sketches of the mind

From StevePavlina.com Personal Development Insights Newsletter #7:

Many years ago I met a businessman who said he’d turned his $40,000 per year business into a $400,000 per year business in just 2 years. He asked if I wanted to know how he did it. I replied that of course I wanted to know. At the time I was struggling with my computer games business. I was able to pay my bills, but I wasn’t getting ahead.

The lesson he taught me was quite simple. In fact, it’s so simple that you’re likely to dismiss it as obvious. I agree that it sounds like common sense, but it’s not commonly applied. When you really put this idea into action, you can take your results to a whole new next level.

In a nutshell this was the lesson:

In life you will always have your ups and downs, your successes and failures. Sometimes things go well for you. Sometimes they go poorly.

When you succeed or fail, there’s always a cause. You can backtrack your results to figure out what caused them. You might not be able to do this perfectly, but you’ll usually have a pretty good idea of the contributing factors.

What caused your income, your health, and your relationships to improve over the past several years? What caused things to get worse? Can you identify the specific causes of your best and worst results?

Once you know the contributing factors to your hits and your misses, your goal is to deliberately do more of what causes the successes and deliberately do less of what caused the failures.

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My girlfriend and I had been dating for over a year, and so we decided to get married. My parents helped us in every way, my friends encouraged me, and my girlfriend? She was a dream!

There was only one thing bothering me, very much indeed, and that one thing was her younger sister. My prospective sister-in-law was twenty years of age, wore tight mini skirts and low cut blouses. She would regularly bend down when near me and I got many a pleasant view of her underwear.

It had to be deliberate. She never did it when she was near anyone else. One day little sister called and asked me to come over to check the wedding invitations. She was alone when I arrived. She whispered to me that soon I was to be married, and she had feelings and desires for me that she couldn’t overcome and didn’t really want to overcome. She told me that she wanted to make love to me just once before I got married and committed my life to her sister.

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One of the primary reasons for my trip to Sydney was to attend the wedding of two of the most loveliest people in my world - Chi and Liza.

Chi and I have been best friends since eleventh grade.

He first walked into the maths classroom with tighter than tight pants, sporting glasses (”he must be smart”) and sat down in the front row. I knew there was something up with this guy so I went and said “Hi”. It was then that I discovered that he had a German accent, and that he’d just recently moved to Australia from Germany with his family. We soon discovered a common interest in video games (though compared to Chi I’m nowhere near as fanatic as he is), girls, and Manga. We’ve been close friends ever since.

So when Chi mentioned last year that he and Liza had set a date for their wedding I promised him I’d be there. I kept my promise.

The weekend also marked my first real trip to the Hunter Valley (aka. “Wine Country”). My only other trip to the region was a number of years ago when, incidentally enough, Chi and I jumped out of planes 14,000 feet in the air when we went tandem skydiving. So this trip was less about adrenaline rush and more about soaking in the sun, tasting some of Australia’s best wine (though I didn’t get a chance to visit any of the vineyards as I had hoped), and loving life.

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“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it!”

Jonathan Winters delivers the ultimate motivational message. If you
want something, don’t sit there waiting for it. Go get it. Make it
happen. Life is only a lottery if you sit on your hands. As soon as
you get up and make things happen, your chances of boarding that ship
go way up.

You could buy a lottery ticket and wait for the ship to come in. And
wait. And wait. Or you could chase after the ship and ride the wind.

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Courtesy of The Happy Guy.

Life doesn’t have to be so damn hard. It really doesn’t. Most people, my past self included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9-to-5 drudgery in exchange for (sometimes) relaxing weekends and the occasional keep-it-short-or-get-fired vacation. ~ Tim Ferriss - The 4-Hour Workweek

I’ve been recommending The 4-Hour Workweek to anybody and everybody who has expressed a desire to get out of the vicious work-home-bills cycle (aka “Rat Race” as Robert Kiyosaki refers to it). The book really does present a new paradigm, and it blows any old ideas about what life “needs” to be out of the stratosphere.

I’m currently in the process of applying some of the tools recommended by Tim Ferriss. The first will be to check e-mail twice a day only. I actually trialled this for a week a while ago and it really did demonstrate something interesting. Aside from seeing how it could increase productivity I also realised that because I was accessing my email less, and because I was only doing it for an hour each time, I wasn’t sending out nearly as many useless emails thus soliciting equally useless replies i.e. time wasters.

I have since returned to my poor habit of checking email when I wake up, thus effectively wasting my mornings however as of next Monday I will return to checking my personal mail twice a day - once at midday for an hour, and secondly at 8pm for an hour.

It really is a good test of discipline. Now I have to work out when I’m going to do the same for my work email and what am I going to do when I’m not checking my email anymore!

I will also limit checking facebook to once every day.

As I start applying other tools and techniques discussed in the book I’ll post my experiences here. I’m particularly excited about outsourcing my life!