When working towards a goal or project, it's important to remember what really matters. Simply keeping the final outcome in mind isn't enough to ensure success.
Many people make the mistake of solely focusing on the end result and end up falling short. But the key to success isn't just having a clear picture of the final goal. While it's important to have a distant vision to guide our efforts, it's equally important to focus on the progress we're making along the way.
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The quote "if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change" by Dr. Wayne Dyer highlights the idea that our internal beliefs and thoughts shape the way we perceive the world around us. Our individual perspectives can color our experiences and interactions with the world, and this can be both beneficial and detrimental to our understanding of ourselves and others.
One way to understand this concept is to do a simple experiment. If someone asked you to close your eyes and think about the color red, you might think of stop signs, tomatoes, and blood. Pause for a minute to visualize red objects, then open them and look around the room.
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Linear thinking is a narrow way of thinking that simplifies situations by focusing on two variables out of many. It believes that there is a simple cause and effect, start and finish, problem and solution, birth and death, rise and fall, and action and reaction.
However, this approach ignores the complexity of systems and fails to take into account all the factors involved. This type of thinking can lead to flawed conclusions and ineffective solutions.
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When studying systems thinking, we come across many systems with multiple layers to them. These layers can be used to achieve our goals, both in our personal and professional lives.
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The notion that businesses are either growing or dying is a prevalent but limited viewpoint. The reality is that business operations are always in a state of flux, with ups and downs rather than a steady incline or decline. This can make it difficult to determine if progress is being made.
To overcome this challenge, successful businesses adopt a mindset of continuous improvement. Regardless of their current state, there is always room for improvement, providing direction and enabling them to advance and secure their place in the market.
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Are you ready to leave your comfort zone behind and embark on an exhilarating journey of self-discovery and personal growth? You Can't Surf from the Shore by Scott Miker will inspire and motivate you to take risks, challenge yourself, and embrace the unknown while relying on systems and habits to stockpile your improvements.
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Improvement is an essential part of personal and professional growth. However, many people struggle making meaningful changes in their lives. The systems and habits approach to improvement provides a framework for creating sustainable changes that lead to better outcomes.
The systems and habits approach is all about creating routines and processes that support our goals. By building systems and habits, we reduce the need for willpower and motivation to make positive changes in our lives. Instead, we create an environment where improvement becomes the default.
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As we work towards our goals, our habits and systems often take over, driving us towards success. However, our natural tendency is to keep pushing, to increase the pace of our improvement. This can lead to dropping all the way back to zero.
To illustrate this, I recall a leadership conference where a speaker asked someone to juggle multiple balls. As more balls were added, the participant dropped all of them. This is a reminder that when we add more responsibilities or push for more, we risk dropping everything.
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In life, we are faced with an endless stream of choices, both big and small. Some of these choices are major life decisions we make as we age, while others are subtle choices that we may not even notice. However, it is important to remember that we always have options, even if they may not be ideal.
One common tendency that many of us fall into is to avoid making a deliberate choice and instead accepting the default option. We may procrastinate or avoid participating in the decision-making process because we don't like any of the options presented to us. But even though we may think we are not deciding, we are still held accountable for the outcome. This can lead to feelings of stress, unhappiness, and a sense of being punished or victimized.
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Everyone is busy. I rarely speak with anyone who doesn’t say how busy they are. Unless they are retired or really bored with their job, everyone feels rushed to get more done.
Often this creates a cycle. We feel rushed to get things done so we rush through them. Because we didn’t do a thorough job, we often must redo them later. As more gets added to our plate we rush through it instead of taking the time to do it right.
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As we go through life, it's easy to feel like we're constantly being pulled in different directions. The demands of work, family, and society can all leave us feeling overwhelmed and stressed out. But there's a way to break free from this cycle and find a sense of calmness and peace within ourselves.
The first step is to let go of the idea that we need to control everything. We can't always control what happens around us, but we can control how we respond to it. By focusing on what we can control, and letting go of what we can't, we free ourselves from unnecessary stress and anxiety.
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As we journey through life, the desire for change often takes root within us. Perhaps it's the realization that we've been dining out excessively and want to shed some pounds or save money. It might pertain to our relationships, a longing to be a better partner or to spend more quality time with our children.
These moments of introspection and the desire for a different outcome are common to most individuals. However, the real challenge arises when it's time to translate that desire into action.
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I write a lot of articles about taking responsibility for one’s life. It is important that we learn how to take responsibility so that we can gain control of life and work to improve.
But as with anything in life, the answer of should you take full responsibility isn’t clear cut. To improve, most of us need to move away from blaming others and work on what we can control, not what others have done. But sometimes it truly is something another person did.
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Everyone sees the world through their own personal perspective. How we were raised, where we live, and who are family members are all combine to give us our own uniqueness.
But regardless of who we are, we all experience time. Time frames events and can color how we view situations. Something that we face today feels different than the same challenge viewed 10 years from now. Once the sting of the moment wears off, our memory becomes a glossier version, with less detail and exaggerated aspects.
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I listen to a lot of easygoing music. Whether it is a summer beach song or an upbeat reggae song, I enjoy the relaxing nature of it. Sure, I enjoy a hard-hitting rock song but for me, I get more excited for the song of the rebel with a ska sound behind it than a wall of distorted guitars.
Sometimes the lyrics are a great description of the music. Other times, it seems to provide Jimmy Buffet style escapism to avoid life’s challenges and instead skip away to a tropical island for a beer and hammock or a joint and a concert.
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There is a scene in the Friends TV show when Ross is on sabbatical. He is complaining to his friend Joey that he completed a bunch of chores and still has nothing to do.
Joey’s advice was to slow down and stretch out the things on his to do list. He said he shouldn’t have done it all in a few hours in one morning, but rather should have made it last all week.
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There is a song I really like that isn’t very popular. It is called Never and is written by a Hawaiian reggae band called The Green.
The lyrics are powerful. The music is melodic but feels as if there is this underlying energy. It feels like calm yet forceful energy.
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Raising children provides a never-ending opportunity to learn. Often, I am struck by how wise they are while other times they seem to lack common sense.
One theme that arises when parenting is the idea that they don’t connect their choice with the outcome they receive. They don’t see that they chose to argue with mom creating their punishment. Or they don’t realize that they didn’t return home on time causing them to be grounded. Or they are upset their tablet battery drained but don’t take responsibility for forgetting to charge it overnight.
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Following the systems and habits approach to improvement means that we value consistency. We use it to build future value by designing our thoughts and actions and reinforcing them over time.
When inevitable chaos ensues, which it always does, it can be difficult to maintain that consistent approach. It frustrates us. It causes emotional upheaval.
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Every summer, as the weather starts to warm, my music taste shifts. Normally I am a huge reggae fan. But I tend to shift to the laid-back summer country music that was popularized by Jimmy Buffett and continues through Zach Brown Band, Kenny Chesney, Jesse Rice, Brian Kelley and many more.
The music gets me in the summer mood. The positive, yet melancholy vibe is a welcome and familiar friend after a long, cold winter in Ohio. Any road trip or flight to paradise will include these songs and they recur in my life like Christmas music that comes every summer instead of December.
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