A New Year often reminds us that we are doing waaaay too much. The most important thing to do when you have hit the burnout wall is to focus on self-care. If you’ve been working on chasing and building your dreams, you probably have had tunnel vision for quite some time and left your self-care far behind you. My top 2 Remedies are:

1. PLAY – I just returned from 4 days laughing 24/7 with 4 GrandKids ages 5 – 18!
2. AEROBIC Exercise – for me it’s running on the beach and seaside hilly trails. It really doesn’t matter what type of aerobic exercise you do – just keep trying until you find the one you ENJOY!

Think of yourself as dead.

You may think this is weird advice, but it’s not coming from me. It actually comes from Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

In his book “Meditations,” Aurelius says,

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”

I like this idea a lot. So much so that I’m convinced that if you apply it, it will completely change your life.

Why? Because oftentimes we give too much of our time and attention to the things that don’t matter. As a result, we completely ignore the things that do.

And we do this because we think we’re going to live forever.

We never stop to think that we’re going to die one day. When in fact, we could die tomorrow.

At any moment, you could get hit by a car, choke on your food, or trip on a step and hit your head.

Because of this, you need to stop focusing on all the little things that bother you and start making the best use of your time.

This doesn’t mean you should sell everything you own and gamble all the money away at the casino.

This isn’t the best use of your time.

Instead, the best use of your time is working on being a good person, doing your best, constantly improving yourself, and living a life of reason and virtue.

Imagine you died last night and you have now been given a second chance. Then make two lists:

1) What are the most important things in your life?

2) What do you actually spend your time with?

Compare the lists and choose one thing you’ll work on being better at in the next few days.
Doing this will help you focus on what’s truly important so that you don’t waste time on what’s not.

Thanks for your Wisdom Vincent Carlos

According to a report from the World Health Organization, the average life expectancy in the United States is 79 years old. Most people in wealthy nations are hovering around the 80–year mark. Women in Japan are the highest, with an average life expectancy of 86 years.

If we use these average life expectancy numbers and assume that your adult life starts at 18 years old, then you’ve got about 68 years as an adult. (86 – 18 = 68) Perhaps a little less on average. A little more if you’re lucky.

(68 years as an adult) x (365 days each year) = 24,820 days.

25,000 mornings.

That’s what you get in your adult life. 25,000 times you get to open your eyes, face the day, and decide what to do next. I don’t know about you, but I’ve let a lot of those mornings slip by.

Once I realized this, I started thinking about how I could develop a better morning routine. I still have a lot to learn, but here are some strategies that you can use to get the most out of your 25,000 mornings.

5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Morning

Here are the strategies that I’ve found to be most effective for getting the most out of my morning.

1. Manage your energy, not your time. If you take a moment to think about it, you’ll probably realize that you are better at doing certain tasks at certain times. For example, my creative energy is highest in the morning, so that’s when I do my writing each day.

By comparison, I block out my afternoons for interviews, phone calls, and emails. I don’t need my creative energy to be high for those tasks, so that’s the best time for me to get them done. And I tend to have my best workouts in the late afternoon or early evening, so that’s when I head to the gym.

Respecting your internal, ultradian rhythm for whichever task is at hand is one of the most powerful things you can do.

What type of energy do you have in the morning? What task is that energy best suited for?

2. Prepare the night before. I don’t do this nearly as often as I should, but if you only do one thing each day then spend a few minutes each night organizing your to–do list for tomorrow. When I do it right, I’ll outline the article I’m going to write the next day and develop a short list of the most important items for me to accomplish. It takes 10 minutes that night and saves 3 hours the next day.

3. Don’t open email until noon. Sounds simple. Nobody does it. It took me awhile to get over the urge to open my inbox, but eventually I realized that everything can wait a few hours. Nobody is going to email you about a true emergency (a death in the family, etc.), so leave your email alone for the first few hours of each day. Use the morning to do what’s important rather than responding to what is “urgent.”

4. Turn your phone off and leave it in another room. Or on your colleague’s desk. Or at the very least, put it somewhere that is out of sight. This eliminates the urge to check text messages, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This simple strategy eliminates the likelihood of slipping into half–work where you waste time dividing your attention among meaningless tasks.

The power of receiving zero notifications, especially at night can boost your sleep time and make your morning that much more productive.

5. Work in a cool place. Have you ever noticed how you feel groggy and sluggish in a hot room? Turning the temperature down or moving to a cooler place is an easy way to focus your mind and body. (Hat tip to Michael Hyatt for this one.)

3 Ways to Improve Your Morning Routine

The science behind temperature and lighting in your workplace has shown that adjusting both can have a significant impact on your productivity, day in day out. It’s worth to spend a few minutes adjusting it.

6. Sit up or stand up. Your mind needs oxygen to work properly. Your lungs need to be able to expand and contract to fill your body with oxygen. That sounds simple enough, but here’s the problem: most people sit hunched over while staring at a screen and typing.

When you sit hunched over, your chest is in a collapsed position and your diaphragm is pressing against the bottom of your lungs, which hinders your ability to breathe easily and deeply. Sit up straight or stand up and you’ll find that you can breathe easier and more fully. As a result, your brain will get more oxygen and you’ll be able to concentrate better.

(Small tip: When sitting, I usually place a pillow in the small of my back. This prevents my lower back from rounding, which keeps me more upright.)

7. Eat as a reward for working hard. I practice intermittent fasting, which means that I eat my first meal around noon each day. I’ve been doing this for almost two years. There are plenty of health benefits, which I explained in great detail here, here, and here.

But health is just one piece of the puzzle. I also fast because it allows me to get more out of my day. Take a moment to think about how much time people spend each day thinking, planning, and consuming food. By adopting intermittent fasting, I don’t waste an hour each morning figuring out what to eat for breakfast, cooking it, and cleaning up. Instead, I use my morning to work on things that are important to me. Then, I eat good food and big meals as a reward for working hard.

8. Develop a “pre–game routine” to start your day. My morning routine starts by pouring a cold glass of water. Some people kick off their day with ten minutes of meditation. Similarly, you should have a sequence that starts your morning ritual. This tiny routine signals to your brain that it’s time to get into work mode or exercise mode or whatever mode you need to be in to accomplish your task. Additionally, a pre–game routine helps you overcome a lack of motivation and get things done even when you don’t feel like it.

25,000 Mornings: The Power of a Morning Routine

Just as it’s rare for anyone to experience overnight success, it’s also rare for our lives crumble to pieces in an instant. Most unproductive or unhealthy behaviors are the result of slow, gradual choices that add up to bad habits. A wasted morning here. An unproductive morning there.

The good news is that exceptional results are also the result of consistent daily choices. Nowhere is this more true than with your morning routine. The way you start your day is often the way that you finish it.

Take, for example, Jack LaLanne. He woke up each day at 4am and spent the first 90 minutes lifting weights. Then, he went for a swim or a run for the next 30 minutes. For more than 60 years, he spent each morning doing this routine. In addition to being one of the most influential people in fitness in the last 100 years, LaLanne also lived to the ripe old age of 96.

This is no coincidence. What you do each morning is an indicator of how you approach your entire day. It’s the choices that we repeatedly make that determine the life we live, the health we enjoy, and the work we create.

You’ve got 25,000 mornings. What will you do with each one?

Thanks James Clear

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was known for his ability to communicate with a crowd of people. His keynotes set the standard for how companies talk about their products. He was known for being charismatic, sometimes funny, and sometimes even feisty.

In the list of his top performances is another moment worth mentioning. This one wasn’t a presentation, but rather it came during a question and answer session in 1997, shortly after he had returned to Apple. Jobs was taking questions when he was asked a rather insulting question by a man in the audience.

“Mr. Jobs, you’re a bright and influential man,” the questioner began. “It’s sad and clear that on several accounts you’ve discussed, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The man went on to ask a specific question about Java and Opendoc, the latter of which was a software framework Jobs had announced would be discontinued. He then challenged Apple’s founder on what he’d been doing during the seven years since he’d been fired from the company.

Jobs had only months before returned to Apple when it acquired his new company, NEXT. There were plenty of people already mad at him (including, apparently, this questioner). He had made a lot of changes, even though he hadn’t yet been named CEO. Technically, he was just a consultant.

In response, however, Jobs doesn’t really answer either of the man’s questions. Instead, he answers the question beneath the question. In doing so, Jobs doesn’t attempt to defend his intelligence or success. He embraces the most brutal part of the man’s criticism–that he isn’t always going to get it right.

To be clear, Jobs, who by all accounts was known to be a perfectionist, wasn’t excusing mistakes. “We’ll find the mistakes,” he continued. “We’ll fix them.”

That’s an important point that we’ll get to in a minute, but first, there are a number of things that are astonishing about this interaction, not the least of which is that Steve Jobs was sitting on stage taking questions from an audience of developers. I think the chances of Tim Cook doing the same on stage at Apple’s WWDC at any point in the future are zero.

Second, Jobs handles the insult with an incredible amount of grace and patience. Jobs could have gotten defensive or angry. He would have been justified had his response betrayed that he was, at least, a little annoyed. But that’s not how he responded at all

Most important, however, those two sentences are a beautiful lesson about success. You see, success isn’t the pursuit of not making mistakes. Almost always, mistakes are the way you find your way to whatever you define as success.

Mistakes are an unavoidable part of the process. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out a strategy that doesn’t involve making any mistakes, but it usually means you don’t do much of anything–certainly not anything of value.

Jobs’s answer takes only a few minutes, but it’s an invaluable lesson about how to define success, and then how to get there.

“One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Jobs explains. “You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake, probably more than anybody else in this room. And I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”

That last part is important. Jobs admitted that he’s made plenty of mistakes, but those mistakes don’t take away from his credibility–as the man who asked the question suggested–but rather, they form it. Scars, after all, don’t mean you failed. They mean you made it through the battle.

Obviously, your job is to make lots of little mistakes–the kind you grow from–and not big mistakes (or, the kind your business dies from). Those you grow from are a great way to learn how not to make the other kind.

Mistakes also teach you something important about whatever it is you’re building. When you make mistakes, find them, and fix them, they make your product and your business stronger. That might be the most beautiful part of all.

Thanks Jason Aten for Your Wisdom

Simple and effective, but according to Steve Jobs,
most people never do it.

Steve Jobs may have left this earth, but Apple’s co-founder and tech genius continues to have an impact that will transcend future generations. In an old video interview, Jobs shared a story that illustrates an uncommon trait found in the most successful people. Here’s an excerpt:

I called up Bill Hewlett [co-founder of Hewlett-Packard] when I was 12 years old. ‘Hi, I’m Steve Jobs. I’m 12 years old. I’m a student in high school. I want to build a frequency counter, and I was wondering if you have any spare parts I could have.’ He laughed, and he gave me the spare parts, and he gave me a job that summer at Hewlett-Packard … and I was in heaven.

Don’t feel bad if you missed the key to success in that story. It’s easy to miss. Luckily, Jobs spells it out in the video a bit later:

“Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.”

Ask and it Shall be Given

Without that experience at HP, would Jobs have gone on to accomplish what he did? Perhaps — we’ll never know. But we know for sure that a single phone call greatly impacted his life. It taught one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this — or any — generation to be willing to ask for something he wanted.

The same can be said about workplaces where people fear asking for help. In so many businesses today, fear keeps people from being open to asking for what they want and seeking help from their peers and colleagues. According to social psychologist Heidi Grant, 75 percent to 90 percent of all help co-workers give to one another starts with making an ask.

The question is, does your environment foster the freedom and safety for employees to do this? Most people are willing to help, and according to research, 90 percent of giving in the workplace is in direct response to people asking for help. But the fact of the matter remains that most people don’t ask for what they need; it is not being reinforced by their managers and the executives above them. Therefore, unfortunately, most of the time, nothing happens.

The Giver-Requester

Sociologist Wayne Baker from the University of Michigan wrote a book called All You Have to Do Is Ask: How to Master the Most Important Skill for Success. In his research, Baker found that the “Giver-Requester” — a person who helps frequently and also asks for help frequently — is the most well-regarded and also the most productive at work.

As managers and leaders, the key is to foster an environment to liberate people to be both givers and requesters — frequently asking for help among their peers and networks and being a giver of help to those in their circle of influence.

Being a giver-requester has many career benefits as well. Baker’s research found that they:

• Are promoted more quickly and at a younger age
• Are paid better
• Are knowledgeable and trusted by their colleagues
• Are known for having great reputations

When the most successful people want something, they’re willing to ask for it. If a 12-year-old Steve Jobs could do it, so can you.

Thanks Marcel Schwantes for your Wisdom

Does your WordPress website’s Host automatically SAVE your website? Sometimes it costs a bit more for this but it’s definitely worth it. Contact your Host to be sure. This could save you a lot of time ($) if there is a problem.

Here’s an issue one client had yesterday – they saw this when they tried to edit a page. I was able to fix it but don’t let this happen to you!

The 64-year-old investor, serial entrepreneur and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks says the strategy helped him accumulate his own wealth — a net worth of $4.6 billion, according to Forbes. He recently broke down his rules for GQ, noting that while they’re meant to help you earn cash, they’re really about being able to “control your own destiny.”

“If you want to be a millionaire, you can do it, but there’s a couple things you have to be able to accomplish,” Cuban said.

1. His first rule: “Find something you can be good at. Then, be great at it.”

To do that, you’ll probably need to study your subject relentlessly. Counterintuitively, you may also need to “cross-train” your brain by studying other topics of interest, too. Research published by the Association for Psychological Science last year noted that what separates Nobel Prize winners from national-level winners is often multidisciplinary experience.

Similarly, the research found that competitive athletes had “greater sustainability of long-term excellence” if they played more than one sport as a child. Those athletes didn’t immediately excel at their preferred sport, but showed a more consistent route to eventual mastery over time, the authors added.

2. Cuban’s second rule is “know how to sell.” His own sales career started early: At age 12, he sold trash bags door-to-door to earn money for new sneakers, he said.

The billionaire has previously given out advice on how to succeed at sales — by showing people how you can help them in the first couple of seconds of your pitch.

“Selling isn’t about convincing, it’s about helping,” Cuban told the School of Hard Knocks in a TikTok. “When you understand what people need and want, you put yourself in a position to help them,” he said. “Then you make good things happen, close deals and that’s how you create companies.”

3. The third rule: “Be curious and always learning,” Cuban said.

Having a “lifetime learning mentality” correlates with both objective and subjective success — from the number of promotions you get to how happy you are in your job — according to a 2020 study from University of Waterloo finance and education researchers.

Lifelong learners can even save their employers money in the long run, study co-author Judene Pretti told UWaterloo’s “Alumni Know” podcastin April.

“As technology continues to move at the rapid pace it is, employers need their employees to … undertake learning and development to stay on top of what the latest technologies are,” Pretti said. “It isn’t a matter of needing to replace workforce. Instead, develop and grow the existing workforce.”

4. Lastly, Cuban’s fourth rule is his longest — and perhaps his most important, especially for aspiring entrepreneurs.

“When you walk into a room, you [need to] know your s–t better than anyone else in the room,” he said. “That’s when it’s time to start a company. Then, you can start to control your own destiny.”

Knowledge, of course, doesn’t guarantee success. Before Cuban started his first company, he quit or was fired from three consecutive jobs and slept on the floor of a three-bedroom apartment he shared with five roommates, he wrote in Forbes in 2013.

He touched on a similar subject in his 2011 book “How to Win at the Sport of Business,” writing that it “doesn’t matter how many times” you fail. “You only have to be right once” to be “set for life,” he added.

That lesson may be why Cuban seems confident enough in his four rules to stake his own livelihood on it. Even if he lost everything, he’d build himself back into a millionaire again, he told NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast in 2016.

“I would get a job as a bartender at night, and a sales job during the day, and I would start working,” Cuban said. Could I become a multi-millionaire again? I have no doubt.”

Thanks for your Wisdom Megan Sauer

Eating a salad at your desk may not be the most memorable kind of lunch, but at least you can get some work done. In France, that’s forbidden.

The French labor code prohibits workers from eating lunch in the workplace. The solo work lunch is also shunned in a culture that prizes a change of pace — and scenery — during the midday meal.

But the French lunch break wasn’t always about bistros, leisurely meals and 90 minutes of amiable conversation. Many workers originally rejected the idea of leaving the workplace at all.

So what did it take for the French to finally take a break?

It turns out that the French lunch break was born in the 1890’s during a public health crisis and was nearly killed in another. Read more HERE.

These days, it’s a standard sight to see workplaces shut their doors and bistros and restaurants swell with lunchtime patrons. The separation between work and lunch is almost sacrosanct.

Ninety minutes, free-flowing conversation, perhaps a glass of wine — by the time the COVID-19 pandemic reached France, the familiar rhythms of the French lunch break had long been established.

Martin Bruegel insists “People are just simply happier when they take some downtime during the workday,” he says. “It’s good for their well-being.” The lunch break is not just good for individuals or the companies they work for. It’s good for society.

Bruegel says “People who eat together are able to talk about issues, and they can work out tensions or different opinions. They create a culture in which having different points of view is possible.”

Although COVID stopped the French from taking lunch breaks for a while most are going back to the daily ritual of a shared meal, carving out a space that they get to make their own, even as they do it together.

When we look at the habits and mindsets of people who always seem to be generating new ideas, who are consistently productive, and who produce at rates to which most of us could only aspire, we notice a few things in particular. Namely, these people are open to receiving new ideas, and to having theirs rejected. They don’t treat a “block” like the end of a career, and they don’t fear the idea of “running dry.”
In fact, it seems that they focus on what they can create and change, not what could potentially derail or stymie them. Here’s a rundown of the most important things highly prolific people do not FEAR:

1. Trying again.

The main thing that defines highly prolific people from those who only create occasionally is that they have a long-term goal in their minds. They are not afraid to try again, and their objective is to keep going, not to create one thing and let their credibility rest on it. Rather than accept defeat, they learn how to pivot, and what to reinvent.

2. Taking a Break

Highly prolific people understand that when you’re tired, overworked, and fresh out of ideas, that is not the time to try harder, it is the time to reset. If you don’t want to create, then don’t create. When you disengage and focus on other areas of your life that need attention, you will naturally come back to your work when the time is right – this time, refreshed and back in the flow.

3. Their ideas being not well received.

Being disagreed with is not the end of the world. Neither is being disliked, criticized or judged. In fact, the more adamantly you fear these things, the more you will prevent yourself from even trying in the first place. That’s why highly prolific people don’t rush to defend every single idea they come up with. They use other people’s reactions as litmus test: not as a judgment on their worth, but as feedback for what to create next.

4. Challenging the status quo.

Innovators don’t try to perfect what exists, they try to create what doesn’t yet. Overriding the status quo can often come with its fair share of resistance, envy and doubt, all of which is a natural, human response to the unknown. However, highly prolific people try to create what people don’t realize they want rather than perfect what they already have.

5. Being open to other people’s ideas.

Creative people are rarely ever lone wolves, though they can often appear that way. They may have come up with the original idea, but it takes a team of people brainstorming, developing and executing to see something fully into fruition. That’s why prolific people don’t insist that their ideas are the only ideas. They remain receptive to other people’s perspectives, especially those they may not have considered prior.

6. Being perfect all of the time.

If you are going to nit pick every single detail of your work, you will be wrapped up in the minutiae of it for the rest of your life. Perfectionism can be helpful to a small degree, but trying to make everything exactly as you envisioned it all of the time usually only holds you back. Highly prolific people don’t worry about everything being perfect as much as they worry about continuing to create even when it isn’t.

7. Not getting it right the first time.

Creativity is not about getting everything right the first time you do it (that’s the ego’s desire to appear talented or competent) it’s about not being afraid to keep trying again, even in the face of repeated failure.

8. Working overtime when something is starting to ‘flow’.

Highly prolific people are not afraid of breaking their routine, working over time and generally exerting the majority of their energy into something they can see is starting to flow. That’s how they take an idea to a concept to a project that gets off the ground.

9. Pivoting when something isn’t working.

Highly prolific people don’t get too attached to one creative idea over another. The fact is that when something isn’t working, you need to be able to let it go and try again. Don’t let sinking cost fallacy take over your brain and keep you working on something that isn’t going to go anywhere regardless.

10. Running out of ideas.

There are so many things to create, and an infinite number of ways to recreate and reinvent them. This fear comes from the idea that creativity is a non-renewable resource. In reality, creativity is a muscle: the more you use it, the better it gets .

11. A creative drought.

“Creative’s block” (a broader term for what’s often known as writer’s block) is, for the lack of more eloquent language, complete nonsense. It only occurs when we don’t know what we’re trying to do, or that we’re reaching and trying too hard. Creator’s block is not a sign that you are untalented or require more drive, it’s just your body and mind saying it’s time for a reset. It’s how you tell yourself that what you’re working on needs to be reimagined. It isn’t here to derail you, it’s a messenger to assist you.

Thanks for your Wisdom Brianna Wiest