“Success is getting what you want; Happiness is wanting what you get.”
Happiness is an emotional response to an outcome; if you win, you become happy. If you don’t, you become unhappy. It is an if-then, cause-and-effect proposition that is not sustainable because every time you attain a certain level of happiness, you raise the bar, and it is an endless loop. We also schedule and delay our happiness; we say when this happens, I will become happy. If this then that, Someday I’ll when so and so happens, I would be happy when I get married we change it to when we have kids, then when the kids leave home to when there are grandkids, there is always a reason to postpone. It is a constant moving target.
“Happiness is not a goal…it’s a by-product of a life well-lived.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
You are not supposed to have figured everything out; your path is made by walking it, take it a step at a time. Most times, we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you just need to trust the process. It does not matter where you start. What matters is where you are going. It is ok to have stopgap jobs for a while; it is ok not to know what you want to do next after college, it is ok not to be married yet at 35, it is ok not to be a parent at 40, it is ok to wander for a while, it is ok not to be ok. The key is to be patient and enjoy the journey with the ups and downs. As American Journalist Hal Borland once said, “Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”
“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”
As per study, 61% of people do check their smartphones after awakening in the morning.
NOMOPHOBIA or NO MObile PHone PhoBIA is used to describe a psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity. The term “NomoPhobia” was coined during a 2008 study by the UK Post Office who commissioned, YouGov, a UK-based research organization, to evaluate anxieties suffered by mobile phone users.
The study found that nearly
53% of mobile phone users in Britain tend to be anxious when they “lose their mobile phone, run out of battery or credit, or have no network coverage”.
The study, sampled 2,163 people, found that about 58% of men and 47% of women suffer from a phobia, and an additional 9% feel stressed when their mobile phones are off. 55% of those surveyed cited keeping in touch with friends or family as the main reason that they got anxious when they could not use their mobile phones.
The study compared stress levels induced by the average case of nomophobia to be on-par with those of “wedding day jitters” and trips to the dentist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he said “We are what repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act but a habit.” You do not have to be great to start but you have to start to be great. A journey of a thousand mile, begins with a single step. One of the ways have been able to keep grounded during trying times such as getting laid off or losing my mum is the power of routines. It has worked for me thus far and I think it can work for anyone. Here is my typical daily routine.
The reptile – fight, flight freeze (emotional often in a bad way – aggression, fear, panic, etc).
If you operate from the primitive, survival part of your brain, you can expect to live like a reptile. Reptiles don’t achieve very much, they eat scraps, they crawl all over each other, they don’t evolve and they feel the cold when the winters of life come around. Reptiles are either fighting for scraps, mating or conserving energy while watching anything that moves to see if it’s good for food or sex.
Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do. – Pele
Author Earl Nightingale defined success as the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. This means that any person who knows what they are doing and where they are going is a success. Any person with a goal towards which they are working is a successful person. Success is personal and subjective hence what I think to be successful might not mean success to you but no matter what your definition of success is, you still need to aim for something. Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success in life is just showing up. It is the writer who sits down every day to write, the entrepreneur who is always growing his business, the salesman who is always pitching, the artist who is always rehearsing, the sportsman who is always at the gym training, the student at the library studying.
One of the greatest truisms of life is that we are all going to DIE; that is our ultimate destination. A lot of us would not achieve our most cherished aspirations in life not because we do not know what to do, we know what to do but we wait for the perfect time, we say: “Someday I’ll“…….when I do…I’ll do this or that. Our time here is short as we are all living on borrowed time. The key to starting is to START, take baby steps. As Chinese Philosopher and Writer Lao Tzu famously said: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” and as The Buddha quipped: “The trouble is, you think you have time.”
Alfred D Souza. observed:
“For a long time, it had 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. Then life would begin. At last, it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
You do not have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. Many of us have misplaced priorities; we do what we are supposed to do tomorrow today and do what we are supposed to do today tomorrow. Hence we do not achieve our goals and aspirations. If you do what is hard and pay today, your life would be easy tomorrow, but if you do what is easy and play today, your life would be hard tomorrow. Garbage in, Garbage out, what you put in is what you get out.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
In Zen Buddhism, the beginner’s mind is called Shoshin (初心). It refers to the idea of letting go of your preconceptions and developing an attitude of openness and eagerness when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, With this approach to study, we can grow and learn faster.
“There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic deadlines.” – Brian Tracy
It is that time of the year again for new years resolutions, we want to exercise more, read more books, eat healthier, spend more time with family and friends, lose weight, save more money, the list is endless. The challenge with a lot of this new year resolutions is that they are mere wishes as most of us go back to our lives of quite desperation, tip toeing through live and we go back to where we started by february/march.
Gyms around the world always see a surge in the number of people in their facilities and they already know this new year gym goers would soon drop out of the fitness program. The reason a lot of us would not follow through on our new year resolutions just like the new year gym-goers is that we have not mastered the art of goal setting. The key to achieving any goal requires what I call the DCE framework: Decide, Commit and Execute.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
It started a long time ago from the moment you were delivered to this world; your family and friends are wired to make you want to take the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, the challenge with that is that the ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what ships are made for; you have to follow your bliss, discover your purpose, reinvent and become who you are meant to become. Live, learn, leave a legacy and make the world a better place.
Haters, Doubters, Critics and Naysayers do not really hate you, they despise themselves because you are the reflection of what they could have become had they followed their bliss.
“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” – Winston Churchill
The key to letting the doubters eat their words is to focus on yourself; Winners focus on winning, and losers focus on the winners. The key is to work on yourself, tune out the noise, execute relentlessly and be the best version of yourself. When you eventually make it, you will know the value of the haters as it would propel you; it becomes the fuel to execute. They would remember your name. As doubters would always doubt, haters would always hate, they would underestimate you, but you have to believe in yourself as you are born to be extraordinary and exceptional.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. – Mahatma Gandhi.
What people think about you and your dreams and aspiration is none of your business, they have the right to their opinion but not the fact; you determine that.
“An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until finally he knows everything about nothing.” (A manager, therefore, must be someone who knows less and less about more and more until finally she knows nothing about everything. So what happens when an expert and a manager meet?)”
People would always have opinions even the so-called experts, but most times they might also be wrong, Remember there are no right answers, just informed opinions and opinions are just transitory perceptions, it changes all the time. Imagine if the following inventors listened to the naysayers and experts, we would not have the following innovations:
“The phonograph is of no commercial value.” —Thomas Edison, remarking on his own invention in 1880.
“There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.” —Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize winner in physics, 1920.
“It is an idle dream to imagine that automobiles will take the place of railways in the long-distance movement of passengers.” —American Road Congress, 1913.
“With over 50 foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big slice of the U.S. market.” — Business Week, August 2, 1968.
“I think there is a world market for about five computers.” —Thomas Watson, chairman IBM, 1943.
“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” —Ken Olsen, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876.
“While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility.” — Lee DeForest, inventor.
“There will never be a bigger plane built.” — A Boeing engineer, after the first flight of the 247, a twin engine plane that holds ten people
Imagine if the innovators listened to the above statements by the gurus, the experts are usually well-meaning most times but they do get it wrong sometimes. If you think you can, you can, if you think you can’t you won’t. It is all in the mind, what the mind of a man can conceive and believe it can and would achieve.
“He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.” – James Allen
We are all going to be doubted at one point or the other whether you are Barack Obama, Ibrahimovic, Cristiano Ronaldo, Micheal Jordan, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, Lebron James, Usain Bolt, Lanre Dahunsi, the key is to prove them wrong and strive to be the best version of yourself. Don’t rest on your laurels, work so hard that people know you on a first-name basis, Ronaldo, Barrack, Lebron, Jordan, Brady and turn your signature into an autograph. The only way to shut the haters and doubters up is by your results, as your results would cancel the insults and Success is the Best Revenge.
You have to use the doubt, hate, criticism, and noise as fuel to achieve your dreams and aspiration. It will not be easy; the road will be rough with its twists and turns, peaks, and valleys, but you have to promise yourself that you would not let the success get into your head, neither would you let your failures get in your heart. You’ve got this, you are made for extraordinary, and exceptional feats, Just Do It.
In his book, “Put Your Dream to the Test.” Author John C Maxwell writes: “Which critics count and which don’t? Heed the advice of the critic when . . .
You are unconditionally loved by the one who criticizes you.
The criticism is not tainted by his or her personal agenda.
The person is not naturally critical of everything.
The person will continue giving support after giving advice.
He or she has knowledge and success in the area of the criticism.
You have to analyze who is criticising you or giving you the feedback have they done what they are talking about. We live in a world where someone can give you advise on writing who is not a writer, entrepreneur coach who has not started a business, Life coaches who have not got their shit together, the key is to be mindful of who you listen to and try to listen more to your inner voice. Block out the noise, execute and the results would eventually come but you have to hang in there. Start that business, start the manuscript, attend the class, write that goal down, the key is constant motion and getting things done.
Vision + Action + Passion = Unstoppable Momentum
As Anthony Robbins often says, we do not get our shoulds in life; we get our musts. You need to tune out the noise, believe and bet on yourself, do the work, and prove the naysayers wrong. I would be rooting for you as I do hope to see you at the Top.
All the Best in your Quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
Most of us live our lives like we would be alive forever, but the truth is that we are all living on borrowed limited time. The Buddha once said that the challenge is that we think we have time. When we hear someone DIE especially if they are young, like Kobe Bryant or Chadwick Boseman, we reflect for a minute about how short life is and how one needs to have a sense of urgency. Still, that reflection does not usually last for many of us as we go back to our lives of quiet desperation.
We continue to perform for the world as we have always done in most of our adult life, spend 4-5 years of our lives studying a course we are not passionate about and would not use for work eventually, we eventually get a job we are not excited about, and we keep jumping from one job to the other with perks such as promotions, health and dental benefits, salary to pay for our mortgage and hence we do not follow our bliss. We give a shit about what people think about us and edit our performance for their validation; what would my family members say or think? How would my co-workers look at me? How would the social media platforms algorithms validate this?
When you’re 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking about you. When you’re 40, you don’t give a darn what anybody thinks of you. When you’re 60, you realize that nobody has been thinking about you at all!
We say to ourselves, I would start the business when I have gathered enough money, start traveling when the kids leave the house, volunteer for great initiatives when I retire, and read more books when I leave paid employment. It follows the same pattern: Someday, I’ll...When I get here, I will do this.
We all start the day with the same amount of time: 86,400 seconds, 1,440 minutes, 24 hours. The billionaire, the homeless, the politician, the celebrity, the entrepreneur, and the 9-5er. We all start the same way but what determines how successful we become is our use of time, which invariably determines our decision making, choices, and routine. Imagine your time like a bank account with credits of $86,400 each morning, and it is carried over no balance from day-to-day.
Each of us has such a bank. It’s name is TIME. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against the “tomorrow”. You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success! The clock is running. Make the most of today
In his very thought-provoking 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, the late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, advised that we find what we love to do and live every day like it could be our last as our time here is limited:
You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
We are all on a journey in this world and having a sense of urgency can not be overemphasized cos Life is very short. Most of us do not understand this very profound message of life until we lose a loved one, escape a ghastly motor accident, survive a terminal diagnosis, or endure a boiling point moment. Depending on which part of the world you are in, let’s use the USA as a reference country which has a life expectancy of 79 years.
We spend at least one third of our lives sleeping, and spend another one third of that working. After spending 2/3rd of our lives working and sleeping. After factoring in grooming, schooling, commuting, gossiping, watching TV, Social Media, Whatsapp, we have just like 10 years left to be really productive and try to leave a legacy in the world.
The moment you realize that your time here is limited, you begin to re-order your priorities. Instead of viewing 90 minutes of soccer, you view the highlights instead, most times; it does not feel like the time is much, but when you add 4 hours of viewing premier league soccer, midweek and weekends; it eventually adds up that is 200 hours (8-10 days) of soccer per year, in 36 years, you would have used one year of your precious life to view soccer.
Your time here is limited, don’t waste it performing for others, follow your bliss, have fun, get things done, be remarkable, exceptional and leave a legacy in the process.
All the Best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
Don’t worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test… Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap – but it was a revolutionary piece of crap. – Guy Kawasaki
I first stumbled on the sentence “Don’t worry be crappy” in one of Guy Kawasaki’s book and the concept really helped me with my perfectionist tendencies. Anytime I want to get into the analysis paralysis mode, I remind myself that you do not need to be great to start but you have to start to be great.
One of the favourite concepts have learnt from reading Guy Kawasaki Books is Don’t Worry be Crappy, it was an aha moment for me when I was first exposed to the concept around 2012 while trying to startup some projects. This singular idea changed my perspective on starting anything as I discovered most big brands did not start as fortune 100 companies they worked their way up the value chain.
Motivation is what gets you started. Commitment is what keeps you going.
Commitment is the ability to stick with something long after the initial excitement is gone. Anyone can set a goal but until you decide and commit to getting things done, it would not happen. As Aristotle, once quipped: “We are what we repeatedly do, excellence then is not an act but a habit.
Commitment is a power we all posess but we do not explore it because greatness has a cost. You can either commit to medicority or excellence, productivity or non productivity, happiness or sadness. The moment you commit providence and the universe get the things you need around you.
The price of greatness is hardwork but the challenge for most of us is that we want to have the joy of winning without the commitment to succeed. The Principle of life is pretty straightforward what you see is what you get gabage in gabage out.
“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 issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. —William H. Murray”
“If you disagree with an idea, you should work especially hard to implement it well because that way when it fails you’ll know it was a bad idea. Not bad execution.” — Andy Grove.
Disagree and commit is a management principle which states that individuals are allowed to disagree while a decision is being made, but that once a decision has been made, everybody must commit to it. Disagree and commit is a method of avoiding the consensus trap, in which the lack of consensus leads to inaction.
“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”
Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business – plus a high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.
“Convinced that we are not good enough, we can never relax. We stay on guard, monitoring ourselves for shortcomings. When we inevitably find them, we feel even more insecure and undeserving. We have to try even harder. The irony of all of this is . . . where do we think we are going anyway?”
You are not your job description, your place of birth; you are not your abuse; you are not your defeat, rejection, or failures. Many of us attach our self-worth to external factors such as our jobs, cars, material possessions, etc. When we lose any of these material things, it usually affects our self-worth and mental health because we have attached so much meaning to them.
In the social media age we are in right now, many of us place our self-worth on the number of followers, retweets, likes, reshares, and all the other metrics used by social media to validate our popularity or awesomeness. The metrics used by social media platforms to validate us are all ephemeral yardsticks, which are not built to last but built to make us come for more; we become like a drug addict always needing the next shot. We are all in a trance.
There is a story about an elderly dying man who told his child:
Here is your grandfather’s gold watch and it is a couple of hundred years old. But before I bequeath it to you, I want you to go to the watch shop and see how much they would offer you.
The child went, and then came back, and said the watchmaker offered 7 dollars because it’s old and has some scratch.
The old man said: go to the coffee shop.
He went and then came back, and said: they offered 4 dollars.
The old man said: Go to the museum and show that watch.
He went then came back, and said to his father “They offered me a million dollars.”
The father said: “I wanted to let you know that the right place values you in the right way.
Don’t find yourself in the wrong place and get angry if you are not valued.
Those that know your value are those who appreciate you, don’t stay in a place where nobody sees your value.
Never doubt, and always believe in yourself by knowing your worth and that there are those who clearly appreciate these values.
“The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.” – Bruce Lee
