Tag: self-improvement

Wealth of information

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Herding information will eventually keep you from doing.

Articles, white papers, eBooks, webinars, podcasts, online classes, books, live and virtual events, tutorials are great resources, when they serve your higher purpose. But they can quickly become a self-serving treat: “just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful” (Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu).

And clearly, the whole space (physical and mental) you occupy while you feed on information is space you cannot use otherwise. Is space you are taking away from focus, care, delivery.

There will be times in your digital life when you will be subscribed to plenty of newsletters, getting updates from a wealth of podcasts, consuming bottomless blogs, and recycling all of that in social media posts of doubt relevance.

Stop that now.

Find the bare minimum you need and bring the focus back to doing.

For your own sake.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Herbert A. Simon

Easing

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Sometimes we get annoyed at people and situations merely because they are not where they want them to be.

We might have spotted potential in someone, or we might just have grown sensitive to a behaviour that repeats over time.

We might have envisioned a better world, or we might just have had enough of a culture where we feel we don’t fit.

Easing into what is will give us and the others the opportunity to change, to grow closer, to eventually meet in a place where we are better and they are better.

That’s true improvement.

Every day

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Motivation, inspiration, and creativity are resistance in disguise.

If you wait to be motivated to start going, you won’t get far.

If you wait for inspiration to struck before doing meaningful work, you’ll soon be out of a job.

If creativity is what you seek when sitting down to write, the page will stay empty most of the time.

There is nothing sudden in people’s achievements, no overnight success will surprise you.

Go do what you are supposed to. Every day.

The right muscles

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Once you’ve identified your triggers, the point is not to stay away from them or drown in the anticipation of the pain they will expose you to. The point is to find ways to manage them and gradually master them.

If you are comfortable around somebody you can’t avoid, take control of your encounters and suggest whatever makes you feel at ease.

If presenting in front of a vast audience is too much for you, volunteer every time there is a small presentation to give.

If you are afraid your boss might ask questions about a delicate issue, make sure you will be the first to raise the topic, at a time convenient for you, with the words you have chosen and rehearsed.

You can prepare for almost everything, as long as you choose to train the right muscles.

The response

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We are all subject to similar stimuli. Stress, frustration, love, anger, disappointment, desire, need, anticipation, exhaustion, fear, failure, envy.

Two things matter.

  1. There are different responses.
  2. We are not the stimuli, we are the response.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Viktor E. Frankl