Know what you want to achieve and build your life around it. Once you have decided how you want to live your life and whom you want to be, you have to pursue it.
Some of us want fortune, others want fame, few of us desire freedom and even fewer are dedicated to giving. Whatever your purpose, unless you build a deliberate perseverance for that goal, you will not achieve it, you won’t even come close.
Pondering...
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
— Benjamin Franklin
Why did the busiest person in the world, former president Barack Obama, read an hour a day while in office?
Why has the best investor in history, Warren Buffett, invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career?
Why has the world’s richest person, Bill Gates, read a book a week during his career? And why has he taken a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his entire career?
Why do the world’s smartest and busiest people find one hour a day for deliberate learning (the 5-hour rule), while others make excuses about how busy they are.
— Charlie Munger
Self-made billionaire & Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner.
Knowledge is the new money.
We are in a period known as “Rapid Demonetisation” whereby technological innovation will render previously expensive tools, practically free.
The below table shows all the previously costly technologies that are now practically free on a smartphone.
Source - Peter Diamandis - Abundance
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
— Alvin Toffler
Those that continue to work hard throughout their working career, but do not take time out to learn are at risk of becoming irrelevant. We live in a fast changing era, many current jobs are likely to be replaced by automation.
Learning and the transfer of knowledge have a multiplier effect, if you transfer what you learn to others it does not deplete (like money) it increases. It helps you accomplish your goals faster and better. It’s fun to acquire. It makes your brain work better. It expands your vocabulary, making you a better communicator. It helps you think bigger and beyond your circumstances. It connects you to communities of people you didn’t even know existed.
Thought-provoking...
The Netflix Story
Netflix was first founded in August of 1997 by two serial entrepreneurs, Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings. The company began out in Scotts Valley, California, and has grown to become one of the world's leading internet entertainment platforms.
Netflix homepage in 1999
When it first opened, Netflix was purely a movie rental service.
Today, Netflix streams movies and has more than 151 million paid subscribers in over 190 countries around the world. It offers a wide range of TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages, including original productions
Netflix's mail-order rental model would directly challenge the market dominance of bricks-and-mortar rental giants like Blockbuster. In fact, Blockbuster could ultimately not compete with the move to online streaming and rentals and filed for bankruptcy in 2010.
In 2000, Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings approached Blockbuster about a partnership. Unfortunately for Blockbuster, their CEO just smiled and laughed at him.
In fact, Blockbuster even had a chance to purchase Netflix for $50 million. Netflix currently has a Market Cap of [$209.74B] (July 2020) and a share price of $476.89, while Blockbuster is out of business."
One of the main reasons for Netflix incredible success has been its unorthodox management styles; In 2002 when Netflix went public with 600 people it was losing money. Today it boasts 8600 employees with a market cap of USD 228 billion.
Netflix runs on the philosophy of No rules Rules
hire the right people and then empower them
One day I was talking with one of our best engineers, an employee I’ll call John. Before the layoffs, he’d managed three engineers, but now he was a one-man department working very long hours. I told John I hoped to hire some help for him soon. His response surprised me. “There’s no rush—I’m happier now,” he said. It turned out that the engineers we’d laid off weren’t spectacular—they were merely adequate. John realized that he’d spent too much time riding herd on them and fixing their mistakes. “I’ve learned that I’d rather work by myself than with subpar performers,” he said. His words echo in my mind whenever I describe the most basic element of Netflix’s talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees—a perk better than foosball or free sushi—is hire only “A” players to work alongside them.
The Netflix HR policy
Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults
Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.
The company’s expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”
Employees were expected to spend company money frugally, as if it were their own.
All this sounds like a recipe for expensive anarchy. But managing “on the edge of chaos”, as Mr Hastings mischievously puts it, has served Netflix well. Most of its workers seem happy being treated like professional athletes, paid handsomely as long as no one can do their job better.
Hastings has a management book called “No Rules Rules” about the more than 20-year-old company’s disruptive culture and habit of reinventing itself.
Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, bestselling author of The Culture Map and one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial ideologies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world.
Wisdom/ What I'm Reading...
Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story.
Benjamin Hardy
This book has been on my reading list from the time I heard about it. Having read many of Ben Hardy’s blogs I admire his thought process and ability to deconstruct seemingly intuitive concepts into everyday possibilities. This book will change the way you think about the future, create a simple toolbox of daily actions that will alter your character and allow you to become your best self in the future.
The book begins by explaining stereotypes and various psychological tests limit us and restrict our possibilities.
Psychometric testing has become very common, but the reality is that answering a few questions that are framed in a certain way can not predict your character type and should not be used to determine how and what a person is going to live their life.
Personality Tests Can Be Dangerously Limiting
The main argument of this book is that your “personality” doesn’t matter. Even more, your personality is not the most fundamental aspect of who you are. Instead, your personality is surface-level, transitory, and a by-product of something much deeper.”
The most fundamental aspect of your humanity is your ability to make choices and stand by those choices, what Viktor Frankl called the last of human freedoms, “To choose one’s own way.”
Choosing one's way has 2 distinct meanings:
Making choices about the way in which you want to live your life
Choosing how to react to what happens to you on a daily basis.
The more you take ownership and control of the decisions you make about the way you choose to live life and react to circumstances the more directed and deliberate your life outcomes will be.
Trauma Can Freeze Our Development
You don’t hear him talking about “the PayPal days.”
You don’t see him limited by what he’s previously done or failed at. You don’t even hear him mention the past unless he’s explicitly asked about it.
This is how successful people live
They become who they want to be by orienting their life toward their goals, not as a repeat of the past; by acting bravely as their future selves, not by perpetuating who they formerly were.
Be Defined By Your Future, Not Your Past
Becoming the New You
In order to solidify your new identity, you need to begin acting in alignment with that new identity, rather than acting in alignment with your former self. Psychologists have a term for this — self- signaling, which means that our actions signal back to us who we are. We judge and measure ourselves by our actions. If you change your behaviour, your identity will begin to follow suit.
I think the language we use can be helpful here. For example, instead of telling myself that I need to do a workout or that I need to exercise, I tell myself that I am the type of person who maintains a healthy and active lifestyle.
"This is a generous, empowering and purposeful book. If you're ready, it will help you unlock a future that you may have been brainwashed into believing wasn't possible. Worth sharing a copy with someone you care about."
—Seth Godin, author of This Is Marketing
Dr. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author of Willpower Doesn’t Work. His blogs have been read by over 100 million people and are featured on Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, Cheddar, Big Think, and many others. He is a regular contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today and from 2015–2018, he was the #1 writer, in the world, on Medium.com.
To read the book - click here
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