Category: Book Summary

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Daniel Kahneman

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Your thoughts determine how you view life, and that’s why you need to learn how to control them

Your brain is always looking for the most natural way out, which could be the death of your ethical judgment-making.

Where there is a chance to preserve energy and assume something without overthinking, your brain will exercise this option. It usually ends up substituting effort for creativity, thanks to your thoughts.

Several factors — illusion, availability, and experience — influence your decisions. These factors lead you to make biased conclusions. Thinking is not as easy as it seems; it is an art we must master. People use intuition, the so-called gut feeling, instead of facts when making decisions. The same goes for problems that are too difficult to solve using logic and intellectual ability — people go with what they “feel” is correct. This phenomenon represents fast thinking, which does not waste too much energy and allows you to evaluate the situation and make relevant decisions quickly. Slow thinking, however, is the type that requires a conscious and energy-consuming thought process but uses logic rather than memory and emotions. Therefore, mastery of thoughts comes from understanding what constitutes intuition and assumptions.

⚡️Experiments and facts shape your thinking, which is why you should know when to switch between intuition and empirical facts.

Daniel Kahneman is a master of his trade. His knowledge of behavioral economics, cognitive thinking, and psychology put him among the best. He believes in placing facts over assumptions and that behavioral patterns can be easy using relative examples and instances

Follow this detailed summary to find out how your brain deceives you and hurts your decision-making process and what you can do to prevent this.

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Ryan Kiyosaki

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Why do we keep falling for the rat race?

Like many other things, we choose our jobs to please others — mainly our parents. But what do we want for ourselves?

Today, many people choose to be trapped in a race against themselves. The rat race idea is that you keep doing tons of hard and often unnecessary work to make ends meet. You do everything it takes, and your employer, the government, and utility bills take away nearly everything you’ve earned, leaving you with little or nothing to save.

⚡️The rat race is an endless quest where you must work hard to catch up with bills and taxes.

Sadly, many individuals are aware of the rat race and hate to be part of it but are worried about backfiring from their social circle; they keep racing anyway.

We’ve all heard conventional advice: “Go to school, study hard, get a good job, and everything will be alright.” The truth is, this advice is a clear indication of how the poor and the middle class see financial security. The rich don’t see things that way. This is no longer the recipe for a life free of financial struggles. Good education and high grades no longer guarantee success.

⚡️Financial education is robust, while money is where this power manifests.

You can go to college, graduate with a summa cum laude, get a white-collar job, and never have financial growth. You need to realize that no matter how hard you work, you will never be the one who benefits from your endeavors. One day you may have it all and lose it the next day. However, you can gain power over money and start building wealth from scratch with financial literacy.

A more significant percentage of people in our society still follow the “go to school” advice. These people may avoid being poor, but they never grow wealthy. Societal disapproval prevents us from quitting the rat race and building wealth.

“One of the reasons the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class struggles in debt is that the subject of money is taught at home, not in school.”

Robert Kiyosaki

Did you know? Adjectives “broke” and “poor” have different connotations. The first is a temporary state; however, the second is an eternal quality.

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by James Clear

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Good habits produce results that multiply rapidly, just like money that grows through compound interest

Whether good or bad, habits accumulate. Positive fusion occurs in terms of productivity, knowledge, and relationships.

Negative aggregation appears in times of stress, negative thoughts, and outrage.

freedom to think about more important things.

⚡️By becoming a lifelong learner, you leverage on the compounding ability of knowledge

There are several ways to practice aggregation. For example, reading challenges you to think differently and introduces new ideas. Growing in kindness also produces compound interest in terms of your relationships. People are predisposed to helping others who have been kind to them.

Negative things are also prone to accumulation. Minor stressors may seem isolated at first, but over time, they fuse into serious health issues. Parenting, traffic jams, a slight increase in blood pressure, etc., are common sources of worry.

Feeling stressed then compounds into more significant problems.

emineorge can i groute cumtaris thoughs has ort enge it, i renegitive reality for you.

microaggressions that burst into protests and civil unrest. But we like to pin it on a single event as if it was isolated.

Small changes appear insignificant until they reach a tipping point or threshold. This threshold is known as the “Plateau of Latent Potential.” To get the results you seek, you need patience.

Did you know? According to James Clear, a daily improvement or regression of 1% will leave you 37 times better or worse at the end of a year.

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Brené Brown

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The essence of effective leadership

Every human reacts and responds differently to situations. That’s why we occasionally act negatively without meaning to do so. These different reactions often affect us at work, for instance, how we choose goals and deadlines and how we go about our workday.

Few leaders set realistic deadlines for their team members, often motivated by a need to get something done quickly or personal ambitions.

But the main problem is that the team doesn’t know about any of that; they simply see the deadline and how difficult it is to achieve and then see a poor leader who can’t be pleased.

It’s also possible that setting these deadlines might be something a person does out of fear or worry that their leadership skills are lacking.

⚡️Courage pushes an excellent leader to succeed. Believe in yourself; fear will not help!

A team should have a shared understanding of all required work, achieved through effective communication. For example, the leadership team working with Dr. Brené Brown decided that each person needed to take notes during meetings and work together on estimating deadlines. Doing this allowed them to communicate effectively and see where others needed help.

Binary thinking patterns often surface in organizations and are dangerous because they do not maximize employees’ full potential. Examples of such binary thinking include:

• Operations versus marketing
• Finance versus creative
• Spenders versus savers
• The heart versus analytics
• The dreamer versus the stick-in-the-muds

Tagging people with stereotypes or just one quality limits their ability to explore and expand. But people are capable of different things, and this summary shows how that knowledge can be helpful to you. The following sections will help clarify the different types of leadership and how you can stand out.

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Joshua Medcalf

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Success is not an easy thing to achieve; you need to be prepared to fight for it

Success and excellence in our personal and professional lives come down to our seemingly insignificant daily choices.

Some decisions are pleasant; some are more akin to chores. The achievements we gain and the sacrifices we make along the way comprise our life journey. If done correctly, they become powerful stepping stones on our road to success.

Life is not a bed of roses for anyone. Often, to enjoy roses, we may need to go out to get them or have someone fetch them for us. Either way, we are still doing something to get the roses. Likewise, we need to do something to be successful in life. We need to stretch our hands to receive the help we need. We also have to give up some of our desires to pursue others. Essentially, we must chop wood and carry water to get anywhere. By doing this, we discover new things, give up some, submit to people, and learn from others, ourselves, and life.

We all love the awe and aura of greatness so much that we look forward to being great one day. We want it more than anything, but there is something else we must love to achieve greatness — the process.

⚡️The process of greatness begins with the dream to be remarkable.

Fantasizing about being magnificent is the easiest part. We imagine without any stress. Sitting down and imagining yourself in a mansion is sweet, but taking the steps necessary to build it is not as sweet. We must wake up from those dreams and take the essential step toward greatness — action.

You can never be great without chopping wood and carrying water; there’s no house without foundation. Wood and water mean different things to different people. It may be writing more for some, while for others, it is taking a course, reading a book, or going on a trip.

In this summary, you will discover general principles explaining how to become friends with the process of achieving greatness and how to take action toward glory in life.

Use tedious activities as learning material

See the process of carrying water and chopping wood as an opportunity to grow. It is the period when you become the judge of your success and learning process. Do not see the period as a test or competition; doing that hampers your seting i nas do sering on your one senter mia leaning spear isragardin mundane thinou, our

the truth is, they are an essential part of your road to success and hold teaching value.

⚡️To maximize your time doing the ordinary, you must identify what wood or water you need to carry.

Knowing the right thing will help you make the best of the period. Your water or wood may be you working under someone; if so, do it with joy and diligence and learn as much as possible. It might be working in a field where you need more experience. This could expand your horizons and available resources. Though it might seem scary and confusing, it’ll bring you much new and valuable knowledge. Wood and water can also be teamwork. It might be challenging if you’re not used to working with many people and making decisions together. But it could teach important lessons about finding common ground with someone and making compromises.

“The only thing that is truly significant about today, or any other day, is who you become in the process.”

Joshua Medcalf

The process may not be smooth or the best pathway you may encounter, but all that will not matter. What will matter in the long haul is what you use this road for, how it influenced you, and what became of you in the aftermath. Your journey is about the lessons you learned along the way, with all victories and downfalls.

Many successful people you hear about today learned their most valuable lessons during their wood and water season.

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Malcolm Gladwell

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It is not enough to ask what successful people are like; their ancestry and environment play equally significant roles in their success story

Rosetans, Italian migrants to New York, grow to a ripe old age and die of old age. By preserving their native lifestyle, they were able to avoid heart diseases, cancers, and other forms of diseases characteristic of old age. In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills. Steward Wolf, a physician at the University of Oklahoma, studied the Rosetans, tested their blood samples and after consulting with his sociologist friend, John Bruhn concluded that the culture of the Rosetans was responsible for their strength and longevity of life.

The same holds true for successful people. What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they’re like — what kind of personalities they have, how intelligent they are, what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top. We need to look beyond their nature to their environment to fully understand the factors responsible for the successes they achieve.

People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact, they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

A Canadian psychologist, Roger Barnsley, was the first to draw attention to the phenomenon of relative age. He found that virtually all professional hockey players in Canada were born between January and March. The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge, in turn, leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still — and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn’t start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better. The sociologist Robert Merton famously called this phenomenon the “Matthew Effect” after the New Testament verse in the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have an abundance.

But from him, that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Robert Greene

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Power requires a set of learned skills

Everyone wants and needs power. Lack of it makes people miserable. But we must keep a balance between being democratic and civilized and standing strong enough not to be crushed by others.

The rules of the subtle power game will help you find that balance. Some think of these games as evil acts of taking advantage of others. While those people demonstrate a wish to avoid playing with power at all, they’re the ones who are the most skillful players. They manipulate people by displaying weakness. Those truly weak will never let their powerlessness show.

Robert Greene believes that the world is a game, and trying to avoid it will take power away from you. The laws discussed here will help you take control and use the power game to your advantage.

One crucial skill you have to master is control over your emotions. This ability is essential to make reasonable and rational decisions. In the same vein, learn to stay objective while analyzing a situation. You must be willing to reflect on your past to prevent making the same mistakes.

Keeping up appearances is also essential. Deception will hide your true intentions when needed.

You can learn the mentioned skills and the ones we’ll touch on below. After all, they don’t come naturally to people.

⚡️Power isn’t natural. It is a social game that requires studying people’s motives.

Robert Greene compiled 48 laws based on writings as old as three thousand years. These laws share a simple premise: some actions will bring you power, and some will not. Whether you study all of them or pick and choose those relevant to you, these laws will give you a deep understanding of power and ways to acquire it.

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Eckhart Tolle

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There are two strong feelings that trap many of us: regret and anxiety

We are either full of regret for the things we did or failed to do in the past, or we are full of anxiety over future events we cannot control. Still, we somehow believe that we can live better, happier lives even if we are clueless on how to go about it.

There are several methods we can apply to resolve the inner conflict we experience. We can develop a healthy relationship with our past, present and future by exploring the lessons in “The Power of Now”.

“Nothing has happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now”

Eckhart Tolle

Living in the present moment requires careful training of our minds to overcome the self-destructive ways in which we have been using it.

From his own personal experiences involving depressing late-night thoughts, Eckhart Tolle shares how he literally found peace by discovering the source of pain and suffering.

Using the body’s life forces, we can prevent any disease

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Darin Olien

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Nowadays, most discuss the mind’s true potential and how it can rule the body. However, only a few stress the power inherent in our bodies already. The physique can take care of itself, yet we keep putting obstacles in our way to a healthy life through our eating habits, negligence, and illiteracy.

Unfortunately, we perceive weak health as a natural outcome of life. People over 40 will complain about weak knees, lack of energy, or digestion problems and finish with the phrase: “But I guess it’s okay at my age.” We got accustomed to feeling fragile and sick, yet nature predetermined something different.

There are no diseases as we know them. Sicknesses draw our attention to the more significant matters. But instead of searching for and solving the greater problem, we keep silencing those little symptoms because they disturb our peace. We try to eliminate the disease — like how the government ends a strike without hearing the protestors’ pleadings. If we listened to those signals and solved the issue, we would enjoy health instead of settling for “I guess, I’m fine.”

When we approach our bodies as if they were made to be energetic and healthy, we get into an offensive position, not a defensive one.

Only then can we prevent any illness, even cancer or diabetes

⚡️We decide how healthy we are at any age.

Hence, we shouldn’t accept “feeling okay” — we should strive to allow our bodies to be what they were made for — free from diseases and problems.

In this summary, you’ll discover five main forces of our body that predetermine our health and life: nutrition, hydration, oxygenation, alkalization, and detoxification. Learn to master these elements, and you will prolong your life and enjoy a healthy life.

A book (📕 / 📀 / 🎧) by Ryan Holiday

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How do you view obstacles that stand in your way?

Marcus Aurelius, one of the most revered emperors of Rome, discovered an idea that has proven timeless. Even with a battle before him, he wrote a self-addressed formula for the many problems he was sure to face ahead. He found that obstacles should be seen as stepping stones and realized that impediments are nothing but a route to success. In time, this idea became fuel for millions of individuals from different spheres of life. This is an idea that resonates across generations while retaining its potency even today.

Many of those who understood the process described above went on to achieve greatness; they understood that it’s normal to face struggles. They knew that battles, barriers, and challenges create an essential part of the journey. Of course, all of this means that you have a golden opportunity to learn. This isn’t restricted to just a few people; you too can ride the waves of challenges to your destination.

⚡️An obstacle need not be a complete stop. Simply learn how to overcome it and do better next time.

Ryan Holiday reiterates this belief and acknowledges the mind game obstacles play on us. You come to terms with failure and settle for leftovers when your dream job, new business, or revamped health are just beyond the barrier. Sadly, your natural response is to keep it safe, to wallow in regret, and to remain helpless. Consequently, you hide behind fear by blaming the system, focusing all your strength on the factors that had dealt you an unfair hand.

Companies can also benefit from this advice. It can teach them how to become better people or brands. Also, it can open their eyes to faster and more efficient ways to do things that were previously labeled impossible.

All of this is only possible when you start to identify your obstacles. Without that, you’re swimming through mud. Is it the color of your skin that held you back, or is your qualification nowhere near the requirements for achieving your goals? Whatever they might be, you must have read somewhere about people who had better reasons to give up and had to find ways to go around barriers. According to Ryan Holiday, achieving this involves three interwoven forms of discipline – perception, will, and action. Read on to learn more.