🔗 Link : Goodreads
⭐️ Rating: 5
🔗🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Formulate clear principles and use them to ease decision making.
- Be a designer of your life rather than a worker: reflect, build habits
- Acknowledge your own weaknesses an deal with them.
🔗🎨 Impressions
A bit disappointed. Most of it just felt like common sense. Maybe most ideas were already too ingrained in my thinking? I missed the aha moments.
🔗How I Discovered It
Alex read it years before and David recommended it to me lately
🔗👷🏼 What do I want to apply to my life?
Communicate my principles to those around me. I need lots of me-time. I am a big planner: I journal and plan my day in the morning. Sunday is my day to organize and reevaluate my priorities. I have an urge to always work on myself / learn.
Remind myself of my higher goals when feeling impulses: like eating, skipping journaling, eating sweets.
Take help where needed. Get help on my weaknesses. Ask people.
🔗📒 Summary + Notes
Be completely transparent with your principles. Share them with others. It eases communication and pushes you to be your “true” self.
Principles make decision making easier. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
Success has more to do with knowing how to deal with not knowing.
Take a few minutes to decide on trivial decisions in advance. This avoids making bad decisions against our values by being caught off-guard.
When you feel pain or resistance, reflect whether you should suffer instead of avoiding it.
Nature throws us trick choices with appealing first-order consequences (e.g. junk food) that steer us away from the bigger second-order consequences (e.g. health).
It is much more important that you are a good designer/manager of your life than a good worker in it. But most people operate emotionally and in the moment.
How to deal with weaknesses:
- Work on them
- Find ways around them
- Change what you want
Five steps to evolve:
- Have clear goals.
- Identify the impeding problems.
- Find the root cause of the problems.
- Design plans to solve them.
- Take action.
Don’t confuse goals with desires. Desires are things that you want that can prevent you from reaching your goals.
Required skills for achieving goals:
- Goal setting: higher-level thinking like visualization and prioritization.
- Identifying problems: be perceptive and maintain high standards
- Diagnosis: be logical, consider multiple perspectives, and willingness to have hard conversations
- Designing: be practical
- Doing: self-discipline, good work habits, and a results orientation. No one has all those qualities. Have humility so you can get what you need from others! My strength: goal setting & diagnosis; My weakness: identify problems (be perceptive), be realistic in design planning (reject most ideas / plans!)
Know whom to ask when you don’t know.
Record the circumstances in which you’ve consistently made bad decisions because you failed to see what others saw.
Be an imperfectionist. The marginal gains of studying even the important things past a certain point are limited.
Don’t get scared away by cons. Good choices have more pros than cons, not no cons. Watch out for people who argue against something whenever they can find something - anything - wrong with it, without properly weighing all the pluses and minuses.