Choose Yourself!

One way to think about it is with the image of the circle: I want you to take out a pen and a piece of paper and do something for me. Draw a little circle. Put what you do in that circle. If you’re a secretary, put “secretary.” If you’re an artist, put “artist.” If you are a mother, put “mother.” Put the thing that is central to your life. If you a

Imagine a life force that flows between them and through them, much like blood. Imagine a central core that must keep everything healthy. Just like you must keep your heart healthy to live a long, productive, and even happy life, you must keep these other bodies healthy as well and exercise them on a regular basis. A daily basis. A minute by minute

The mediocre entrepreneur understands that persistence is not the self-help cliché “Keep going until you hit the finish line!” It’s “Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail.” That’s persistence.

Emotionally I try to surround myself with only positive people who inspire me. This way I can learn to be positive. To be a beacon to those around me.

It reminded me of something Kurt Vonnegut, considered an experimental writer in his own right, once said: “To be experimental, first you have to know how to use all the rules of grammar. You have to be an expert first in tradition.”

Choose yourself right now. If you do this, not only can you not plan the impact you’re going to have, you often won’t recognize it while you’re having it. But one thing is for sure: if you don’t make courageous choices for yourself, nobody else will.

Exercise: think of two people in your network who don’t know each other but you think can add value to each other’s lives. Introduce them. Do this every day. Get better and better at it. The more value you bring to the people in your network (even if it doesn’t directly bring value to you in an immediate way), the greater the value of your network.

So you need to tame the wild horse or it will tame you until you are a slave. Nobody wants that. The way you tame it is through focused use. Set a goal: I’m going to come up with ten ways I can have more time for myself. Or I’m going to come up with ten ways I can make my job better. Or ten business ideas. Make sure the list you plan to do is a har

This is obviously an extreme. But it points out how hard it is for us to do things for ourselves unless we are given some implicit permission.