Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If only I had more money is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment - now and not later.
I tend to split my activities into fun, income and legacy. The number of things in that finance bucket is pretty few and far between and doesn't consume much time at all.
Never check email first thing in the morning. Instead, complete your most important task before 11:00 A.M. to avoid using lunch or reading email as a postponement excuse.
Rather than spend my life on data entry and typing, I also take photos on my iPhone of business cards, wine labels, menus, or anything I want to have searchable on-the-run.
I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.
After decades of hauling telescopes around in the back of vans and going up to high altitude locations and so forth, I did finally build an observatory, here on Sonoma mountain.
It is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life. This is a nonstarter—nothing can justify that sacrifice.
I was never the most technical wrestler. But my coaches definitely instilled in me the belief that if you can push yourself and practice smarter than the other guy, you can beat him.
The key to having more time is doing less, and there are two paths to get there, both of which should be used together: (1) Define a short to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list.
The first thing I would do for anyone who's trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.
I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in 'American History X,' yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.
Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
I think about willpower almost never. I realize for myself, trying to be more disciplined is pretty nebulous and it's often a slippery target. For me, I've just thought about incentives.
I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.
One of the great things about stargazing is that it's immediately at hand for so many people. You know, you could get into scuba diving or bird watching, but the stars are always up there.
Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market - define your customers - then find or develop a product for them.
Focus on impact, not approval. If you believe you can change the world, which I hope you do, do what you believe is right and expect resistance and expect attackers. Keep calm and carry on!
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
I encourage active skepticism - when people are being skeptical because they're trying to identify the best course of action. They're trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.
A 'social media fast' is a fast, I suppose like any other. In this case, you're simply giving up whether it be a device or a particular type of social media site. And I do this at least once weekly.
If you're sitting in a monastery, where your schedule is set and you have very few uncontrolled variables, that's fantastic that you can do loving/kindness meditation, but that's not the world I live in.
Having a size 9 foot is fantastic because almost all of the shoe companies do their prototyping in size 9, so if you visit a place like Nike headquarters, you can try every sort of wacky, out-there model.
I don't journal to 'be productive.' I don't do it to find great ideas or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren't intended for anyone but me. It's the most cost-effective therapy I've ever found.
I started using Twitter about year after its very early adoption and ended up investing in it around that same time. I'm involved with the Tech scene and companies ranging from Facebook, Stumbleupon and Twitter.
When you elevate the heels more so than you elevate the sole of the foot, you trigger a cascade of compensations in the knees and hips that cause tight hip flexors, and then those hip flexors cause lower-back pain.
As far as income goes, there are three currencies in the world; most people ignore two. The three currencies are time, income and mobility, in descending order of importance. Most people focus exclusively on income.
I'm not a big believer in long-term planning and far-off goals. In fact, I generally set 3-month and 6-month dreamlines. The variables change too much and in-the-future distance becomes an excuse for postponing action.
There's an entire generation of male strength and endurance athletes, even recreational lifters, who have never gotten off the ephedrine-caffeine-aspirin stack. The process of getting off stimulants is really horrible.
If you start out with a little telescope observing the stars and you keep at it over the years, as I have, it's kind of a dream to one day have an observatory where you can always go and use the telescope conveniently.
I always thought I was going to end up teaching ninth grade, specifically, because I had a lot of really formative influences, I think, at that fork in the road, where a lot of crucial decisions are made by young folks.
It's very easy to confuse confident motion with being productive - and they're not the same thing. Productive to me means measurable outcomes that apply to my most important to-dos that positively affect my life. That's it.
When I left the U.S. for the first time, I spent my first year abroad in Japan. That culture shock and abundance of new stimuli combined with a lack of guidance forced me to develop my own approaches to learning and juggling.
But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn't making you stronger, they're making you weaker.
Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
I might seem biased, but I use Evernote every day. It came to me through my readers, who I'd asked for software recommendations via Twitter and Facebook. For seemingly every function, the answer was 'Man, you have to use Evernote.'
I was an All-American in wrestling in high school, was National Champion in Chinese kickboxing in 1999 and have spent a lot of time around professional athletes, which includes my eight-plus years as CEO of a sports nutrition company.
It's very easy to say, 'Well, hey, you should wake up at 4:30 in the morning and do what ABCD people do.' Just because it works for one person, just because it works for even many people, does not mean it will necessarily work for you.
Changing the world doesn't require much money. Again, think in terms of empowerment and not charity. How much were Gandhi's teachers paid? How much did it cost to give Dr. Martin Luther King the books that catalyzed his mind and actions?
A recession is very bad for publicly traded companies, but it's the best time for startups. When you have massive layoffs, there's more competition for available jobs, which means that an entrepreneur can hire freelancers at a lower cost.
I was a very happy kid. I didn't get new bikes very often. We ate a lot of chicken legs for dinner. But I never felt in want of anything. I wasn't cognizant until much later of the discrepancy between what we had and what other people had.
It's just astonishing to me, but not surprising in some respects, how dependent we are on the somewhat meaningless and certainly ephemeral feedback that we get from strangers on the Internet. I think that's a dangerous dependence to develop.
I used Evernote almost exclusively for researching 'The 4-Hour Body.' I was able to eliminate all of the perpetually open tabs and multiple bookmarking services. It's also all automatically backed up to Evernote, which gives me peace of mind.
The truth is that since the first book, I have wanted to emulate Benjamin Franklin and put together a healthy, wealthy and wise trilogy and so healthy was 'The 4-Hour Body,' wealthy was 'The 4-Hour Workweek' and then wise is 'The 4-Hour Chef.'
If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.
To make a bestseller, there are more customers than just your customers: Selling to the end-user is just one piece of the puzzle. In my case, I needed to first sell myself to the publisher to get marketing support and national retail distribution.
If you take a strong stance and have a clear opinion or statement on any subject online, you're going to polarize people. And without that polarity, there's no discussion. Discussion is what I want, which means that I'm fine with the consequences.
Everything that works in sales has been done already. Just keep track of the crap that you buy, or the awesome stuff that you buy, and decide what was the trigger, and then just sell to people like you. It's really that easy - and that's what I do.
Lacking an external focus, the mind turns inward on itself and creates problems to solve, even if the problems are undefined or unimportant. If you find a focus, an ambitious goal that seems impossible and forces you to grow, these doubts disappear.
A friend of mine, Derek Simmons, who's been on the podcast, said, "If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with perfect dads." It comes down to motivation and incentives. If it isn't a punishment or a reward, then it's just talk.