No Excuses!

Hah.

‘Someday Isle.’

NOT a good place to take up residence, eh?

Are YOU hanging out there?

What’s one thing you’ve been planning to do “someday” that you might wanna revisit and schedule for now?

This book is pretty much all about helping us pack up our bag of excuses and move out! Or, as Brian says, “voting ourselves off the island!” Let’s enjoy some Big Ideas on how, shall we? :)

We talk about this battle within A LOT throughout these Notes. From angels to wolves and lawyers. Jesus and Socrates to Krishna and Rumi.

First, the wolves. You might’ve already heard this one but it’s worth repeating. Marci Shimoff tells the story of the wolves well in Happy for No Reason (see Notes): “One evening a Cherokee elder told his grandson about the battle that goes on inside of people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between the two ‘wolves’ that live inside us all. One is Unhappiness. It is fear, worry, anger, jealousy, sorrow, self-pity, resentment, and inferiority. The other is Happiness. It is joy, love, hope, serenity, kindness, generosity, truth, and compassion.’ The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf wins?’ The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.’”

And Alan Cohen has a great way of describing the battle between lawyers in your head in his classic Why Your Life Sucks (see Notes): “Imagine two lawyers in a courtroom inside your head. One is arguing for your possibilities and you achieving your goals. The other is arguing for your limits and why you don’t deserve what you want. Who will win? The lawyer whom you pay the most. The way you pay these lawyers, however, is not with money; it is with your attention.”

Plus, I love how Socrates puts it: “I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can…And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same…I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.”

So, who’s winning your battle and how can you get Mr. Mo on the side of The Good Guys? :)

Long-term thinking.

Not only is it a key to success, it’s also a key to happiness.

Two things I want to highlight here: 1) the ability to delay gratification; and, 2) the importance of coherence.

First, delaying gratification. We talk about this in the Note on Emotional Intelligence. Quick re-cap: Kids were tested in a lab and offered a choice: two marshmallows if they could wait until the experimenter ran an errand or one if they wanted it immediately. Whether they were able to delay gratification or not as a four-year old was a greater predictor of their SAT score than IQ. (IQ is a better predictor once they’ve learned to read.)

As Goleman says: “There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.”

And, coherence. We know that having long-term and short-term goals that “line up” and are “coherent” is super important for our overall happiness.

As Jonathan Haidt tells us in The Happiness Hypothesis: “The psychologists Ken Sheldon and Tim Kasser have found that people who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of “vertical coherence” among their goals—that is, higher-level (long term) goals and lower-level (immediate) goals all fit together well so that pursuing one’s short-term goals advances the pursuit of long-term goals.”

Here’s to coherence and delayed gratification as we flex our long-term thinking muscles!!

The Law of Sowing and Reaping. Cause and Effect. Karma.

We hit on this theme quite a bit throughout the Notes as well.

I love how Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it (see Notes): “Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”

I also love the image T. Harv Eker creates in Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (see Notes): “In every forest, on every farm, in every orchard on earth, it’s what’s under the ground that creates what’s above the ground. That’s why placing your attention on the fruits that you have already grown is futile. You cannot change the fruits that are already hanging on the tree. You can, however, change tomorrow’s fruits. But to do so, you will have to dig below the ground and strengthen the roots.”

Bottom line is simple: “if you are not happy with your current ‘crop,’ it is up to you, starting today, to plant a new crop, to begin doing more of those things that lead to success—and to stop engaging in those activities that lead nowhere.”

Love that.

Reminds me of a chapter from my book called “Love Letters.” Basic idea: Write a letter describing your ideal partner (could be an intimate relationship, business partnership, whatever). Go into detail. What would this person be like? How would they treat you? How would they take care of themselves?

Now, Part II. The much more important part!

Write a letter describing who YOU need to be to attract this person in to your life and to maintain an awesome relationship with them. Who do YOU need to be? How do you treat yourself? How do you treat them? Who are you?!

That second letter should be much longer than the first. :)

Reminds me of Albert Ellis’s mojo from A Guide to Rational Living (see Notes): “We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming—or damning. If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it almost impossible to upset yourself emotionally—about anything. Yes, anything.”

Why is blame so bad?

The #1 reason is because whenever we blame we’re putting control OUTSIDE of ourselves. We’re giving up our power. We’re not taking responsibility. And that’s always a REALLY bad idea!!

T. Harv echoes this one as well: “You can be a victim or you can be rich, but you can’t be both. Listen up! Every time, and I mean every time, you blame, justify, or complain, you are slitting your financial throat.”

Will Bowen wrote an entire book on this called A Complaint Free World (see Notes) and tells us: “To be a happy person who has mastered your thoughts and has begun creating your life by design, you need a very, very high threshold of what leads you to express grief, pain, and discontent.”

Here’s to taking our power back and no longer blaming, criticizing, complaining or otherwise draining ourselves! :)

I love that.

Dale Carnegie offers the same wisdom in his classic How To Stop Worrying and Start Living (see Notes): “George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: ‘The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.’ So don’t bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking—and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It’s the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth—and one of the best.”

How ‘bout some more old-school goodness on this from David Schwartz in The Magic of Thinking Big (see Notes) where he tells us: “Fear of all kinds and sizes is a form of psychological infection. We can cure a mental infection the same way we cure a body infection—with specific, proved treatments… condition yourself with this fact: all confidence is acquired, developed. No one is born with confidence. Those people around you who radiate confidence, who have conquered worry, who are at ease everywhere and all the time, acquired their confidence, every bit of it.”

Are you worried?

Here’s to spitting on our hands and taking purposeful action in the direction of our goals!!

Remember: Action cures fear!!

NEWSFLASH: TV is not your friend.

Sure, you can use it for awesome educational stuff but let’s be honest: Are you?

Or, are you numbing out and wasting your life sucked into the latest lame “must see” TV show?

I’ve heard it said that you can predict the level of wealth of a household by whether their big screen TV or their library is the prominent feature in their home. And, I’ve definitely seen this play out in my own casual study. The wealthiest and most successful people I’ve met read a CRAZY amount.

Beyond that, psychologists tells us that the average emotional state we experience while watching TV is mild depression. As Tracy says, it’s as if a part of us *knows* that we’re not showing up. And that NEVER feels good.

Personally, I haven’t had a TV plugged in on a regular basis for prolly 10+ years now. The last time I owned a TV (haven’t had one in maybe 5+ years), I unplugged it and put it in the closet–pulling it out when I watched a movie (on a VCR to put it in perspective). :)

One of the best decisions I ever made!! Wanna join me? :)

We are teleological beings. We are purpose driven. We NEED goals that drive us.

Or we suffer.

That’s not modern self-help silliness. It’s a scientific fact and a deep philosophical truth.

Modern Philosopher Tom Morris puts it this way in his great book The Art of Achievement (see Notes): “Aristotle has taught me we all need a target to shoot at. We must have goals to guide our actions and energies. The Greek word for target was telos. Human beings are teleological creatures. We are hard-wired to live purposively, to have direction. Without a target to shoot at, our lives are literally aimless. Without something productive to do, without positive goals and a purpose, a human being languishes. And then one of two things happens. Aimlessness begins to shut a person down in spiritual lethargy and emptiness, or the individual lashes out and turns to destructive goals just to make something happen.”

And, I’ve quote this passage from Sonja Lyubomirsky’s How of Happiness (see Notes) probably half a dozen times at this point because it rocks: “In 1932, weighed down by the sorrows and agonies of his self-absorbed and aimless clients, an Australian psychiatrist named W. Béran Wolfe summed up his philosophy like this: ‘If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.’ He was right. People who strive for something personally significant, whether it’s learning a new craft, changing careers, or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations. Find a happy person, and you will find a project.”