those of the young subjects; they were instead happier because they had rewired their brains to ignore the negative and savor the positive.
• Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

PART 2: The Rules

Rule #1: Work Deeply

• You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.
• The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
• The rhythmic philosophy argues that the easiest way to consistently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit.
  • The chain method is a good example of the rhythmic philosophy of deep work scheduling because it combines a simple scheduling heuristic (do the work every day), with an easy way to remind yourself to do the work: the big red Xs on the calendar – don’t break the chain.
  • Another common way to implement the rhythmic philosophy is to have a set starting time that you use every day for deep work.
    • Eliminate even the simplest scheduling decisions, such as when during the day to do the work
• The journalist philosophy – fit deep work wherever you can into your schedule.
  • This approach is not for the deep work novice. The ability to rapidly switch your mind from shallow to deep mode doesn’t come naturally. Without practice, such switches can seriously deplete your finite willpower reserves.
• To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals on: Where you’ll work and how long (e.g.office with the door shut and desk cleaned off)? How you’ll work once you start to work (e.g. ban on any Internet use, or maintain a metric such as words produced per twenty–minutes
  • ).
  • How you’ll support your work (e.g. start with coffee or access to food to maintain energy, or walking to help keep the mind clear).
• The grand gesture – By leveraging a radical change to your normal environment, coupled perhaps with a significant investment of effort or money, all dedicated toward supporting a deep work task, you increase the perceived importance of the task (writing a book on airplanes). This boost in importance reduces your mind’s instinct to procrastinate and delivers an injection of motivation and energy.

• 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) helps companies successfully implement high-level strategies.
  • Discipline # 1: Focus on the Wildly Important – “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”Discipline # 2: Act on the Lead Measures – Once you’ve identified a wildly important goal, you need to measure your success. In 4DX, there are two types of metrics for this purpose: lag measures and lead measures.
    • Lag measures describe the thing you’re ultimately trying to improve.Lead measures, on the other hand, “measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures.”
  • For an individual focused on deep work, it’s easy to identify the relevant lead measure: time spent in a state of deep work dedicated toward your wildly important goal.
• Discipline # 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard – “People play differently when they’re keeping score”.  Shown publicly to record and track their lead measures. This scoreboard creates a sense of competition and motivation that drives them to focus on these measures, even when other demands vie for their attention.
  • Individual’s scoreboard should be a physical artifact in the workspace that displays the individual’s current deep work hour count.
  • Circle the hour when an important milestone is reached. Helps calibrate how many hours of deep work were needed per result.
• Discipline # 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability – put in place “a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal.” During these meetings, the team members must confront their scoreboard, commit to specific actions to help improve the score before the next meeting and describe what happened with the commitments they made at the last meeting.
  • Review weekly to look over the scoreboard to celebrate good weeks, help understand what led to bad weeks, and most important, figure out how to ensure a good score for the days ahead.

• Some decisions are better left to your unconscious.
  • For decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, use your unconscious.
• At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning.
  • You can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give this activity a rest.
  • If you keep interrupting your evening to check e-mail, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration
  • Trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.
• Deep work is about an hour a day of intense concentration for novices, and as much as four hours for experts.
• A strict shutdown ritual that you use at the end of the workday to maximize the probability that you succeed.
  • Ensure that every incomplete task, goal, or project has been reviewed and that for each you have confirmed that either (1) you have a plan you trust for its completion, or (2) it’s captured in a place where it will be revisited when the time is right.
  • When you’re done, have a set phrase you say that indicates completion ( “Shutdown complete”).
• First: look at your e-mail inbox to ensure that there’s nothing requiring an urgent response before the day ends.
• Second: transfer any new tasks into my official task lists.
• Third: quickly skim every task in every list, and then look at the next few days on my calendar. Ensure there’s nothing urgent or any important deadlines or appointments.
• Last: say, “Shutdown complete,” and my work thoughts are done for the day.

Rule #2: Embrace Boredom

• The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained.
• You’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.
• If every moment of potential boredom is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where it’s not ready for deep work – even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.
• Instead of scheduling the occasional break from distraction so you can focus, you should instead schedule the occasional break from focus to give in to distraction.
  • Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet, and then avoid it altogether outside these times.
• The key here isn’t to avoid or even to reduce the total amount of time you spend engaging in distracting behavior but instead to give yourself plenty of opportunities throughout your evening to resist switching to these distractions at the slightest hint of boredom.
• Identify a deep task that’s high on your priority list. Estimate how long you’d normally put aside for an obligation of this type, then give yourself a hard deadline that drastically reduces this time.
• The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally — walking, jogging, driving, showering — and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.
• Suggestion # 1: Be Wary of Distractions and Looping
  • When you notice your attention slipping away from the problem at hand, gently remind yourself that you can return to that thought later, then redirect your attention back.
  • When faced with a hard problem, your mind, as it was evolved to do, will attempt to avoid excess expenditure of energy when possible. One way it might attempt to sidestep this expenditure is by avoiding diving deeper into the problem by instead looping over and over again on what you already know about it.
• Suggestion # 2: Structure Your Deep Thinking
  • Careful review of the relevant variables for solving the problem and then storing these values in your working memory.Once the relevant variables are identified, define the specific next-step question you need to answer using these variables.
  • Example “How am I going to effectively open this chapter?” you now have a specific target for your attention. The final step is to consolidate your gains by reviewing clearly the answer you identified.
• Memory training can improve your general ability to concentrate. This ability can then be fruitfully applied to any task demanding deep work.
  • Begin by cementing in your mind the mental image of walking through five rooms in your home.
  • The second step in preparing to memorize a deck of cards is to associate a memorable person or thing with every 52 cards.

Rule #3: Quit social media

• To master the art of deep work, therefore, you must take back control of your time and attention from the many diversions that attempt to steal them.
• The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.
  • Identify the main high-level goals in both your professional and your personal life.
  • List for each the two or three most important activities that help you satisfy the goal.
  • Keep using this tool only if it has substantial positive impacts and outweighs the negative impacts.

Rule #4: Drain the Shallows

• Fewer official working hours help squeeze the fat out of the typical workweek. When you have fewer hours, you usually spend them more wisely.
• Decide in advance what you’re going to do with every minute of your workday.
• Schedule every minute of your day into blocks of time.
• Two things can (and likely will) go wrong with your schedule once the day progresses.
  • First, you’re going to underestimate at first how much time you require for most things.
  • Second, tasks will take longer.  Use of overflow conditional blocks. Overlap blocks if you’re unsure how long a given activity might take
• I maintain a rule that if I stumble onto an important insight, then this is a perfectly valid reason to ignore the rest of my schedule for the day (with the exception, of course, of things that cannot be skipped).

• Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
  • How long would it take (in months) to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task? The answers it provides will help you objectively quantify the shallowness or depth of various activities.Once you know where your activities fall on the deep-to-shallow scale, bias your time toward depth.
  • Here’s an important question that’s rarely asked: What percentage of my time should be spent on shallow work?
    • Try to stick to this percentage (30-50%)

• Fixed-schedule productivity – firm goal of not working past a certain time.  Work backward to find productivity strategies that allow me to satisfy this declaration.
  • How to say no to shallow work: be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. Avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it (e.g. busy on Tuesday, response: what about next Tuesday?).
• What is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion?
  • Replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next.
  • The extra two to three minutes you spend will save you many more minutes reading and responding to unnecessary extra messages later.

• Emails: Deep thinker’s default behavior when receiving an e-mail is to not respond.
• Do not reply to e-mail rules:
  • It’s ambiguous or otherwise makes it hard for you to generate a reasonable response.It’s not a question or proposal that interests you.
  • Nothing really good would happen if you did respond and nothing really bad would happen if you didn’t.

*Big ideas/takeaways*

 Challenge 1: Face Your Bad Hand

Write a list of current factors limiting your growth and success.  What are the long odds you’re up against right now?  What are things you were hurt by?  What cause you pain?  Write every detail. 

This list will be used to fuel your ultimate success. 

*Challenge 2: Set Up Your Accountability Mirror*

Write all your insecurities, dreams, and goals on Post-Its and tag up your mirror with them.  Whether it’s a career goal, a lifestyle goal, or an athletic one, you need to be truthful with yourself about where you are and the necessary steps it will take to achieve those goals, day by day.  Hold yourself accountable to your goals on a daily basis.

“If you look into the mirror and you see a fat person, don’t tell yourself that you need to lose a couple of pounds. Tell the truth. You’re fucking fat! It’s okay. Just say you’re fat if you’re fat. The dirty mirror that you see every day is going to tell you the truth every time, so why are you still lying to yourself? So you can feel better for a few minutes and stay the fucking same? If you’re fat you need to change the fact that you’re fat because it’s very fucking unhealthy.”

Call yourself out! Tell yourself the truth!

It’s okay to be cruel to yourself as long as you realize you’re doing it to become better.

Challenge 3: Get Used to Discomfort

The first step on the journey towards a calloused mind is stepping outside our comfort zone on a regular basis.  Write down all the things that you don’t like to do or that make you uncomfortable.  Especially those things that you know are good for you. Now go do one of them and do it again. Doing things – even small things – that make you uncomfortable will help make you strong.  The more often you get uncomfortable the stronger you’ll become.

*Challenge 4: Taking Souls*

Choose any competitive situation that you’re in right now.  Who is your opponent?  Is it your teacher or coach, your boss, an unruly client? No matter how they’re treating you there is one way to not only earn their respect, but turn the tables: Excellence.  

Whatever it is, I want you to work harder on that than you ever have before. Do everything exactly as they ask, and whatever standard they set as an ideal outcome, you should be aiming to surpass that.

Your goal is to make them watch you achieve what they could never have done themselves.  You want them thinking how amazing you are.  Take their negativity and use it to dominate their task with everything you’ve got. 

Find your competitive advantage.  Address your weaknesses (and your opponent’s weaknesses to your advantage).

Challenge 5: Armored Mind – Visualize Success

Rather than focusing on bullshit you cannot change, imagine visualizing the things you can. Choose any obstacle in your way, or set a new goal, and visualize overcoming or achieving it. Paint a picture of what success looks and feels like.

Make sure to visualize the challenges that are likely to arise and determine how you will attack those problems when they do. This also means being prepared to answer the simple questions. Why are you doing this? What is driving you towards this achievement? Where does the darkness you’re using for fuel come from? What has calloused your mind?

It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day, but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you. 

*Challenge 6: The Cookie Jar*

Take inventory of your Cookie Jar. Write out all your achievements, including life obstacles you’ve overcome.  Add in those minor tasks you failed earlier in life, but tried again a second or third time, and ultimately succeeded at.  Feel what it was like to overcome those struggles, those opponents, and win. Then get to work.

Set ambitious goals before each workout and let those victories carry you to new personal bests. When the pain hits and tries to stop you short of your goal, dunk your fist in, pull out a cookie, and let it fuel you!

When you’re in the heat of battle, we need to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion, depression, and misery.  Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can help lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in so you can power through obstacles.

*Challenge 7: The 40% Rule*

We habitually settle for less than our best, at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or racecourse. 

Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Even when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give!  This is the 40% Rule. The only way to move beyond your 40% is to callous your mind, day after day.  Which means you’ll have to chase pain like it’s your damn job!

But nobody taps their reserve 60 percent right away or all at once.  The first step is to remember that your initial blast of pain and fatigue is your governor talking. Once you do that, you are in control of the dialogue in your mind, and you can remind yourself that you are not as drained as you think.

That’s why the line “fatigue makes cowards of us all” is true as shit.

We have many more resources today than ever before and yet we are so much less capable than those who came before us.

Whether you are running on a treadmill or doing a set of pushups, get to the point where you are so tired and in pain that your mind is begging you to stop.  Then push just 5 to 10 percent further.

It also resets your baseline, which is important because you’re going to increase your workload another 5 to 10 percent the following week, and the week after that.

The newfound mental strength and confidence you gain by continuing to push yourself physically will carry over to other aspects in your life.

The bottom line is that life is one big mind game.  The only person you are playing against is yourself. 

Challenge 8: Become Productive

Our culture has become hooked on the quick fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.

My work ethic is the single most important factor in all of my accomplishments. Everything else is secondary, and when it comes to hard work, whether in the gym or on the job, The 40% Rule applies. To me, a forty-hour work week is a 40 percent effort.

There are 168 hours in a week! That means you have the hours to put in that extra time at work without skimping on your exercise. It means streamlining your nutrition, spending quality time with your wife and kids. It means scheduling your life like you’re on a twenty-four-hour mission every single day.

Avoid the excuse of not having enough time.  Win the morning.

Minimize wasted hours and focus 100% of your attention on that task. 

Analyze your schedule, kill your empty habits, burn out the bullshit, and see what’s left. Is it one hour per day? Three? Now maximize that shit. That means listing your prioritized tasks every hour of the day.

Three-week challenge.

• In week one, go about your normal schedule, but take notes.  When do you work? Are you working nonstop or checking your phone (use Moment app)? How long are your meal breaks? When do you exercise, watch TV, or chat to friends? How long is your commute? Are you driving? Get super detailed and document it all with timestamps.  This will be your baseline.
• Most people waste four to five hours in a given day, and if you can learn to identify and utilize it, you’ll be on your way toward increased productivity.
• In week two, build an optimal schedule. Lock everything into place in 15- to 30-minute blocks. Some tasks will take multiple blocks or entire days. Fine. When you work, only work on one thing at a time, think about the task in front of your and pursue it relentlessly. When it comes time for the next task on your schedule, place that first one aside, and apply the same focus.
• Make sure your meal breaks are adequate but not open-ended, and schedule in exercise and rest too.
• By week three, you should have a working schedule that maximizes your effort without sacrificing sleep.

Challenge #9: Uncommon Amongst Uncommon

If you truly want to become uncommon amongst the uncommon, it will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time. It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort. 

That’s what it takes to become a true overachiever, and if you are already surrounded by people who are at the top of their game, what are you going to do differently to stand out?

Torch the complacency you feel gathering around you, your coworkers, and teammates in that rare air. Continue to put obstacles in front of yourself, because that’s where you’ll find the friction that will help you grow even stronger. Before you know it, you will stand alone.

Uncommon people think about everyone else before yourself and developing your own code of ethics to set yourself apart from others (turning every negative into a positive and when it gets hard, be prepared to lead from the front).

A true leader stays exhausted, abhors arrogance, and never looks down on the weakest link.  He finds for his men and leads by example. It meant being one of the best and helping your men find their best too. Instead of getting angry that your colleagues can’t keep up, help pick your colleagues up and bring them with you!

Most people in the world if they ever push themselves at all, are willing to push themselves only so far.  Once they reach a cushy plateau, they relax and get soft. 

Challenge #10: Empowerment off failure

Think about your most recent and your most heart-wrenching failures. Break out the journal.  You’re going to write your own belated After-Action Report (AAR).

First off, write out all the good things, everything that went well, from your failures.  Be detailed and generous with yourself.  A lot of good things will have happened.  It’s rarely all bad. Then note how you handled your failure. Did it affect your life and relationships? How so?

How did you think throughout the preparation for and during the execution stage of your failure? You have to know how you were thinking at each step because it’s all about mindset, and that’s where most people fall short.

• You can’t prepare for unknown factors, but if you have a better pre-game focus, you will likely only have to deal with one or two rather than ten. 

Now go back through and make a list of things you can fix. This isn’t time to be soft or generous. Be brutally honest, write them all out. Study them.

Then look at your calendar and schedule another attempt as soon as possible.

As you prepare, keep that AAR handy, consult your Accountability Mirror, and make all necessary adjustments. When it comes time to execute, keep everything we’ve learned about the power of a calloused mind, the Cookie Jar, and the 40% Rule in the forefront of your mind. Control your mindset. Dominate your thought process. This life is all a fucking mind game. Realize that. Own it!

And if you fail again, so the fuck be it. Take the pain. Repeat these steps and keep fighting. That’s what it’s all about.

Whenever I failed in life, my mom was always asking me when and where I would go after it again.  She never said “Well, maybe it isn’t meant to be.” 

Challenge 11: What if

The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether they be good or bad. We are all our own worst haters and doubters because self-doubt is a natural reaction to any bold attempt to change your life for the better. You can’t stop it from blooming in your brain, but you can neutralize it, and all the other external chatter by asking, What if?

What if you pushed past your comfort zone next time you feel like giving up?