Category: 67 Steps

Step 24: Gandhi’s Funeral, Stephen Covey’s Wars, and Flurries Of Activity

The Big Idea: Know Your Endgame In Life. Win Wars, Not Battles.  Depression’s function is to tell you to change. Ask yourself: when I die how many people will show up at my funeral? When Adolf Hitler died, the world celebrated. When Gandhi died, the world mourned. Most people are rewarded for flurries of activity. Do […]

Step 23: Landing Your Plane On The Great Wall

The Big Idea: Problems are going to confront you.  Be prepared by expecting them, putting them into perspective, developing the fortitude to overcome, and learning how to innovate past them. To succeed, you must learn how to bypass the obstacles of life. Life will deal tremendous blows to you.  This is the reality. Statistically, something bad will […]

Step 22: The Seven-Fold Path To The Obvious Signs

The Big Idea: Experiment. Experiment. Experiment. Set the right goals and cut out anything that is not moving you towards your goals. Don’t delude yourself.  Embrace the truth when you’re asking yourself if you’re moving towards your goals. Jeff Bezos is one of the best in the world at seeking and embracing the truth, especially through […]

Step 21: Mastering The Four P.A.S.E. Energies & Casanova’s Chameleon

The Big Idea: Understand your strengths. Work on your weaknesses. Learn to identify the strengths of other people. Speak in the language of other people’s strengths. When you’re a worker, technical skills determine your success. When you’re a leader, social skills determine your success. Understand your core strength (P, A, S, E). Understand your weakness (P, […]

Step 20: Richard Branson’s Hurricane & The Imaginary World Of Kanye West

The Big Idea: If you were independently wealthy, what kind of life would you create? Work backward from there to engineer your ideal life. An entrepreneur creates the world in his own image. Richard Branson created Virgin Airlines because a hurricane stranded him on an island. There are three types of people: people who watch things […]

Step 19: Amazon.com & The $32,000 Brain Budget

The Big Idea: Spend 30% of your monthly income on reading and learning.  Do an audit of your finances. Find out how much you spend on 1) consuming vs 2)  investing (specifically, learning). Spend 30% of your automatic income on learning new skills. Spend 30% of your income on bills. Spend 30% of your income […]

Step 18: Man-On-The-Moon Contrast and Keeping Easy Things Easy

The Big Idea: Break down complex things into simple things, but keep simple things simple. Ask yourself: is what you’re trying to do harder than putting man on the moon? We put a man on the moon by breaking up the problem into smaller steps. There are two types of men in the world: those […]

Step 17: Elon Musk‘s 14-Hour Workday vs. The 4-Hour Work Week

The Big Idea: The most successful men work 14 hour days, not 4 hour work weeks. Learn to love the grind. — John Calipari In fifty years, you will wish you had the energy to work hard. Life is grind.  Hate the grind and you will hate life. If you love the grind, it’s not really […]

Step 16: Rousseau, The Renaissance Man, & Iron Sharpening Iron

The Big Idea: The most successful people are generally renaissance people, who know a lot about a lot. Our brains are simulation machines. Jet pilots do not start learning by doing, they start in a simulator. Learn by reading, not by trial and error. Today, it is not very rewarding to be a renaissance person. People […]

Step 15: Descartes & Solving Problems With A Calculator

The Big Idea: To run a successful business, you must be comfortable with math and statistics. Math is the only 100% certain truth. — Descartes I was dyslexic, but I realized that if I was going to be rich I had to understand numbers. — Richard Branson To make good decisions, you must understand math […]

Step 14: The Shaolin Monk & Touching An Electric Fence

The Big Idea: Prepare for what is difficult when it is easy. If you take the approach that everything is your fault, you can begin to anticipate and plan for many scenarios (disease, recession, breakup, accidents). If you get mugged and beat up at 30, it’s your fault because you could have been training since you were 10. […]

Step 13: The Amish Vacation, Tap Dancing To Work, & Avoiding What You Love

The Big Idea: If you have to go on vacation from what you do, don’t ever come back. The Amish work almost every day but don’t feel the need for a vacation. The Amish have 1/5 the depression of non-Amish. The Amish integrate work and life. Never permit a dichotomy to ruin your life.  A dichotomy […]

Step 11: The Whispers Of 10,000 Generations, Dunbar’s 150, & Evolutionary Mismatch

The Big Idea: Don’t Fight Your Evolutionary Hardwiring; Understand It. The biological impulses you have come from 10,000 generations of evolution.  However, the world has completely changed  over the last 10 generations. Our biology leads us to overeat since we now live in an abundance of food. Our biology wants to to sleep from dusk to […]

Step 8: The Integrated Good Life and The Four Pillars of Eudaimonia

The Big Idea: The good life integrates four pillars of health, wealth, love, and happiness. The Amish are so happy because they do not compartmentalize work from life. Do whatever it takes to avoid hating Mondays. The 2 Mile Rule: work and shop within 2 miles of your home; traffic (work/life compartmentalizing) is an enormous […]

Step 7: Martin Seligman’s Salary Slave and Learned Helplessness

The Big Idea: Take risks in life The modern education system trains students to rely on others for their education Read a book a day and become self-educated for happiness Learned helplessness exists in education, health, income, love Great nations are born stoic and die epicurean In the American economy today, the consequences of failure are not […]

Step 6: Sculpture vs Lottery and the Anthropic Media Bias

The Big Idea: The media lies to you about success.  Success takes years of focused work towards a wisely-chosen goal. The media lies to you about success The media doesn’t emphasize Bill Gates worked 7 days a week for ten years.  Arnold Schwarzenegger worked out 4 hours a day during his teens. Overnight success takes years Learn to love […]

Step 5: My Poor Friends & Cameron Diaz’s Parrot

The Big Idea: Study how successful people think.   Don’t pick your friends based on their success, but be selective about which friend’s advice you listen to. Pay attention to how your more successful friends think and how your less successful friends think. Like parrots, successful people repeat quotes all the time (not their own opinions.) Successful […]

Step 4: Picasso’s Rising Tide and the Law of 33%

The Big Idea: Use mentors to shorten your learning curve. Good artists copy and great artists steal. —Picasso If I’m great it’s because I’m standing on the shoulders of giants. —Einstein To get what you want you must be a learning machine. Poor people should take rich people to dinner. 70% of communication is nonverbal. […]

Step 2: Blue Footed Booby Birds, ESS, and the 500 Year Old Mind

The Big Idea: Change is the basic law of nature in life, so be an adaptability machine.   Read, learn, and expect occasional setbacks towards success.  Change is the basic law of nature. The species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt to change. — Darwin Similarly, the most successful individuals and […]

Step 1: The Billionaire’s Brain and Jennifer Lopez’s Voice

The Big Idea: To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want.  Awareness is key to success.  If you’re not successful, be self-aware enough to understand why. The good life = health, wealth, love, and happiness. To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want.  the world is not […]