utilize.......................

High-hope people take every experience they have as a learning experience—no matter the experience.   Everything happens for them, not to them.  They utilize every experience to improve how they live and approach life.

-Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, 10x Is Easier Than 2x

one day at a time................

 

Only you can create the life you want for yourself—no one is going to do it for you.  If you don't know what that life looks like yet, for whatever reason, that's fine.  We're here now.  The choices you make from here on out are what matters. . . . Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time.

-Arnold Schwarzenegger,  Be Useful:  Seven Tools for Life

imagine............................

 

Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.  To be an optimist you don't have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves.

-Kevin Kelly

Fifty ways.......................

 .........................the World is getting better.

Here's an idea.........................

 The best way to live life is to combine a constant appreciation of the present moment, with a general program of consistent improvement. That way, you get to feel good about both the present and the future. 

-as cut-and-pasted from this blog post

Accelerated doesn't necessarily..................

 ..........................mean improved:

Adding more people to the internet has accelerated science, politics and every element of culture. The echos happen faster, the learning is exponential, and connected communities heat up and morph ever faster.

-Seth Godin, from here

Good results compound..............................

Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.  Even when that effort makes a small difference—more rational thinking and fewer emotional decisions, translated into an increased probability of better outcomes—it can have a significant impact on how our lives turn out.  Good results compound.  Good processes become habits, and make possible future calibration and improvement.

-Annie Duke, as culled from Thinking in Bets:  Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

While incentives matter.............................

 ". . . improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives."

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

About security......................

     Most people never feel secure because they are always worried that they will either lose their job, lose the money they already have, lose their spouse, lose their health, and so on.  The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way, that you are increasing the caliber of who you are and that you are valuable to your company, your friends, and your family.  I don't worry about maintaining the quality of of my life, because every day I work on improving it.  I constantly strive to learn and to make new and more powerful distinctions about ways to add value to other people's lives.  This gives me a sense of certainty that I can always learn, that I can always expand, that I can always grow.

-Anthony Robbins, Awaken The Giant Within

Plus, it's not difficult....................

"If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters."

-Epictetus

Aging like a fine wine..................

He's still pretty young, but still...............

Respect thyself.......................

     "Always do the affairs of man change and improve because keen-minded men seek greater skill that they may better serve those upon whose patronage they depend.  Therefore, I urge all men to be in the front rank of progress and not to stand still, lest they be left behind. . . .
     "Thus the seventh and last remedy for a lean purse is to cultivate thy own powers, to study and become wiser, to become more skillful, to so act as to respect thyself to achieve thy carefully considered desires."

-Arkad, as channeled by George S. Clason in The Richest Man In Babylon

About failure.......................

Failure hurts so much that we, as a society, have tried to minimize its impact.  Kids are told that it's okay to fail.  We read how great men and women failed time and again.  We're told that failure is a part of life and it's nothing to get upset about.  At the same time, we're told to learn from our mistakes.  How can we learn from our failures and mistakes if we're told that they're no big deal?
     You can't really have it both ways.  It is the pain that makes failure a step toward success.  By trying to hide your failure or minimize it, what you're really doing is protecting your own ego at the expense of improvement.  We don't get stronger by giving our muscles a little bit of a workout—nothing too painful, nice and steady.  We get stronger when we literally shred our muscle fibers, so that when they grow back, they grow back larger.  It's the trauma, the pain, that builds our bodies.  It's no different when we're going after our dreams.  Experiencing the pain of failure helps us grow.

-Akbar Gbajabiamila, Everyone Can Be A Ninja:  Find Your Inner Warrior And Achieve Your Dreams

Time is of the essence.................

17.  Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you.  Fate is at your elbow;  make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, Book Four

Checking in with Jim Collins again.....

Greatness is not a function of circumstance.  Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.

The good-to great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment.  Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away.

. . . the good-to-great transformation never happened in one fell swoop.  There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle movement.  Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel in on direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.

-Jim Collins,  Good To Great:  Why Some Companies Make The Leap . . . and Others Don't

Hmmm...........................

via

Tougher than it looks........................

Most people will get much more out of destroying their own wrong ideas than trying to come up with new ones all the time.  Once you get rid of the clutter, all that's left will be the good stuff that you can use to improve your results.

-Ben Carlson, from A Wealth of Common Sense

From her lips to God's ears......................

      Your brain's health may be the most powerful indicator of how long you will live.  It is crucial to whether that life will be rich and satisfying from youth into old age, or something substantially less rewarding, and for less time.
      A car driven wisely, fueled with high-quality gasoline, given regular oil changes, and repaired with new parts as old ones wear out is likely to last longer than one that's abused or neglected.  Likewise, the easiest way to have a healthy brain in middle age and beyond is to start with one as a youth and to follow good physical and mental habits.  Exercise it.  Feed it.  Challenge it.  Then enjoy the rewards.
      But what of the person who comes late to the repairs, like the owner of a car that rusts for years on blocks or runs too long on dirty oil?   The car owner can always swap out the engine.  You, on the other hand, have only one brain, basically composed of the same neurons you were born with, plus a few added to some narrowly specific areas.  Once they've begun to deteriorate, can they be saved—or even made stronger?
      Brain researcher Marian Diamond is certain they can.

-Michael S. Sweeney,  Your Best Brain Ever:  A Complete Guide & Workout

On capitalism.......................

"capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses … It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls."

-Joseph Schumpeter, as quoted in 1919, and as cut-and-pasted from this blog post on how much cheaper (in the relative terms of how much labor do you perform in exchange for what you want) a basket of food is today as compared with 1919.

via Newmark's Door

Quoting......................

.................................................................James Clear:

"The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom."

"Until you work as hard as those you admire, don't explain away their success as luck."

"Learning to play a game where the odds are in your favor is critical for maintaining motivation and feeling successful."

"Competence is highly dependent on context."

"Pain is an effective teacher."

"The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it."

"Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard."

"Most days, we'd rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves."

"It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action."

"The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements."

"Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross.  It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine."

"Small habits don't add up.  They compound."