Despite pretentious title and correspond cover, “Suceed” fully met my expectations and appeared to be not an empty self-help “You can do it all” rant but more or less practical interpretation of scientific research in a field of psychology and motivation. Probably, the biggest compliment I can give a books is to say that I wrote down many notes in my Evernote while reading it. In this case notes were record-high long. Basically it’s my notes that I’d like to share here. Otherwise, how would I force myself to re-format and make them more structured?
Book is about setting your goals in a way that increases your chances to achieve them and enjoy the process. Percent of trivialities not as high as I expected it to be which is quite rare for self-help/self-development books. I personally found quite many ideas to be practically applicable and I hope so will you. So, what is my summary?
Difficult goals & self-control
Usually, it pays off to set difficult goals. They usually bring much higher gratification than the ones you, honestly speaking, considered to be quite easy to achieve. For example, corporate departments that identified themselves with hard work usually appeared to be happier as well.
Metaphorically speaking, self-control is a muscle. Immediately after its usage it gets temporarily weaker (you ability control yourself is lower) but in overall it grows and develops as you use it.
Example of weakness: 2 groups of people were presented with 2 plates, one with a chocolate and another one with radishes. While 1 groups was allowed to eat as much chocolate as it wanted, another one could only eat radishes. Than, both groups were given a difficult (in fact, unsolvable) task and the 1 group performed much better (didn’t give up for longer time). Same effect after attempts to suppress laughter when watching comedy, etc.
Positive thinking
It’s very important to distinguish between 2 types of positive thinking. First type is believing that you are capable of achieving a goal one day. Second type is expecting that it will be easy for you to resist all the temptations and get through all the obstacles.
1 type is important and helpful, while the 2 type might be harmful and dangerous. Instead of expecting your way to be easy you should better realistically expect it to be quite challenging but prepare for obstacles and believe that you will be able to get through them.
When setting goals you might use this tactic: name one barrier or sacrifice associated with a goal and than one reason why this goal is important for you. Then, repeat it few times. It allows you to think more realistically and decide whether you really want to pursue this particular one.
Yes, we all love TED. They probably have the best collection of video presentations online with most of them being either inspirational or insightful. But is it all there is?
Actually, there are few places where you can find some edutainment videos for you dinner watching. Here are the main alternatives to TED I stumbled upon and some introductory videos that I personally liked that can help you get started.
1. PopTech
According to the website:
PopTechis a unique innovation network – a global community of cutting-edge leaders, thinkers, and doers from many different disciplines, who come together to explore the social impact of new technologies, the forces of change shaping our future, and new approaches to solving the world’s most significant challenges. We are known for our thriving community of thought-leaders, breakthrough innovation programs, visionary annual conferences and deep media and storytelling capabilities.
A good video to start from: Sebastian Seung’s Connectome.
2. Learning Without Frontiers
According to the website:
Learning Without Frontiers is a global platform for disruptive thinkers and practitioners from the education, digital media, technology and entertainment sectors who come together to explore how new disruptive technologies can drive radical efficiencies and improvements in learning whilst providing equality of access.
A good video to start from: Gordon Brown’s Pirate’s Dilemma.
Well, one might of course get an impression that I’m a fan of Conan O’Brien as this is the second video with him on this blog. But c’mon the man is charismatic and this commencement speech is probably the funniest one I’ve seen so far! And a little wise too
Let me make it clear. I am not really a type of person who is really into things like “diet”. But the whole Paleo movement really got me interested. So, what is paleo? It’s a nutritional approach that focuses on optimization of one’s health through self-experimentation in part but based on few basic principles.
There has been a huge boom around it with lots of blogs created and it seems to really work for many people in terms of overall well-being, energy, etc. Some even report dramatic transformations that literally changed their lives.
There are few reasons why I, personally, got interested:
But I decided to take it one step further and create a list of the most highly-rated TED talks.
Which is not hard to do using their Youtube channel statistics. So, here it is. The list of most highly-rated TED talks:
Looks like guys at Google feel that importance of posture for overall health. Here are 2 great lectures on the subject that aim to clarify what good posture is and how to improve yours.
ZZE.ST is the blog where I share my personal insights, experiences, lifehacks and researches that made my life more fun & interesting and will probably do the same to you.
More about blog & me.
