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.
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:
For a long time I wanted to write about savants, people whose intellectual capacities significantly exceed what we consider to be normal. Usually, they have one or two fields where they really shine, but more often than not other abilities, usually social skills are sacrificed. You all remember Rain Man, right?
For example, Matt Savage learned to play piano at the age of 7, gave his first concert at 9 and recorded his album later on. You see him playing here:
What I find interesting and amusing about these people is how vividly they show the the real width of our own abilities and how inefficiently we use our own brain. Of course, personal traits, genetics and sometimes even injuries all play role here. But still all these amazing abilities are somewhere in our heads… And I like to believe that we can find a key to unlock them.
Throughout last couple of years I’ve been collecting my personal favorite quotations from various inspirational people in my Evernote. As a result I got quite a long list of sayings which I personally consider to be one of the smartest, wittiest, daring and positive at the same time.
Moscow, 2008.
So, I thought why not to share them with you? Assuming I have a lot in common with my readers, you might enjoy them too. If you don’t then you might just skip the post and excuse me for wasting your time. Otherwise, here is the collection:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.” ~ Mark Twain
“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” ~ Michelangelo Buonarroti
“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.” ~ Tim O’Reilly
“Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.” ~ Frank Tyger
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference” Reinhold Niebuhr, Kurt Vonnegut
Cyprus, 2008.
I’ve been thinking about covering this topic in my blog for a long time and eventually decided to do it. Firstly to structure it all for myself and secondly to share some thoughts and interesting articles & videos which I collected for last couple of years. As a result, this post is quite long and wordy, so don’t open up the full article if you’re not really interested in such kind of philosophical issues and get bored easily by them. In this case you might think that this is just an unpractical gobbledegook.
I actually find the combination of how important and how ambiguous this issue is quite puzzling. Very high percentage of people respond to the question about meaning of their lives with “to be happy” answer. And very few of them actually have any particular idea what this happiness is, how to achieve & feel it. Even in their individual case, not universally.
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.
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Moscow, 2008.
