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1 Practice This Holiday

The trick to quickly mastering any skill is to pick one crucial aspect of that skill to focus on like a maniac before moving on to your next one thing, and so on.

For instance, many of us know that the word “but” (as in “Yeah, but”) screws up communications.

It negates what that person just said and means you basically end up throwing your words all over their self-defenses.

Notice this week that nearly every time you say “but” you could have easily said “and,” and just by changing this one word how much better you are at keeping people on side.

Changing this one small aspect of your language can have a massive impact.

All skills are the same.

The Hardest Skill To Master

In my lifetime I’ve learned an endless number of skills, but none have been so hard to master as the skill of thinking.

That’s the skill of getting beyond those old habitual ways of thinking that your biology and society conditioned into you, and choosing the thoughts that you want to live by.

So instead of say reading the news and seeing the world through crap-covered glasses, this skill involves stepping outside of the fear-based social reality, and living in your own reality.

As we cover all the time together, the skill of getting what you want mostly comes down to this skill of thinking.

Trump: Won. NYT: WINNING

After the latest gaffe around Charlottesville, Trump lost a number of high profile CEO supporters, and the New York Times quickly moved in for the kill.

In its appropriately titled section, “Morning Agenda,” the NYT ran the headline, “Debating Gary Cohn’s Future in Washington.”

Using powerful influence, citing no sources but “the many” business elite, and “several people close to him,” the NYT expertly seeded the idea that Cohn might be next to go.

To those people out there who read the news as “factual” this may appear to be a simple statement of the “truth…”

But to those of us who enjoy watching the wars of propaganda in our society, you see the NYT beautifully using one of Trump’s favorite devices of influence against him—external validation.

In his presidential campaign Trump proved himself an excellent influencer, but the media is proving itself better.

Where Blowing Up People Fails

Trump principally has one approach to winning—a hand grenade.

He’s used to blowing through things, forcing other people to bend, break, collapse, and hand him victory.

A Secret To Influence Too Few Of Us Know

Sitting at dinner in London, it’s obvious that the woman at my one o’clock is ready to go…

Dilated pupils, twirling her hair, playing with her necklace, stabbing her straw into her drink, she’s parading the most obvious signs of attraction, but her date has no idea.

She’d be embarrassed if she knew everyone in the room could tell what she was thinking, but fortunately, the rest of the room is as unaware as she and he are.

An entire conversation is playing out in front of me that nobody else can “hear.”

Stop Talking To Me

Walking into a top law firm I passed a man and a woman sitting in an office.

The man was sitting in his power pose, behind his big mahogany desk. The woman on the other side was squirming, every aspect of her body language saying, “get away from me.”

As the man kept talking, she kept leaning further back, her arms and legs twisted tighter and tighter like a pretzel, indicating (not definitively) that she didn’t want to hear what he was saying.

The man, in his mid-fifties, who presumably learned to speak five decades ago, still hadn’t learned how to communicate!

Your Words Are Mostly Meaningless

Us humans mostly associate communications with the words that are coming out of our mouths.

But, unfortunately, as anyone who has studied communications and influence knows, our words are only a tiny fraction of the message we are conveying.

Would You Let Your Arm Flap About?

Imagine your right arm, for whatever reason, couldn’t control itself.

So, you might be walking down the street, and that arm of yours is just lashing out, pointing here and there, turning itself over and over, swinging all over the place.

You’d be pretty embarrassed by it, and worse—in close quarters that arm would likely flail around and hit other people.

Eventually you might even find yourself in a court of law trying to explain how that arm of yours knocked out an old lady at Starbucks.

It’s not YOUR fault; that arm of yours just has a life of its own.

But most of us would still do near everything we could to get that arm under control, including strapping it to our body.

Not Talking About The Arm

Now let’s say that wasn’t your arm, but that part of you flapping around, lashing out, constantly turning, is your brain.

How a 12 hour delay = happiness

There’s a lot of things that make us happier, and part of life is figuring out what they are.

We of course know that making more money and having more success has little positive impact on our happiness, so what does?

You guys know my answer by now—it’s all in the head.

And to keep feeling more amazing every day, we want to keep finding ways to change the way we see the world.

One way is to adjust our expectations.

The Secret of Low Expectations

According to happiness researcher Barry Schwartz, the secret to happiness is—Low Expectations.

This of course means, if you have high hopes then it’s easy to be disappointed and hard to be pleased, whereas if you’re happy eating out of a can of tuna, well…

I saw this in Buffalo last night.

Having been diverted from Newark to Buffalo and after sitting for 6 hours waiting to hear whether we’d get out or not, the boarding gate was a pretty somber affair.

How Much Do You Want It?

Over lunch with a leader, I asked him, “What do you see makes the difference between the many in your business, and the few that truly win?”

“Focus and intensity,” he fired back.

Winning is simple to him.

It’s not about who you are or where you come from, but how willing you are to find a way to win.

He sees it at every level, including in his own game.

“Sometimes I see effort other people put in to win a piece of business,“ he said, “and I’m no longer willing to do that.”

He’s good with that choice; he’s got enough, and he’s willing to leave a little for others on the table.

What about you?

Intensity and Duration

Two rules for “manifesting” your reality are—intensity and duration.

The more intensely you go at it, and the longer you do it for, the more likely you are to create the results you want.

But of course that’s not the entire game.

A Key to Feeling Amazing—Right Now

In 2010 when I moved to Vail Colorado I was escaping to the mountains for more than just the skiing.

It was the hardest time in my life, and I was there to transform.

I had chosen a job that was way too hard for me, I was stuck in my work, feeling like crap beating up on myself, and I needed to fix my head.

I needed to become mentally stronger and clear the roadblocks my mind had put in my way; work that would take me another two seasons back to my mountain chrysalis.

It was there, in the isolation of the mountains, I began to go deep into the mind with hours of meditation and hypnosis a day, including while barreling down the hill.

It was there, even after a decade of R&D’g personal development, I began to appreciate the depth of these topics, and I started my 7+ year obsession with the mind.

Going down the rabbit hole I’ve focused on a lot of super deep ideas over the years, but ultimately, I began with just one.

How Do You Feel Amazing Every Day?

Summer of Getting Better

One of my clients has been setting the bar higher.

We’ve been working together for more than five years, and every week he’s shooting to get better.

Yet in the last couple of weeks he’s taken it to an entirely new level—his Summer of Getting Better.

Why Get Better?

For many people, getting better is mostly irrelevant to their success.

Even most the people I know in high paying jobs, so long as they show up every day and get done what they “need,” they’ll have a great career.

But my client is different.

He left one of those jobs years ago, and in his business today, if he doesn’t get better, he will FAIL.

I don’t write that to be dramatic, but factual.

He’s chosen a very hard game. Over years of constant improvement, he’s pulled ahead in his business, but he only keeps winning because he keeps getting better.

In his case, it’s simple—Get better or fail.

But That’s Not His Only Why

Too Old Not To Settle

There are many complexities and constraints when it comes to creating the lives we truly want.

In different ways it has been said—you can have everything you want, just not all at the same time. And, indeed, throughout our lives we are forced to choose, to sequence our “wants” according to what makes sense for our circumstances.

Coming out of school with a bunch of debt, it’s harder to venture out on your own. With a young family and mouths to feed, it’s harder to take risk. With the runway of a great career, it’s harder, and often wiser, to work that track for the “right” amount of time.

If we do it right, and we’re lucky to live long enough, by “simply” making the right choices at each point in time, we can create our most magical lives.

Yet, it can be very hard to keep our eye on the prize.

Why You Feel Stuck—And 6 Tools How To Push Through

Focus Tools

How many of you have goals that you can’t seem to get yourself to focus on?

They might be professional, personal, getting things done around the home. You know that you “want” to do them, but you just can’t consistently get yourself to take action.

I know that’s a problem for many of us because I know few people who it isn’t a problem for, and because many of you keep telling me it’s a problem.

This weekend I did a call with a member of our community.

Some time ago he’d reached out to me about his grandest vision for his career and life, and although he’s too junior to be a client, I jumped on the phone and gave him some pointers.

He’s moving, he’s making good progress on his goal, but some days when he sits down eager to get things done, he finds himself stuck.

He knows the things he wants to get done, but, well, he can’t get himself to do them.

Mike Tyson’s Daily Routine Was Simple, Predictable, And Unstoppable

In his latest book, Iron Ambition: My life with Cus D’Amato, Mike Tyson lays out what it took to become a champ.

Inside, Tyson details his relationship with his trainer and what took him from a punk kid in Brooklyn involved in petty crime to 7 years later becoming the youngest heavyweight champ.

How did he do it?

Simply. There was no secret bullet, no expensive course he took that “catapulted him to reach his full potential.”

He became the best in the world by building a daily training routine with a simple set of tools—tools you can use to become a champ in your own life.

Tyson’s Daily Routine Uses Tools You Already Have

Cus D’Amato, Tyson’s trainer, gave Tyson a “secret sauce” of mental training anyone can practice:

Affirmations
Hypnosis
Visualization

It's Not Just You: Why So Many of Us Cannot Feel Fulfilled

A trap many of us Do What You Wanters fall into is that we spend too much time obsessing over that thing we want, and too little time indulging in what we already have.

We certainly will spend our lives dreaming of and charging after a rosier future, but we also want to be smelling the roses around us.

Rushing to get out the door every morning, one of my clients realized he’d been waking up fixating on what he wanted to get done today, but missing out on that precious little time he gets with his boys.

He travels and works late, so he misses them most nights. This 15 minutes in the morning is all he really gets during the week, and now he’s fixating on enjoying it.

As Epicurus put it, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

The Complete Guide To Winning Daily Routines

You hear a lot about the importance of daily routines, but how many of us actually use them?

I know many professionals trying to compete at the top of their game, and honestly, many teachers who promote the importance of daily routines, who fail to use them. That’s because, as I did for years, we often look at routines completely wrong.

In the same way that many people see exercise as hard and grueling and something to be avoided, we often think of building winning routines as requiring a lot of “hard work.” In fact, the opposite is true.

Top daily routines aren’t about grinding it out against a stop watch, squeezing every ounce of productivity from your day, but getting yourself focused and in the right state of mind to get done those things that truly matter to you.

Like the rituals a top athlete follows ahead of a competition, daily routines are the key to top performance, but they’re also about something far more important—feeling happier and more energized every day.

None of us want to be lazing around in bed tired hitting snooze, do we? Of course not. We all love the idea of bouncing out of bed excited to dive into our day, right?

Similarly, none of us want to be sitting at our desk stressed, worried, whining about all the things we “have to” get done. We want to be clear on what matters, focused on doing it, and feel great looking back at the end of the day having gotten it done.

In this guide I’m sharing with you my ultimate daily routines, a system for your day, broken down into three phases:

Pre-Productive Phase
Productive Phase
Post-Productive Phase

Why I Don’t Charge For Coaching

What most people call “coaching,” I do for free.

Sitting with someone and spewing advice is a service people charge for, but it’s not particularly valuable. It might get someone to feel better about their day and life, but it’s unlikely to lead to transformational results.

To get transformational results, you have to take the best knowledge and build systems of continuous improvement that you work and re-work every day until you get what you want.

Results are valuable, and they are the only thing I can imagine charging people for.

Do You Want Advice, Or Results?

A concern I have when I write each and every one of these newsletters is that I’m leading you into the same trap that I found myself in.

Spending more than 10 years of my life reading thousands of books on personal development, I learned a lot, but, honestly, I mostly just filled my head with redundant knowledge.

That knowledge is incredibly interesting to me, but knowledge by itself is next to useless. Just like that piece of meat between your, um, ears, it’s what you do with it that counts.

I’ve read many amazing books that gave me amazing knowledge. I’ve sat with top executive coaches—who charge six and seven figures per client—who have also shared ridiculously good knowledge with me, but on its own, it all fails to get the job done.

3 Life Lessons I Learned While "Wasting Time"

One of the tenets of my life, and the thing that has allowed me to keep creating the most amazing life I can imagine, is that I prioritize learning above everything else.

To that end, I feel very grateful to the people who have written the thousands of books that have helped me keep growing, and to the world-class mentors and teachers who have groomed me.

Yet, when people ask me about the most transformational experiences of my life, about where I learned the most, I rarely give them the answer they expect. I learned a lot at Goldman Sachs. I learned a lot at the Carlyle Group. I learned a lot training with world-renowned experts, but where did I learn the most important lessons of my life?

When I was wasting time.

“Wasting time” is a phrase people use with a negative connotation, but for me at least, wasting time means doing something I want to do, even if I can’t explain why.

I want to learn to sing, but can’t figure out why? Well, better go spend some time learning. My brain has a reason for it, and I know if I do what “I’m told,” I’ll get something I need out of it.

Living that way is odd for a lot of people. When they were kids it was easy, but as adults, they’re out of the habit of doing things that they can’t directly connect to “making progress,” and they criticize themselves for wanting things that aren’t obviously beneficial to them in “serious” ways.

But life is too important to take seriously, and when you venture into these other areas you learn things that often surprise you. Here’s the three most important life lessons I learned by wasting time.

1. I Learned To Embarrass Myself By Singing

We live in a pathetically cynical society. When I first decided to learn to sing, it wasn’t because of some deep ambition. I didn’t want to be Beyonce. I just thought singing sounded fun.

How To Avoid Sacrificing Your Life For A Job

20 years of life wasted.

That’s what I thought when I saw this article talking about big law firms culling partners.

Working as an investment banker you get to see the “worst” of what it’s like to be a lawyer, at least a securities lawyer, and boy, you’d have to really love the law to do that job.

Now, of course many of them do, but others who I’ve met over the years are in the legal profession for the same reason many people are in “top” jobs:

At some point in time, they thought being a lawyer was a top job.

They’re right, it was.

So too was being an investment banker, private equity partner, hedge fund manager, consultant, etc. but today nearly every profession is under significant threat.

As the article states, “Being made partner at a big law firm used to be seen as a brass ring of prestige, wealth and security. But it turns out that it is not so secure after all.”

Just like many “good jobs” of the past, being a lawyer isn’t so good anymore. And with more supply than demand for legal services, the prediction is that all law firms are going to be slimming down.

When the jobs of auto workers and grocery store checkout clerks go away, we’re not surprised, but when top jobs become less attractive, it creates far bigger problems for one main reason.

9 Pieces of Life Advice People Love To Misinterpret

As many of you know, I never dreamed of becoming a, um, “self-help expert.”

When I began this work back in 2000, sitting at Goldman Sachs dreaming of the life I truly wanted, I had no idea where reading a bunch of self-help books would lead me.

Hat down, glasses on, the day I sheepishly crept into the self-help section of the bookstore hoping not to be seen, thinking, “who the fuck needs this stuff?” I was pretty desperate.

My head down work hard approach had gotten me a long way, but now asking myself the question that had come to dominate my life—What Do I Want?—I’d shown up here with the other losers looking for answers…

Hidden amongst the trillions of tons of earth on this planet we have uncovered only enough gold to fill two Olympic sized swimming pools.

To find the gold you must throw out a lot of ore, and life advice is the same. Here are 9 of the most common misinterpretations of legitimate life advice.

How To Say No To Wasting Time

Many of us struggle to effectively manage our time. With an inundation of emails, phone calls, and meeting requests, we must keep finding ways to protect our time for what matters most.

That often requires becoming better at saying “No.”

This can be hard to do. We all have a fear of missing out, of saying no to an opportunity that might just change our lives. Maybe this lunch is where we hear the idea that comes to define our career. Maybe this connection will be a lifelong friend.

If you let that thinking rule your actions, you are bound for failure.

How To Ask For Anything

Whatever you want in life, you’re going to have to ask for it. It doesn’t matter if you desire to excel in your career or to live on the beach—I’ve done both—you’re going to need other people’s help.

A problem many of us face is that we think of every ask as a unique event. Asking for a raise is different to asking for a date is different to asking for a sale. As a result, we focus on developing situation-specific strategies that might work for one thing, but seldom make us better at asking for everything.

Getting someone to do what you want is influence, and influence is a fundamental skill we all need. You don’t need 20 “influence hacks.” To become an expert at asking for what you want, you need a reliable system that you use over and over again in every situation.

Commencement Speech Worth Reading!

Most commencement speeches are worse than most self-help books, filled with useless platitudes that benefit no-one.

This is different.

Each of us can massively change the world, but only if we are willing to do what it takes…

_______________

The following are the remarks by Naval Adm. William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, at the University-wide Commencement at The University of Texas at Austin on May 17:

President Powers, Provost Fenves, Deans, members of the faculty, family and friends and most importantly, the class of 2014. Congratulations on your achievement.

It’s been almost 37 years to the day that I graduated from UT. I remember a lot of things about that day. I remember I had throbbing headache from a party the night before. I remember I had a serious girlfriend, whom I later married — that’s important to remember by the way — and I remember that I was getting commissioned in the Navy that day.

But of all the things I remember, I don’t have a clue who the commencement speaker was that evening, and I certainly don’t remember anything they said. So, acknowledging that fact, if I can’t make this commencement speech memorable, I will at least try to make it short.