Notes

Amazon (Link)

Russ started rapping in 2006. By 2015, he became a worldwide sensation. This book is part autobiography, part self-help. You’ll learn why Russ believes the three keys to achieving your dreams are delusion, persistence, and gratitude. Short read but lot of wisdom in these pages.

• There are three essential qualities into turning your life into your dream life: delusion, persistence, gratitude

Delusion

• “You have to be careful what you think about, because it comes true.”
• When you set your achievement in the future, you’re already putting it off. The future never comes. It will always remain the future. You need to say “I am successful.” You need to believe so deeply that you are just waiting for the world to catch up.
• Living off delusion is healthy. Everything is unrealistic until it’s not. Follow your dream despite its contraction with the known reality and the rational expectations and assumptions of other people
• Become addicted to the craft. After the show, Russ partied with the fans but the whole time he was itching to get back into the hotel to record.
• Get so lost in your passion that the numbers on a clock aren’t real. Time isn’t real. Just clocks.
• Detach from the when. If you’re too attached to the when, you will be fighting the natural flow of the universe. It knows the exact right moment everything needs to happen.
• Fuck the points. Play for the love of the game.

[Read more…] about It’s All In Your Head by Russ Notes

Amazon (Link)

“If the game of life ended today, would you be a winner?” This book goes deep on the practices best practices Jim Tressel has found on winning the game of life. I loved it. And if you’re pursuing the highest version of yourself, you probably will as well.

• On Goals
  • Goals are important but it’s important to understand people are not defined by their goals. A win or a loss does not make you better or worse as a human being.
  • Let your goals come from your purpose
  • Goals must be measurable. You need to be able to quantify what you want to accomplish
• On Success
  • “Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you’re capable of becoming.” –John Wooden
  • Success is an everyday proposition
  • The true measure of success is whether we feel good about our ability to contribute to whatever team we’re on.
  • More difficult to handle success than adversity. That’s because it’s a natural human tendency to rest on our laurels when we’ve done well. If we get punched in the nose, we have an instinctual desire to fight back
  • “Success is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can’t lose.” –Bill Gates
  • True success is achieve when our main concern is the good of others and the building up of the team

[Read more…] about The Winners Manual Notes

Link (Amazon)

A former Navy SEAL sniper’s experiences in business, war, and training. Practical, real world examples. Loved how the writing acknowledged Webb’s own flaws and failures as well as his massive successes.

• Front sight focus is that state of intense concentration in which all your resources and abilities are brought on a single intention… everything else blurs and disappears
• Single core principle for success in business: choose one thing, focus on that one thing, and execute it to the absolute limit of your abilities.
• Cold bore lesson – each day is a single bullet
• Two common traits of top performers: complete and total confidence (“I will win no matter what”) combined with rigorous, consistent, meticulous mental rehearsal (“and this is exactly what it will look like and feel like”).
• On self talk
  • You create complete and total confidence via self-talk
  • People give themselves excuses before they start and while they are performing so they can decide to quit
  • They quit because they decided to
  • We are all talking to ourselves all the time. Why not do it intentionally?
• Failing sniper school because you wipe the sweat from your brow… A little sweat and discomfort is no reason to lose your focus
• Stay on purpose
• Figure out your number – the amount of money you’re aiming for. Would you pull a trigger without knowing where you’re shooting?
• People sometimes you train like to hell to become a Navy SEAL. The truth is you you train like hell to become a SEAL, and then you start training. The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.
• Develop the habit of knowing more than you think you need to know.
• Illusory superiority – everyone thinks they’re above average
• First year in business, Brandon lived like a monk – monk mode.
• When you hear, “this is the way things are always done”… don’t believe it. It’s always suspect
• “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” –General George Patton
• Velocity is speed plus direction. Not just fast action, but directed fast action
• In business, the enemy is not the other company. It’s your own mediocrity and complacency
• Given the choice between doing something or sitting there, SEALs always favor taking action
• If you want to change the world, make your bed. Captain William H. McRaven
• Action This Day. Develop The habit of doing it now. Refuse to let yourself procrastinate.
• Confidence + open-mindedness
• Often you gain from failures and crisis.
• When running large scale Facebook ads… have a backup.
• Everything is a test run (Amit)
• Excellence means excelling. Everything everyone else does, you strive to do it better, faster, sooner, more efficiently, more effectively, more reliably, more consistently, with greater results. You take on the job at hand and do it to the limit of human possibility… and then do it better than that.
• Want world changing success? Be excellence.
• “Improve constantly” is a mantra that needs to be at the core of you.
• Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.
• The supreme art of war is subdue the enemy without fighting
• You need to surround yourself with the right environment, whether that means building that environment around you or moving to where it already exists. If you want to perform at a certain level, you have to put yourself in that environment that exemplifies that level.
• “Excellence matters in everything you do, not only in fitness, but in everything. The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the music you listen to. The shows and films you watch. The words and sentences you speak. The quality of your relationships. You should be a connoisseur of greatness.”
• If you’re living a mediocre life and you get rich, all that extra money will buy is more mediocrity. Excellence isn’t a means to an end. It’s simply a way of life.
• Simple business lesson from a restaurant owner worth taking seriously: Take care of the guests, take care of your people; growth and profits will follow.
• “I will not quit.”
• It’s not just about getting through hard times. It’s about welcoming them
• A genuine commitment to excellence is impossible without a deep appreciation of pain and failure
• When people say you can’t do that, what they’re saying is they couldn’t do it. Obstacles are there to show how bad you want it
• “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” –Winston Churchill
• Take it one piece at a time. If you look at everything at once, you can get overwhelmed. But breaking it down into small pieces, it becomes manageable.
• One team, one fight. No man or woman is an island.
• Four core values at Hurricane:
  • People First
  • Honesty and Integrity
  • No Limits
  • Give Back
• Take the interview seriously.
• Interview questions to ask
  • What you do if the decision maker on your biggest account asked you to lie for him?
  • Do you believe in aliens?
  • What keeps you up at night?
• A team with average ability but great chemistry will win out ver a team with extreme talent but lousy chemistry
• You can’t fake authentic caring
• Learn to listen to your gut instinct, but don’t necessarily trust your first impression. People can surprise you.
• Genuine gifts > bonus money
• Business is about helping people.
• You have to earn your title every day… and every day is a new opportunity to.
• Talk to your people.
• Figure out what your mission is.
• “Success requires no explanation; failure permits no alibis.”
• If you don’t define where you’re going, you’ll drift like a stick in a river and go wherever the current takes you.
• Never confuse your own preferences for the markets.
• A good leader isn’t one who always has (or thinks he has) the answers. A good leader is the one always asking questions and being smart about looking for the answers.
• “I don’t understand, please explain” is not a sign of weakness, it’s a demonstration of open-mindedness, intelligence, humility, and fearless leadership
• None of us is as smart as all of us.
• Having an entrepreneurial spirit simply means you make something happen.
• Personal Vision Statement
  • I live an adventurous and meaningful life. I value time as my most precious asset and use it wisely. I plan my life and live my plan.
  • I speak candidly and respect people’s views and choices. I don’t fall prey to certainty. I lead by example.
  • I stay physically fit and eat healthy. I set challenging goals and achieve them. I never give up, and I know the difference between failing and quitting.
  • I see fear and adversity as necessary opportunities to grow and learn. I am always striving to learn and improve myself as a father, friend, son, companion, and business leader to my team.
  • I am leaving the world a better place.
• You’ll fail, probably more than once. That, too, is not only inevitable. but a positive force, guiding and propelling you forward. Failure seems to be a necessary ingredient in the humility and wisdom it takes to succeed greatly.
• Man In The Arena
• Further Reading
  • The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli
  • The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela

Link (Amazon)

This is one I will refer back to often. The incredible writing. The use of historical examples. The timeless lessons. I can’t remember the last time I annotated this much in a book. Wisdom from so many different sources. Highly, highly recommended.

On Starting

• Serenity Prayer: God, grant the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
• Great changes come when we make small adjustments with great convictions.
• When we say we don’t know what to do, it’s often not information we’re lacking, but courage.
• As long as we have enough wonder and humility, our motives don’t have to be pure.. More selfless, meaningful reasons will come if we keep on the path.
• It hurts to realize how much time we’ve wasted. The only thing that hurts worse? Not starting.
• Accept that you are imperfect and always will be. Your quest is not to perfect yourself, it’s to better your imperfect self.
• Anyone doing anything worthy will have critics. Start anyway. (Mother Teresa, for example)
• “To make the world excellent, great, and beautiful, we have to be a little irrational, a bit strange, and sometimes odd. That’s okay. Hold on to that.”
• If every risk you take pays off, then you probably aren’t actually taking risks.
• Begin even though you know you will suffer and fail along the way.
• “Move and the way will open.” –Zen Proverb
• Beginning brings fear that you won’t succeed. So what should you do when starting? Use humility. I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility. Humility leads to clarity. Humility leads to an open mind and a forgiving heart. With an open mind and a forgiving heart, I see every person as superior to me in some way; with every person as my teacher, I grow in wisdom. As I grow in wisdom, humility becomes ever more my guide. I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility
• You don’t need to know what perfect looks like. You need to know what better looks like though.
• “Culture” originally meant tending to the land. You would “cultivate” the land. Eventually, it was used to refer to yourself. Cultivating yourself.

On Happiness

• We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming.
• To create a flourishing life, we need both virtue and the conditions in which virtue can thrive.
• Happiness of doing is often greater than the happiness of the actual destination. A mountain climber reaches for the summit, happiness meets her along the way.
• Joy is the byproduct of an activity, not the aim.
• “And happiness… what is it? I say it is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” –John Butler Yeats

On Role Models

• Find a model. Do as they do.
• “Any fool can learn from his mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” –Otto Von Bismarck
• “Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.” –Yohji Yamamoto
• How do you find a model? When you find yourself reflecting on someone’s positive example to guide your thinking and your actions and you begin to imitate him, then you have a model.
• Hunter S. Thompson once hand-copied The Great Gatsby to get in the mind of a masterpiece
• The closer the model’s experience to yours, the more practical
• Your story is not unique… find a model.
• Nuance is important… we can admire Thomas Jefferson for his genius while accepting he owned other humans.
• You can find models from unlikely places. A kid in Rwanda found the story of the Holocaust in Night and it gave him a measure of comfort. (263)

On Identity

• Less interested in how you feel and more interested on who you want to be.
• The way you act will shape the way you feel. You act with courage and immediately your fears start to shrink and you begin to grow. If you want to feel differently, act differently.
• When you start to put your identity ahead of how you feel, you act in alignment with who you want to be.
• Character precedes achievement.
• When we look at others, we see what they’ve done, not necessarily how they did it. Often, how they did it is more important.
• Your identity requires daily attention (like eating well or cleaning yourself)
• Smile, breathe, exercise, serve, being grateful and gracious, act with humility and courage. Simple. Not easy.
• You don’t want achievements, you want a way of being.

On Habits

• To change the direction of your life, you have to reset your habits.
• “Never cease chiseling your own statue.” –Plotinus (205-270)
• When a habit becomes so ingrained that the actions
• The direction of someone’s life is not shaped by a single action, but by thousands of days, each filled with small and unspectacular actions produced over and over again
• Your life builds not by dramatic actions but by accumulation
• People imagine they’ll rise to the occasion. In truth, you’ll fall to your level of your preparation.
• If you’re growing, you’re likely failing. If you’re not failing, you’re likely not growing
• Practice builds habits. Habits builds character.
• We become what we do if we do it often enough. We act with courage, and we become courageous. We act with compassion, and we become compassionate.
• “There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove we are as good today as we were yesterday.” –Eric Hoffer
• You do it not once, twice, or three times. But three thousand. You make it a habit.
• Without practice, our skills deteriorate.

On Excellence

• A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness.
• What separates exceptional from unexceptional? A willingness to fail, and an ability to learn from the failures.
• Self-respect isn’t something anyone can hand you. Self-respect occurs when we know we’re good.
• Excellence is not about a single important day of decision. It’s about accumulated effort, consistent practice, and wise habit formation
• Excellence is beautiful and temporary. One moment we are victorious. The next moment, we were victorious. An excuse endures.
• We don’t ask “What did I intend?” We ask, “What did I do?”
• Judge yourself based on results, not intentions.
• If you best is not good enough, make your best better. If you tried hard and failed, then try harder, or find a new way to try until you succeed. Trying hard is trying hard. Success is success.
• What ultimately matters is not what we intend but who we become and what we leave behind us.
• Excellence comes wrapped in hard work. You know that the will to win is cheap and common, while the win to train is rare and noble.
• Benjamin Franklin questions on living well: “Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means? Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people? Do you know of any fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?”

On Taking Responsibility

• The most important to build if you want to be resilient is the power of taking responsibility for your life
• You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you react.
• The first word out of a complainer’s mouth is “they.” Beware of “they.”
• Responsibility is a heavy burden, but it is also offers power.
• James Stockdale never lost faith in the end of his story. He believed he held more power over his situation than his captors did.
• Stockdale Paradox: “You must never confuse your faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.” Maintain clarity of the situation with the hope that you will remain victorious.
• On Purpose/Vocation
• Purpose is not found. It is created.
• How do you create your purpose? You take action. You try things. You fail. You pursue excellence and you endure pain.
• What you work on, works on you.
• “Your vocation is the place where your great joy meets the world’s great need.” –Reverend Peter Gomes
• Almost any activity, if you pursue it with purpose and attention for its own sake, can become a vocation
• Any work can be a miserable bore. Any work can be a source of joy if i’s pursued with passion and a love of excellence
• Any job can be a site of service if pursued with compassion
• Often we have no idea what someone’s real vocation is if we don’t know them. It’s a mistake to assume what someone is paid to do is the same as their life work.
• “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how” –Nietzsche
• “The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” –Joseph Campbell
• “Don’t say things. What you are … thunders so that iI cannot hear what you say to the contrary.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

On Critics

• “You have enemies? Why, is it the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats.” –Victor Hugo

On Fear

• “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”
• Every worthy challenge will inspire some fear.

On Power

• One of the habits of the truly powerful is to recognize the power in everyone else

On Wisdom

• To be wise, we must recognize we only know a small fraction of what is worth knowing. To be resilient, we also have to recognize that we know only a small fraction of what is worth knowing about ourselves.
• When we close our minds, we protect the ego but degrade our thinking.
• “Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”
• Seneca on the obvious: “People say: ‘What good does it do to point out the obvious?’ A great deal of good; for sometimes we know facts without paying attention to them. Advice… merely engages the attention and rouses us, and concentrates the memory, and keeps it from losing its grip. We miss much that is set before our eyes.”
• The test of a philosophy is simple: does it lead people to live better lives? If not the philosophy fails. If so, it succeeds.
• If a piece of wisdom has survived for generations, that is a sign that it works.

On Nuance

• Have nuance. Honest people can lie. Wise people can be dumb. Compassionate people can be cruel.
• “The sign of a first rate intelligence is to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
• For most of history, our feet were hardened by walking on the rough ground. In our world, people wear shoes. Shoes are good. They protect our feet. But we realize that it is possible to gain something very good and still lose something very real. What most of us have lost is the ability to walk barefoot over difficult ground.
• “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them… But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Winston Churchill was a prisoner of war and made a 300 mile trek by himself. He also was proud about traveling alone to the French Riviera.

On Risks

• Extreme recklessness is dangerous. Extreme caution is dangerous, too.
• “Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannonballs, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts every thing you said today.” –Emerson

On Hard Work

• “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses… in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” –Muhammad Ali
• Get in the game, it doesn’t matter what you do. Get to work.
• Working hard yourself makes you more appreciative of the hard work of others.
• “We do two things here: We work hard. And we win. The reason we win is that we work hard. So really, we only do one thing here. If you don’t want to work hard, don’t waste my time.” –Ben, Oxford boxing team coach
• The magnitude of the challenge X the intensity of your attack = your rate of growth
• Five variables go into training or practice: frequency, intensity, duration, recovery, and reflection
• If you aren’t failing from time to time… you are either Superman or not pushing yourself hard enough
• “A small daily task, if it really be daily, will beat the labours of spasmodic Hercules”
• Humans must breathe, sleep, eat, and love to do well. But we also must struggle. We need to challenges to master and problems to solve. Without struggle, a part of begins to die.

On Pain

• Pain can make us or break us. Suffering can make us stronger. Fear can cripple us or make us more courageous. Resilience is the difference.
• There is the pain we seek. And then there is the pain that seeks us.
• People frequently hold on to pain because it feels comfortable. Of course pain hurts, but the pain you know can seem easier, more manageable, than the unknown pain you might encounter on a different path.
• If there is tension in your life, if there is some deep worry about living a worthy life… then good. That tension and worry is part of a well lived life.
• Rolling with the punches means to literally move your body as you’re getting punched… not to go through the pain
• Push yourself, but don’t be an idiot.
• The minute we write down what we are afraid of, we begin to gain control
• Not everyone who’s beaten will be broken. And usually, no matter how hard the hardship… there is possibility for light at the end of the tunnel.
• Thich Nhat Hanh writes that suffering is something we create through our attachments: what makes people suffer is not so much the physical sensation they experience but the meaning they attach to their losses.
• Jack Dempsey story
• We don’t know what we’re capable of until we’re tested.
• You need a worthy adversary.
• Make the task easier. Break it down. To the person getting out of bed… getting out of bed might be difficult. But can you move your toes? Yes. Then do it. Can you move your fingers? Yes. Then do it. can you lift your leg? Yes? Then do it. Eventually, you’re out of bed.
• People quit when they start to think about how hard something is going to be.
• Mental visualization, or mental rehearsal, is one of the most powerful ways to master pain, fear, and difficulty.
• “Worry productively.” Go ahead and visualize the worst thing that can happen. But instead of wallowing in your worries, think about how you’ll respond. Practice.
• The resilient mind imagines hardship and figures out how they’ll respond.
• Control your breath. It won’t erase your fears or eliminate your pain. But to be resilient, you have to exercise control over what you can control. At the most basic level, you can always control how you breathe. And how you breathe shapes how you think.
• “Gratitude is the parent of all other virtues.”
• When you hold onto pain it is holding onto a hot coal with it in your hands. You may be aiming it at someone else but you are the one who is hurt.
• The warrior protects others. Suicide makes that impossible. Just because you’re in pain doesn’t mean we should quit.
• “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” Hemingway

On Reflection

• Science is reflection. There is no worries about being wrong. Science starts out wrong often, but through reflection, it gets closer to the truth.
• Thinking and reflecting aren’t the same. Difference is reflections often point toward future actions.
• The gold standard for good reflection is that it allows you to plan well. And planning leads to thoughtful action. Act. Reflect. Plan.
• Questions to ask for reflection:
  1. Why am I here? (“Here” referring to this particular situation.)
  2. What’s going on around me?
  3. What am I going to do about it?
  4. How will my actions affect others?
• When the Romans came in contact with the Jews, they were shocked. Every seventh day, the Jews stopped all their work. The Jews used this day to reflect.

On Friends

• Be with people who are the way you want to be. If you want to be excellent, be with people who pursue excellence. If you want to be happy, be around people who are happy.
• Friendships of utility bring people together who are useful to each other.
• Friendships of pleasure are based around people we just like being around.
• We turn to friends for big life decisions because they will question or decisions and motives. An acquaintance might say “Sounds good to me” but a real friend will go deeper.
• As you become more powerful, you have to work harder to make sure that people correct you. More and more, you have to ask yourself, “How can I become better?” Avoid yes men.
• Most truly elite performers are accessible, friendly, and humble because they want to make friends with more to learn more. Makes sense.
• When you think about your own pain and how the world deals you an unfair hand, you become weaker. When you think of the needs of your team and your friends, you become stronger.

On Mentors

• There are a lot of people who know more than you. So try to find them and listen to them.
• What to look for in a mentor? Someone who respects their craft.
• You can pursue any craft without a mentor, but it’s unlikely you’ll find mastery.
• It’s easy to find people willing to give advice. It’s hard to find people with advice worth giving.
• It’s much easier to make information complex than it is to make it simple. A good mentor makes it simple so you can learn in order to get better.
• Novices see what it is obvious. Experts see the story and can use inferences to predict what will happen next.
• Good mentors hear the right things.
• If you want to become great, you need a great coach.

On Teams

• When things don’t go right with a team, the team either snipes at each other or comes to a solution
• “If these guys weren’t here right now, I’d probably stop.” Thought from pledging, also a thought from SEAL teams.
• The strength of others can make us stronger.
• We become close to the people with whom we discover the world with.
• When we share a purpose with others, our work creates a shared connection.
• Real success is usually a product of struggle. And struggle brings people together.
• Some teams are tight like families. Other teams work like allies. But all resilient teams share one thing: an ability to manage interests while serving a purpose that is larger than the interests of any one person.

On Leadership

• Never ask someone to endure more than you are willing to endure yourself.
• Leadership’s responsibility is to work intelligently with what is given and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.
• We are almost always led by those who have pushed themselves than by those who have been benefited from privilege, luck, or circumstance.
• We cannot be victorious if we abandon those who are wounded. Robert Bly: “The wounded man knows something.”
• Leadership is a way of being, not a set of tricks.

On Story

• What’s a quest? It’s a journey with meaning. On a quest, we discover what we’re after by going on the journey. You figure out the purpose of your life by living your life. You give meaning to your quest by what you do and say and suffer.
• Different people use the same circumstance to create a different story. A different story doesn’t change what happened, but it changes what happens.
• Centuries ago, writers realized that the best stories start in medias res, in the middle of things. They realized that time in stories doesn’t run like on clocks. In a story, the real beginning comes when things start to matter in a different way.

On Death

• Death provides urgency.
• When do you see things most vividly? It’s when you first discover them or they’re about to be taken away.
• “He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” –Montaigne
• We honor the dead by living their values. Through our efforts, we ensure that the good things they stood for continue to stand even when they are gone. Our actions become a living memorial to their memory.

Link (Amazon)

More than 17,000 reviews on Amazon for a reason. It’s concise wisdom. Really enjoyed it and highly recommend it. A great book for anyone seeking knowledge on how to live a better life.

• Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God. Everything is God.
• The real us is pure love, pure light.
• We keep doing what others want us to do in order to get rewards. We fear being punished and fear not getting the reward, so we start to pretend we are what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else.
• We need a great deal of courage to challenge our own beliefs because we have agreed to these beliefs. They make us feel safe.
• In your whole life nobody has abused you more than you have abused yourself. If someone abuses you more than you’ve abused yourself, you’ll probably walk away. But if someone abuses you less than you abuse yourself, you’ll stay in the relationship and tolerate it.
• The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us conserve and gain energy.

The First Agreement: Be Impeccable With Your Word

• Your word is the power you have to create. Through the word, you express your creative powers. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word.
• Your word is your spell (we “spell” with words, get it?)
• Our parents/siblings gave us opinions about us without even thinking
• A sin is anything you do that goes against yourself
• If I love myself, I will express my love in interactions with you, because that action will produce a like reaction. This is why saying “I love myself” generates such positive results in your own life. (Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant)
• We sometimes believe we must repress our emotions in order to be loved.
• Every action you take matters.
• Gossiping is wasting your word
• Your opinion is not necessarily right, it is just your viewpoint.
• How much you love yourself and how you feel about yourself is directly proportionate to the quality and integrity of your word.
• Tell yourself how wonder you are, how great you are. Tell yourself how much you love yourself.

The Second Agreement: Don’t Take Anything Personally

• Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally.
• Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind.
• Compliments and criticism. Don’t take it personally. It’s a reflection of the other person.
• When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is great, everything makes you happy. You are loving everything that is around you, because you are loving yourself. Because you like the way you are. Because you are content with you. Because you are happy with your life. You are happy with the movie you are producing, happy with your agreements with life. You are at peace, and you are happy. You live in that state of bliss where everything is so wonderful, and everything is so beautiful. In that state of bliss you are making love all the time with everything you perceive.
• If someone is not treating you with love or respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you.

The Third Agreement: Don’t Make Assumptions

• We literally dream things up in our imaginations. Because we don’t understand something, we make an assumption about the meaning, and when the truth comes out, the bubble of our dream pops and we find out it was not what we thought.
• We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just that the answer makes us feel safe. That’s why we make assumptions.
• Avoid assumptions by asking questions. Clear questions. Have the courage to ask questions until you are clear as you can be, and don’t assume you know everything there is no know about a situation.

The Fourth Agreement: Always Do Your Best

• Regardless of the quality, keep doing your best – no more and no less.
• When you do more than your best (overdo it), you go against your body and yourself and it will take you longer to achieve your goal (true with lifting, got injured overdoing it!)
• When you do less than your best, you subject yourself to frustrations, self-judgement, guilt and regret
• Take action just for the sake of doing it, without expecting a reward. You will find you enjoy the actions and the rewards will come, but you are not attached to it.
• When you are doing your best just for the pleasure of doing it, you are taking action because you enjoy the action.
• Action is about living fully. Inaction is sitting in front of the television/phone/screen because you are afraid to take risk and express what you are.
• The best way to say “Thank you, God” is to live in the present moment.

The Toltec Path To Freedom: Breaking Old Agreements

• If we find a child who is two or three, perhaps four years old, we find a free human. Why is this human free? Because this human does whatever he or she wants to do. The human is completely wild!
• The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing, painting, writing, or expressing yourself in some way. These are your happiest moments of your life – when you are the real you.
• The first step toward personal freedom is awareness. We need to be aware we are not free in order to be free. We need to be aware of what the problem is in order to solve the problem (interestingly, I said something extremely similar to David Chodosch today about social media… we need to be aware we are getting addicted before we can make a change)
• The freedom we seek is to use our own mind and body to live life, instead of the life of the belief system
• Forgiveness is a way to heal yourself. We must forgive those we feel who have wronged us. We do this because we love ourselves and no longer wish for pay for the injustices.

Link (Amazon)

Written by the man who coached both the Men’s and Women’s Champions in the 2016 CrossFit Games. The book is a mix of storytelling and wisdom – and a must-read for anyone who is attempting to pursue not just competence but excellence.

Intro

• A “bad” situation might be the best thing that ever happened to you. Reframe.
• “It’s impossible to spend any time around Ben without becoming a better person.”
• Mental toughness isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you can actually improve. But you have to practice it.

Commitment

• The only way to get better is to pound on your craft, day in and day out, doing the right thing over and over and over again. “There are no secrets, there are no tricks. If anything, it’s the opposite. Whether you are a pro athlete or a guy running a business, or driving a truck or going to school, it’s simple. Ask yourself where you are now and where you want to be instead. Ask yourself what you’re willing to do to get there. Then make a plan to get there.”
• Working and training at the champion level is not for everyone. Too much pain, sacrifice, hours, monotony. There’s so much you have to think about and dedicate yourself to chase perfection. Not about talent, it’s about commitment.
• Excellence is asking yourself: Am I committing everything I have to make myself the tiniest percentage better I am right now, no matter how hard I have to work, no matter what I have to give up?
• Commitment is about a focus on each minute.
• You’re focused not on the outcome of your dedication, but the dedication itself and the person you’re trying to become
• Champions wake up with one goal in mind: becoming better.

Grit

• What is grit? It’s when things get harder, you push harder; when you fail, you get back up stronger; when you don’t see results, you don’t get discouraged but you continue to pound away day after day with relentless/consistency/heart/passion.
• What people don’t see is that behind most every talented person who has become a massive success is a daily schedule of grind, hours of suck, and a whole string of difficult, lonely moment working on the tiny details that will get them to where they want  go.
• Talent + Grit = Unstoppable
• “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.” –Mozart

Positivity

• Staying positive is hard for us because our DNA is hardwired for survival. Far more important to remember which big furry animal would kill you than that butterfly is pretty.
• Sign in Ben’s gym: NEVER WHINE. NEVER COMPLAIN. NEVER MAKE EXCUSES.
• Where most people see adversity and difficulty, you want to see advantage and opportunity.
• Positivity is directly linked to improved performance. If you stay positive, you perform with greater speed and accuracy.
• Almost two-thirds of the words in the English language convey the negative
• Tell yourself the right story – the positive one – about what the adversity means for your own success. The obstacle is the way.
• Your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, and your actions dictate your future.
• Preparation, not your attitude, will dictate results. Positivity doesn’t guarantee anything, but it can lower perceived exertion, make things seem more enjoyable, and improve your chances of competing at your potential, and give you a competitive advantage

Embrace Adversity

• Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but you’ve actually been planted.
• The days when you have to do things that scare you, when you have to take risks, push against challenges and difficulties – those are the days that make you stronger, faster, better.
• Overload Principle: you can force adaption in your body by consistently pushing past yesterday’s limit; you can make yourself stronger by showing your body what stronger feels like
• Humans naturally fear adversity. Ironically, adversity is the only thing that makes us better. In fact, we’re certain to face adversity on Earth. It is 100% guaranteed. So when we do face it, putting ourselves through adversity will help us.
• “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
• Visualization is an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s not enough to simply visualize success. You need to also envision adversity and setbacks.
• Michael Phelps set a world record in the 200m. He swam BLIND. He only knew what he could do because he visualized adversity.

Confidence

• Confidence is about your competitive drive, your focus, positivity, perseverance and grit, and whether you can maintain those characteristics when it matters most. Can you maintain the characteristics of a champion, regardless of what life throws at you? That’s confidence.
• Event + Response = Outcome
• We don’t control the events of life. We only control our responses to them.
• “Exceptional competitors understand that their primary competition is themselves. They understand the biggest struggle is always the one within, the struggle to bring out their best physical and mental self to the competition floor and maintain presence until they cross the finish line.” – Bob Rotella
• If you win the battle in your own head, you’ve won. Regardless of the outcome
• True confidence is being secure in the knowledge you did everything you could, even if that excellence doesn’t produce victories.
• Be a racehorse and a bumblebee. Racehorses are incapable of focusing on anything but themselves. Bumblebees fly… contrary to everything we know about physics.
• Tying success or failure to one single point in time, one event which you don’t even have much control over, sets you up for unavoidable failure because there’s no way anyone can win every single time.
• What Katrin wrote – her definition of success:
  • “Success to me is giving full effort knowing that was the best I was capable of. That said, full effort means nothing if day-to-day preparation was not all I had. Success to me is giving everything I have into each and every day, each and every moment; training, recovery, family, friends, giving back, inspiring, loving what I do. Then, come game time, give full effort, knowing I am the best I am capable of becoming.”

Maximizing Minutes

• Deliberate practice is different from normal practice. Deliberate practice is stepping outside your comfort zone and trying activities beyond your current abilities. 
• Are you giving each minute the respect it deserves? Every minute of your day is a building block that goes toward creating your success, your measure of excellence. Every minute deserves your utmost attention and commitment.
• Passion is the only way to commit your all. You have to love it.
• To watch – How Great Leaders Inspire Action.
• Story about Samuel Pierpoint Langley vs. Wright Brothers

The Process

• Nick Saban: “Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you need to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”
• When character and process are both in place, the results will take care of themselves.
• Ray Allen: “What makes [KG, Paul Pierce LeBron James, Dwayne Wade] champions is the boring old habits that nobody sees. They compete to see who can be the first to the gym and the last to leave.”

Control

• Create a list of what you can control vs. what you can’t control.
• Focus ruthlessly on what you can control. Ignore the rest.
• Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Turn The Page

• When you make a mistake, all you can do is turn the page. What can you do in this moment to prepare for tomorrow? Anything we do looking back can’t help us.

Humility

• Mat Fraser, a CrossFit competing athlete, reached out to a high school coach and started practicing with high schoolers twice a week. That takes humility. Then he went from last to first in the CrossFit Games the following year.
• When you reach a certain level, it’s easier to hide your weaknesses behind your strengths. But continually ask: what can I do better?
• Further Reading: Teaching Smart People How To Learn
• Single loop learners look for external reasons they’re not succeeding; double loop learners look inward for solutions

Competitive Excellence

• “Excellence is the gradual result of always wanting to do better.” –Pat Riley
• “I will maximize my minutes by thinking, acting, training, and competing with excellence, regardless of circumstance.”
• If you can compete with excellence when you’re ahead, you can do it when you’re behind
• You can’t train on autopilot and compete with purpose. In order to perform at the highest level, you have to prepare that way every single day. When Mat Fraser trains, he doesn’t do it compete. He trains like he’s possessed.
• Excellence can only be achieved today. Not tomorrow or the following day – because they don’t exist in the present moment. The not-so-hidden secret of extraordinary success: clarify what you really want, then work as hard to get it for as long as it takes.

Clutch

• “In any game played with the body, it’s the head that counts.” –James Kerr
• Further Reading: Clutch by Paul Sullivan
• Clutch is the ability to do what you can do normally under immense pressure.
• You cannot summon what you do not have. The traits you need when the stakes are highest must be worked through in training.
• Who you are on the competition floor is a reflection of who you are in practice – no more, no less.

Epilogue

• “Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is a nightmare” –Chinese proverb
• Katrín Davíðsdóttir ordered fish and veggies after winning CrossFit Games to celebrate. The process reigns.
• The only way the process works is through action.
• Success is a decision, not a gift. The ideas in this book are only useful if you can decide to apply them to your own life, day in and day out.
• Further Reading: A Champion’s Mind by Jim Afremow
• You don’t become a champion and then start acting like a champion. You start acting like a champion first.
• It’s the manner in which you try to achieve your potential that defines you as a champion – no medals, titles, accolades. When you start acting this way… when you commit to the process fully… everything else falls in place.