The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your LifeThe Achievement Habit By Bernard Roth, teaches how to use design thinking to improve our lives and achieve more. Roth is the co-founder of the Stanford d.School (Design School.) According to the book, you'll learn:
Self Awareness The first big lesson I got from the book is learning to be aware of my current mental state (especially when stressed or unhappy or any bad state) and then using my mind to alter said state. You can do this by practicing self-awareness. Using meditation or other mental exercises will help facilitate this. An exercise suggested in the book (to help you change states and get “unstuck”) is to ask yourself this series of questions, each repeatedly for several minutes, and answer them (he suggests writing them in a journal or just saying them aloud) without thinking too much or censoring yourself. Questions: Who am I? What do I want? What is my purpose? “The effect of this exercise is to get you to devote time to thinking deeply about the meaning of your life.” Personally, these are questions I need to ponder more often. When I start thinking about these things, I usually get anxious and push the thoughts from my head. I will work in this. The Meaning of Everything The next lesson is simply that you give everything in your life its meaning. This one can be hard to believe when you first hear it. (I still have trouble with this, but I've slowly made progress in my mindset and this is one of the empowering thoughts I've incorporated.) When you accept that you get to give meaning to things, it allows you to change the way you see things, and in turn change the way you feel and act. Reasons are Excuses “The problem with reasons is that they’re just excuses prettied up.” Here, Roth explains that reasons and excuses are BS that we use to avoid taking responsibility for our behavior. It sounds harsh, but when you read the book, he makes sense. Having an attitude of “no excuses” is a good stance to take if you want to improve yourself. “Many reasons are simply excuses to hide the fact that we are not willing to give something a high enough priority in our lives.” This reminds me of Brian Tracy’s No Excuses: The Power of Self Discipline, which is one of the best self development books I’ve read. (I’ll have to read it again and do a write up on it.) I highly recommend reading it. Taking responsibility for your life and circumstances is really hard. Naturally, we want to blame outside forces. Successful people take responsibility. They are empowered because they believe they have control over their lives and so they do. Major Key: Bias Toward Action Cultivating a bias toward action is a big point in The Achievement Habit. This excellent advice is offered frequently by successful people of all walks of life. Learning to be decisive and take action are probably the biggest factors to achieving what you want in life. Not having enough time is an excuse most people use often. Yet, we all have 24 hours in a day and there are successful people who get shit done. Roth says the difference comes down to “intention and attention.” The successful people didn’t have extra time, they made time for their priorities. Exercise: Write in a journal for a few days, truthfully noting what you’re doing all day and how long you do each task. This will allow you to see where you’re wasting time and where you can improve your time management. Get Unstuck In this section of the book, we go through 22 ways to get unstuck. You’ll have to check the book out for the full detailed list. Some of my favorites include:
The author suggests getting good at a few of these problem solving techniques and using those, not jumping around from method to method. A great piece of advice that I've heard from many successful people (and is mentioned in this book) is that you should learn from everyone. Sure, sometimes it's going to be what not to do, but everyone you meet has experience that you can learn from. Doing is Everything This section of the book can be broken down into a timeless quote from Yoda. Do. Or do not. There is no try. Make your mind up to do something or not and commit to it. Don’t go in thinking, “I’ll try” or you won’t have the right mindset to put in full effort. Communication Skills FTW Top Suggestions for Good Interpersonal Communication
Is Your Self Image Accurate? To find out try this exercise: List five short (one or two word) descriptors of the kind of person you think you are. Ask five family members or friends to list five descriptors of what kind of person they think you are. Now compare your list to theirs. Who Do You Want To Be? Exercise: Imagine you only had 10 minutes left to live, what would you do? 10 days? 10 Months? 10 years? The rest of your life?
“Remember that the real big picture is this: You don’t take anything with you when you die, so you might as well spend your time on Earth experiencing all that you can, rather than stagnating and accumulating.” Prototype Your Way to Success Prototyping can be in many forms, from conversations, videos, written drafts, to physical models. Just prototype something that will give you information fast and allow you to adjust and keep iterating. The Lean Startup's MVP comes to mind. Build a minimally viable product so you can get feedback and make it better. This kind of prototyping and experimenting gets you out of the theoretical, “what might happen” to into the reality of problem solving. Prototyping has different purposes depending on where in the solution process you are. Roth breaks this down into three stages.
Just take action and keep adjusting. The Achievement Habit is full of insight and actionable exercises to help you improve you life and work. The biggest themes I took from it were learning creative problem solving and taking control of your life. The author points out that life is pretty much a series of problems for us to solve. It sure can feel that way. Fortunately, with learning and improving ourselves, we can get better at solving life's problems on our Journey to Better.
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In one of Anthony Robbins' books, he introduces the concept of CANI - Constant And Never-ending Improvement. It's something I've really taken to heart. Great satisfaction can be found in improving yourself. It's one of the best parts of life. There is a reason self-actualization is at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We are happiest and most fulfilled in life when striving for and reaching our full potential. On our journey to better ourselves, our commitment to continually and consistently improving ourselves is the key. Always be learning and growing. Don't let yourself stagnate. That's the road to depression and pain. On my journey, there is so much I want to learn, sometimes it can be overwhelming. I've just got to keep chipping away everyday. Here are a few of the books I'm reading right now. (For free thanks to the awesomeness of the library - Thanks for that, Andrew Carnegie.) I'm always reading a ton of books and doing courses and other things to learn and improve. What are you reading/learning right now? Let me know in the comments.
"Getting an MBA is an expensive choice-one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping business school altogether." -From Description The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman is like going to a top business school for a minuscule fraction of the price. It is astonishing how much you can get out of this book. When reading it, I found echos of all the business training material I've read so far, plus so much more. At certain points I even thought to myself that almost everything I've learned from Tai Lopez in the last year can be found in this book. Probably like 80%. Of all the business books I've read so far this and The Millionaire Fastlane -Read my post on TMF here.-are absolute must reads for anyone interested in business, wealth, and success. I first saw mention of the book on Derek Siver's site, in which he gives it high praise: 10/10. Derek's site is an amazing resource of it's own, my favorite part is his vast array of book reviews/notes. Derek said this of Josh's book: "Wow. A masterpiece. This is now the one “START HERE” book I'll be recommending to everybody interested in business. An amazing overview of everything you need to know. Covers all the basics, minus buzz-words and fluff. Look at my notes for an example, but read the whole book. One of the most inspiring things I've read in years. Want proof? I asked the author to be my coach/mentor afterwards. It's that good." One of the best parts about The Personal MBA is that is actually fun to read. It's well written and not dry like a lot of business books. Josh's writing style made me tear through the book a lot faster than I would normally take reading a business book. And I'm actually looking forward to reading it again. |
AuthorHey there! I'm Jax. Here on A Journey To Better, it's all about bettering ourselves, our lives, and the lives of others. Join me on a self development quest to learn more and improve every day. Archives
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