All posts by Solomon

Wise Business Quotes

Life Advice

Business

“Don’t worry about doing something initially that will constrain you in the long term because if you don’t win in the short term there won’t be a long term anyway” – Paul Graham

His curiosity about the world and openness to it is summed up in the spirit of a Chinese-style calligraphy painting behind his desk. “Set your goals high; make friends with different kinds of people; enjoy simple pleasures. Stand on high ground; sit on level ground; walk on expansive ground.” – Li Ka-Shing

Li’s younger, more high-profile son Richard has a stake in a family trust but runs his own telecom empire. He says he follows two of his father’s business lessons. The first is to “leave something on the table for the other side” in business transactions because that will help to bring deals back to you in the ­future. The second is a message his father wrote down for him when he was younger: Success is all about planning, study­ing downside risk and execution; “arrogance leads to failure.”

“Where is my lead, what is my edge. Wherever you’re ahead, focus on that. If you’re trying to win, your opponent won’t give you the time to train your weaknesses, so push ahead and exploit your strengths.” – Day9

What do entrepreneurs know that no one else knows? – Quora

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The Value of Physical Activity

Life Advice, Life Education

Physical Activity is valuable because of it’s potential to teach you life lessons on multiple levels.  For one thing, it teaches you what you can achieve when you work hard. Because fitness goals are something that can be quantifiable, you can measure your progress and see your results more easily than other goals like “I want to get better at cooking” because whether your cooking is good more subjective than whether your mile time was under 8 minutes.

The next thing it teaches you is humility because hard work does not always translate into results.  Generally people growing up with exercise experience the following:

You work an equal amount every year and as your body grows so do your skills, amplifying the effects of your work and making you think it’s because of your hard work.

As you age you get better and better until you reach your peak age of physical fitness. Then you work the exact same amount and you stop improving.  

Then you work the exact same amount and you start getting worse and worse due to age.

As a result, you can experience being better than others simply because of your age, and you can experience being worse than others simply because of your age.  Thus you learn to appreciate what you have when you have it, and you learn that not everything is inside your control: while your ability and success are related to your hard work, they are not directly correlated.

Physical Activity also teaches you patience and long term (it’s a marathon not a sprint) thinking because no matter how much you want to build your muscles and how hard you work out at the gym today, they will only grow so fast.  And if you get impatient and overwork them then you will get injured.

Injuries teach you how to handle setbacks because in life you will meet many setbacks and how you respond to them and stay the course will largely impact your success in life.  Injuries also teach you about limitations because you are limited in some respects and understanding those limitations will help you live a better life, make better decisions, and teach you how to overcome obstacles because a limitation is an obstacle, but there are often ways around it.  Perhaps you realize your limit for exercise is 2 hours a day and any more than that then you will suffer more physical pain.  Many will get stuck at this obstacle, but others will discover: it’s because I’m not resting enough after exercise, or getting enough nutrition, sleep, etc., that I have this limit, and if I improve at resting and recovery, then I can increase my capacity for exercise to 3 hours a day or more.  As such, Physical Activity teaches you how to take care of yourself, which is the first step in knowing how to take care of others.

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2014 Recap: Self Doubt

Thoughts On Life

This year I fell victim to the vicious cycle of self doubt.  I believed I could be successful in my endeavors, but when I started to fail I started to doubt and that reduced my chances of success because it’s hard to fight both the obstacles you face on your journey to success and your inner demons at the same time.  Because my chance of success went down, the failures added up and my doubt grew stronger, causing more failure and resulting in self doubt.

This was because this year I set grand goals, goals that were bigger than any other goals I’ve ever set in my life, so of course it would make sense that success would not be knocking on my door anytime soon.  I was in for the long haul, and I was only just beginning.  So when I didn’t succeed in my long term goal I wasn’t surprised: that was to be expected.  However I fell into the trap that most people make when they set grand goals: They don’t break it up into smaller ones.

Because I only had the one goal that was to be achieved years from now, I had no short term goals that I could achieve for gratification, satisfaction, adrenaline to keep me going.  The over-investment in the long term resulted in boredom and depression in the short term, and with depression came the doubt: “no results yet huh? Must not be working, should probably give up.”

Luckily for me I had systems in place to keep me working which meant that I continued to make progress even though I felt like quitting…and now at the end of the year I can say that I have certainly made progress because while it was difficult to see any gains or improvements or short term advances at the day or week or month level, at the year level it is clear what progress has been made.

There are many tricks to conquering self doubt. Before I dive into them I just want to take a moment to explain why you should not give into them.  An important one is that like most things in life: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Other people feel self doubt too.  In fact, some of the most successful people out there have felt self doubt.  For example, Jerry Seinfeld, who became a billionaire from being an exceptional comedian, and Jimmy Fallon, host of the Tonight Show, a job that is an extremely high award for a comedian in the USA, both admitted that even after achieving decades of success, they still occasionally feel self doubt before performing (*From an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee).  They doubt whether they will succeed, they question their life decision to even try, they question whether they even have the potential to succeed.  But then they go do it anyway, and when they are in the middle of the doing, they realize they can do it.

What this goes to show is that whether you are just beginning and have no history of success, or whether you are at the peak of your career and have a history of success and momentum carrying you: self doubt will always be there, until you take the dive and do it.  So a solution to self doubt is to just dive in and just go do it.  Do it and keep doing it and by gaining experience improve incrementally over time so that with enough time and increments, major improvements are made and you can focus on enjoying what you’re doing or looking back and enjoying your accomplishments instead of getting trapped in the purgatory of indecision.

Next year, my goal is to stay positive and focus on having fun, being happy, and drawing on my incremental success from 2014 to give me the self confidence to face the challenges of 2015 and the conviction to pursue what I want and not change goals because I will believe I can achieve what I originally set out to do.

Misc: An alternative source of self doubt is a weak sense of identity. See Who Am I? and Getting Out of Depression if so.

* See http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/jimmy-fallon-the-unsinkable-legend-part-2

Check out AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.

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