Success

How Do You Measure Your Life? by Mark Manson. As humans, we’re wired for comparison. It’s an inevitable facet of our being. We are constantly trying to gauge how we measure up to those around us. Comparison and the drive for status are innate parts of our nature and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. But what we can change is the basis of those comparisons. What yardstick are we using? We may not be able to stop measuring ourselves against others, but we can decide which yardstick we use to measure. It’s all in how you choose to measure success. I don’t measure my success by displays of monetary wealth. I prefer to measure it based on social and global impact. Is that totally self-serving and biased? Absolutely. And that’s the point: You get to choose how you measure success.

How I Measure My Life by Darius Foroux. People who‘re considered successful in the eye of society often look at these 3 factors: Energy, Work, Relationships. I’ve experimented with improving all the three above things. What I’ve found is that they are all closely related.

The Most Important Question of Your Life by Mark Manson. What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life...Everybody wants something. And everybody wants something enough. They just aren’t aware of what it is they want, or rather, what they want “enough.” Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs.

Mindset for Success. How you think about yourself determines how you approach everything in your life and it has a big influence on how much you achieve.

Passion. Should you “follow” your passion?

Skills and Success

The Kristina Talent Stack by Scott Adams. The idea of a talent stack is that you can combine ordinary skills until you have enough of the right kind to be extraordinary. You don’t have to be the best in the world at any one thing. All you need to succeed is to be good at a number of skills that fit well together.

How to Become the Best in the World at Something (Medium). This is how skill stacking works. It’s easier and more effective to be in the top 10% in several different skills — your “stack” — than it is to be in the top 1% in any one skill.

Skill Stacking: A Practical Strategy To Achieve Career Success by Darius Foroux. The more skills you have, and the more value you can create, the more rewards you receive. And yes, over your career, that’s probably more than a million bucks.

Going Broad—Not Narrow—is the Best Route to Lasting Success (outsideonline.com). Practitioners with breadth are increasing in importance and hyper-specialists—while still very important—are decreasing a bit in importance.

Planning for Success

All the evidence-based advice we found on how to be successful in any job (80000hours.org). We’ve gathered up all the best advice we’ve found over our last five years of research. These are things that anyone can do in any job to increase their career capital, personal fit and, therefore, their positive impact.

Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance (fs.blog). In expert tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are won; in amateur tennis, about 80 per cent of the points are lost. In other words, professional tennis is a Winner’s Game – the final outcome is determined by the activities of the winner – and amateur tennis is a Loser’s Game – the final outcome is determined by the activities of the loser. The two games are, in their fundamental characteristic, not at all the same. They are opposites.

Dive in (mindingourway.com). Come to realize that you find good things to do by getting your hands dirty, not by sitting on the sidelines and bemoaning how no task seems worthy of your conviction.

Why Most People Will Never Be Successful (inc.com). If your daily behaviors are consistently low quality, what do you expect your life’s output to be? Your choices must become higher quality. Your relationships must become higher quality. Every area of your life affects every other area of your life. Hence the saying “How you do something is how you do everything.” This is high-level thinking. It makes sense only to people who have removed everything they hate from their lives. To live this principle, your daily life can be filled only with those things you highly value.

Why Most People Will Remain in Mediocrity (Medium). Much of the thinking around us is small-minded. Most people are overly concerned with “beating the other guy,” usually through manipulation and politics. As a result, they’re left fighting for scraps with the other 99%.

Quality and effort by Seth Godin. We need to put care into our systems. We need to build checklists and peer review and resilience into the way we express our carefulness. It seems ridiculous that a surgeon needs to write her name (with a Sharpie) on the limb that she’s about to operate on, but this simple system adjustment means that errors involving working on the wrong limb will go to zero.

The Surprising Benefit of Being Inflexible (michaelhyatt.com). It’s better to decide once and be done with it. Then you can get on with the work that really matters. Eventually, we have to learn to say, “no exceptions.” If your productivity matters, then there are a few commitments that deserve that level of commitment.

Intuition Is The Highest Form Of Intelligence (Forbes). Smart people listen to those feelings. And the smartest people among us – the ones who make great intellectual leaps forward – cannot do this without harnessing the power of intuition.

More Reading

A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you (aeon.co). Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition (theatlantic.com). Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

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