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September 2020

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Productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways.

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Theme: If you can become more motivated, more focused, better at setting goals and making good decisions, then you’re a long way down the path to becoming more productive.

“Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways. The way we choose to see our own lives; the stories we tell ourselves, and the goals we push ourselves to spell out in detail; the culture we establish among teammates; the ways we frame our choices and manage the information in our lives. Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.”

At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key concepts—from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making—that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters—the book posits that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don’t merely act differently.

They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.

Here are my favourite take aways from reading, Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg:


Art Williams delivered the Just Do It Speech at the 1987 National Religious Broadcaster Convention.

Just Do It Speech Transcript

I was asked to talk to you about how to win in business. I think it’s a good subject for you to think about because I believe business in America is in a crisis situation today. All you have to do is read the paper, and every month see our trade deficit, and it’s just a very depressing situation.

“With the possible exception of Henry Ford, Sam Walton is the entrepreneur of the century.”- TOM PETERS, co-author of In Search of Excellence

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Made In America is the story of how Sam Walton built a retailing empire, “Walmart” from a humble upbringing. He started it from a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town (Arkansas) into the largest retailer in the world. In a story rich with anecdotes and the “rules of the road” of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. grew to be the world’s largest corporation by revenue and the biggest private employer in the world. For a while, Walton was the richest man in America. As of July 31, 2020, Walmart has 11,496 stores and clubs in 27 countries, operating under 56 different names.

I think it must be human nature that when somebody homegrown gets on to something, the folks around them sometimes are the last to recognize it.

The company which Sam built Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue, with US$514.405 billion, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2019. It is also the largest private employer in the world, with 2.2 million employees. It is a publicly-traded family-owned business, as the Walton family controls the company. Sam Walton’s heirs own over 50 percent of Walmart by holding company Walton Enterprises and their holdings.

Sam Walton was a relentless, hands on entrepreneur who led by example. In his own words:

I don’t know that anybody else has ever done it quite like me: started out as a pure neophyte, learned his trade, swept the floor, kept the books, trimmed the windows, weighed the candy, rung the cash register, installed the fixtures, remodeled the stores, built an organization of this size and quality, and kept on doing it right up to the end because they enjoyed it so much. No one that I know of has done it that way.

Here are my favourite take aways from reading,Made In America by Sam Walton:

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt

Not making a decision is a decision itself; the choices you make today have long-term consequences in the future. How far we go in life is due to our options, the choices made by your parents on where you lived, schooled and exposure, your own choice on where to live, study, work who to marry, parenting, and other seemingly insignificant decisions that always have consequences.

MJ DeMarco, in his book The Millionaire Fastlane shares some great insights on decision making:

“Your life’s choices are like a mature oak tree with millions of branches. The branches symbolize the consequences of your choices. Near the trunk of the tree, the branches are thick, reflecting the decisions you’ve made early in life, while the top branches are thin, symbolizing decisions near the end of your life.”

Youthful choices radiate the most strength and fabricate the trunk of your tree. As the branches ascend topside through time, they get thinner and weaker. They don’t have enough power to bend the tree in new directions because the trunk is thick with age, experience, and reinforced habits.”

“The smallest choices made in your daily life create habits and lifestyle that forms process-they are the ones that can make the biggest impact. You can’t decide to “go Fastlane” because that itself is just an event. A Fastlane process is hundreds of choices.”

Here are some great quotes on decision making:

Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do it. – Frances Hesselbein

Frances Hesselbein (born 1 November 1915) is the former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, from 1976 to 1990, and is the president and CEO of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum, at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), Johnson Institute for Responsible Leadership.

Leadership is the art of getting people to do what they might not otherwise do, and to like it.- Harry Truman

Between 1965 and 1976, she rose from volunteer troop leader to CEO and held the position of CEO for thirteen years until 1990. During her tenure, the Girl Scouts attained a membership of 2.25 million girls with a workforce of 780,000, mainly volunteers. In 1990, Hesselbein left the Girl Scouts to run the Leader to Leader Institute (formerly known as the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management). After Drucker’s death in 2005, the foundation was renamed after Hesselbein in 2012.

In 1998, Hesselbein was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work with the Girl Scouts of the USA. She turned 100 years old in November 2015. Hesselbein was denoted a Pitt Legacy Laureate of the University of Pittsburgh in 2000. She has received 22 honorary doctoral degrees.

Professor Jonah Berger is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 2007. He graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a B.A. in Human Judgment and Decision Making and received his Ph.D from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been a visiting faculty member at Duke University and Cornell University.

Professor Berger studies social dynamics—why products, ideas, and behaviors become popular. He examines how individual decision making and social influence among people generate collective outcomes, such as social contagion and trends. His work mixes psychology, sociology, marketing, and economics to understand human behavior and its implications for collective outcomes.

Professor Berger is the author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, which appeared on the best-seller lists of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and translated into almost 30 languages. His other books include Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior and The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind.

Here are my favourite take aways from viewing, Jonah Berger’s Great Courses Class: How Ideas Spread:


Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat. – THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1899

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Built to Last is a great book that outlines the results of a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, conducted by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras. The book explores what leads to enduringly great companies, the authors examined eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day — as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. 

Built to Last is one of the most influential business books have read multiple times as the concepts in the book is evergreen: Clock Building, vs Time Telling, Preserve the Core / Stimulate Progress, Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What works, Cult-Like cultures, among others.

Here are my favourite take aways from reading, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins:

The study found a negative correlation between early entrepreneurial success and becoming a highly visionary company. The long race goes to the tortoise, not the hare,

Someday – The legendary place where your hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations all magically come to fruition.

Someday is dangerous and paralyzing. It traps you in the land of Nowheresville.

What do you want to become when you grow up? It is one of the silly questions you get asked by adults who are also yet to figure out their lives; what they don’t tell you is that they live a script you might follow someday. The Script was handed to them by the society, their parents, their caregivers, and their indoctrination by the school system. We get domesticated to stop listening to our inner voice, and we become fixated on the future, someday. A lot of us live on a deferred life plan, always looking to do everything in the future.

The script goes thus: Go to school, get good grades, graduate, get a good job, get married, have kids, and DIE. If you deviate from that script, you get called a rebel, maverick, a black sheep for going against the herd or the groupthink. The “what you want to become question” makes a lot of us to be more interested in the Event (future) than the Process (Routine, Habits). We go to jobs we don’t like, share one-third of our lives with colleagues we can’t stand, to get the money to impress people who don’t give a sh*t about us.

“Happiness is a journey, not a destination. For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one.” – Alfred D. Souza

Charlie Munger delivered this speech at Harvard University in June 1995. Munger spoke about a framework for decision making with an emphasis on factors contributing to human misjudgments. The Psychology of Human Misjudgment is talk eleven in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a collection of speeches and lectures by Charlie Munger, compiled by Peter D. Kaufman. The speech is based on the concepts he read from Robert Cialdini’s great book. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

Munger was so impressed by Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, after reading the book, Munger wrote in Poor Charlie’s Almanack:

“Cialdini had made himself into a super-tenured “Regents Professor” at very young age by  devising, describing, and explaining a vast group of  clever experiments in which man manipulated man to his detriment, with all of this made possible by  man’s intrinsic thinking flaws. ”

I immediately sent copies of Cialdini’s book to all my children. I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock [Class A] to thank him for what he had done for me and the public. Incidentally, the sale by Cialdini of hundreds of thousands of copies of a book about social psychology was a huge feat,  considering that Cialdini didn’t claim that he was going to improve your sex life or make you any money. “

I immediately sent copies of Cialdini’s book to all my children. I also gave Cialdini a share of Berkshire stock [Class A] to thank him for what he had done for me and the public.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgement Transcript

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“Do all the right things to precision and “the score will take care of itself”

The Score Takes Care of Itself was recommended by Jack Dorsey at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2013, and John C. Maxwell says the book is one of his favorite books on Leadership.

Bill Walsh was an American football coach who served as the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers and the Stanford Cardinal. Walsh went 102–63–1 (wins-losses-ties) with the 49ers, winning 10 of his 14 postseason games along with six division titles, three NFC Championship titles, and three Super Bowls. He was named NFL Coach of the Year in 1981 and 1984. In 1993, he was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Bill Walsh was one of the NFL’s pivotal figures, a leader, head coach, and general manager whose innovations changed how football is played and whose San Francisco 49er dynasty—five Super Bowl championships in fourteen years—ranks among the great achievements in sports history.

“Most big things are simple in the specific, much less so in the general.”

The Score Takes Care of Itself is Bill’s very personal and, at times, painful account of the leadership lessons he learned during his life and his conclusions on how they might help you overcome your challenges as a leader. The book is based on Bill’s extensive conversations on his philosophy of leadership with best-selling author Steve Jamison.

Here are my favorite take-aways from reading, The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Wash.:

  • Your effort in the beginning is part of a continuum of effort; your Standard of Performance is part of a continuum of standards. Today’s effort becomes tomorrow’s result. The quality of those efforts becomes the quality of your work. One day is connected to the following day and the following month to the succeeding years.
  • Your own Standard of Performance becomes who and what you are. You and your organization achieve greatness.

A good leader is always learning. The great leaders start learning young and continue until their last breath.

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!”― William Hutchison Murray

Most of us set new year resolutions every 365 days, but we start faltering from February/March; the missing piece is the commitment to follow through. We all want the prize, but we do not love the process; we are unwilling to pay the price, but we want the joy of winning the prize. Anything worth doing takes a lot of time, grit, sacrifice, whatever-it-takes-attitude, and the ability to want it more than you want to breathe.

Commitment is the ability to stick with something long after the initial excitement is gone. Commitment is a decision to stick with a project, idea, relationship, or goal against all odds, failure, and tribulation. Setting a goal is not enough, you have to be committed to making it happen against all odds.  

In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy set a great goal to land a man on the moon when he said: “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon. The most important word in that statement is the Commitment to achieve a goal.

The difference between involvement and commitment is like ham and eggs. The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.

There is a business fable about the chicken and the pig which is a metaphor for commitment to a project or cause.:

When producing a dish made of eggs with ham or bacon, the pig provides the ham or bacon which requires his or her sacrifice and the chicken provides the eggs which are not difficult to produce. Thus the pig is really committed to that dish while the chicken is only involved, yet both are needed to produce the dish.

Here are some great quotes on commitment;

Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst helps Canadians and Canadian companies seize the opportunities and tackle the challenges of cybersecurity. The Catalyst collaborates with industry, governments and academic partners, and leverages the full expertise and capabilities of Ryerson University’s staff and faculty. The Catalyst is a not-for-profit corporation owned and operated by Ryerson University and based in Brampton, ON.

 The Rogers University Cybersecure Catalyst Accelerated Cybersecurity Training Program

The Program is a 20-week intensive cybersecurity training and certification program designed to give promising learners from diverse backgrounds the skills they need to launch careers in the cybersecurity sector.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area)  who didn’t read all the time-none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads-and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book  with a couple of legs sticking out.” 

Charlie Munger is the vice-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett. He is an American investor, businessman, former real estate attorney, architectural designer, and philanthropist. Munger served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011. He is also chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, California, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation.

Charlie is a proponent just like Warren Buffet of Life Long Learning. As a teenager he worked at Buffett & Son, a grocery store owned by Warren Buffett’s grandfather.

In his 2007 USC Law School Commencement Address he shared some great insights on life long learning:

Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. As a corollary to that proposition which is very important, it means that you are hooked for lifetime learning.

And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.

Another idea that I got, and this may remind you of Confucius too, is that wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty.

Make you mess your MESSAGE

Robin René Roberts (born November 23, 1960) is an American television broadcaster. Roberts is the anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America.

After growing up in Mississippi and attending Southeastern Louisiana University, Roberts was a sports anchor for local TV and radio stations. Roberts was a sportscaster on ESPN for 15 years (1990–2005). She became co-anchor on Good Morning America in 2005. Roberts was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2012. Her treatment for myelodysplastic syndrome was chronicled on the program, which earned a 2012 Peabody Award for the coverage.

Robin has been a GMA anchor for more than a decade and has been with the Walt Disney Company for 30 years (and counting—she’s also been recognized as a Disney Legend, the company’s highest honor). She’s interviewed President Barack Obama, reported on the ground in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, and spoken publicly about her breast cancer and Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). She was a first in her industry, and thanks to her hard work and mentorship, she won’t be the last. 

Here are my favorite take away from viewing

Barack Obama is one of my favorite people of all time; his story profoundly inspires me. On his 2008 Election victory night and inauguration, I remember how teary I was to see the first Black American President get inaugurated. His campaign slogan “Yes we can” was so moving and apt for that moment with the turmoil in the world back in 2008. Barack’s message of Hope keeps me going during the tough times, and when the chips are down, I usually ask what would Barack do? That I admire Barack is an understatement, I adore and look up to him.

Michelle and Barack are also my favorite couple in the world; I love what they are building, their resilience, and their message of hope for a brighter future. I miss hearing him speak as the president of the United States of America; even though he is not perfect like all of us, he radiated hope for a brighter day with the way he carried himself.

I don’t remember anticipating a book the way have expected this book: A Promised Land: The Presidential Memoirs, Volume 1, set to be released on November, 17th 2020. You can pre-order the memoir from the official website: Obama Book.

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

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