Being a better listener can give you a lot of opportunities to grow in your career and change your life dramatically!
Why?
Because when you can listen well, you learn better and make people be more respected to you rather than when you just focus on speaking.
This is a big lesson that I learned from a leader in Melbourne. When I have a chance to meet him face to face in a luxury event in Dockland, one of the most beautiful harbors in this city.
And this is also a character that many employers are looking for from their employees.
“With more than 20 years of experience in the recruitment process, I’m sure with you that if you can put your character as a good listener on the top of your CV.
Your CV will get a higher chance to be chosen compared to the others”.
When I heard him say that, I really curious about this because I had never heard about “great listener” that can be considered as the criteria for a good job before.
So I asked him the reason why he says like that…He just smiles at me and said:
“The reason is when you are a good listener, you will understand what your boss says, or if you don’t clear yet, you will ask him to clarify at that time.
It helps your boss to save a lot of time compared to talking with someone who is not a good listener.
Because the person who doesn’t have this skill easily misunderstands the idea and leads to complete the tasks in the wrong direction. This is not what your boss wants”.
This moment blows up my mind because I never think that being a great listener can be considered a good character in work.
Personally, before I just think it is a piece of character that can help you to learn better and faster.
Then I asked him how can I be a great listener, what should I need to improve to achieve this goal?
And from his advice, there are 3 things that will help you to achieve it if you really want to be a great listener!
1. To be a better listener, let: Ask the right question
This is better to not ask if you can’t come up with the right question. Don’t try to create the impression by asking the question if you already have the answer for it but just want to test the speaker.
Let think about the questions that you really don’t know about or can add value to the speech of the speaker. When you can make a good question, it will make you remember better the content of the speaker.
Therefore, it helps to create a good impression about you for both other audiences and the speaker.
Because when you ask the question, it means you are directly involved in the conversation. And turn it into the face to face talk. Therefore, your mind will remember the content better because it is directly related to you instead of just passive listening.
2. To be a better listener, let: Keep Eye Contact
The idea of this action is to build up the connection between you and the speaker.
When you keep good eye contact, the speaker’s mind will be noticed that “Well, this person is really taking care of what I am saying. Therefore, I should show my best knowledge to him/her”.
So, instead of just spend for you a few seconds to answer your question. Good eye contact and showing off your concentration on the topic can encourage the speaker to go deeper question. It will give you more valuable information rather than you can expect!
While you don’t keep eye contact with the speaker, he/she will think that maybe you are not interested in this topic anymore or you already get enough of the information you need. So, instead of sharing for you 2 to 3 more points, now they just share for you the limited answer.
3. To be a better listener, let: Use “Supporting words”
It means that you shouldn’t just stand and listen all the time. Don’t think that you are just a listener. Let be an active listener by using some kind of “supporting words or questions”.
It can make the speaker loses his motivation to keep sharing his knowledge and information for you. If he just speaks all the time and doesn’t get any reaction from his listeners.
In this case, some of the “supporting words” that you use can help the conversation be smooth. Because the speaker knows that you are really focused on what he/she says and have the interest to know more about what the speaker is talking about.
Some good examples of “Supporting words” are:
Oh, really. I didn’t get it before
Yes, absolutely. I agree with your point of view
Uhm, well. That’s true
To sum up,
Being a great listener will take time, but you will get a good result if you can do it well. Because everyone wants to talk about themself more than listen to others’ stories.
Therefore, let others speak, and you listen, learn more valuable things for you. Then, just give you speak when you need it. A good leader will start by being a good listener. So, let try to be one from today!
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
The apple value increases rapidly during the pandemic, and there are so many secret sauces that you can figure out from the business aspect for this case.
Apple reaches $1 trillion in value in 8/2018, 42 years after its founding.
And at the beginning of the pandemic, the value of the company falls down to under $1 trillion in the middle of March before going to double to $2 trillion on Wednesday 19/08/2020.
So actually, what happened that makes this company gain massive value during this tough time — in the middle of a pandemic — when thousands of other companies declared bankruptcy?
This is a big question that I wondered about myself a lot after I read the news about the value of Apple getting over $2 trillion last week.
And it encouraged me to do tons of research about this company and figure out 3 very interesting lessons about how this company can reach that big size to share with you in my Wiki Business blog series.
1. Diversity the Products
When you think about Apple, you have more than iPhone to talk about.
The variety of products help this brand to build an ecosystem surrounding it. An extreme advantage that doesn’t many companies have and help the customers keep buying and using more frequently the products of Apple.
When I recognize this, I look back to my room to see what I have from Apple. And even I’m not tech-savvy, I see myself are using a lot of stuff from Apple and paid for this brand a lot.
From the iPhone that I used which Apple Store installed to the Macbook Air I use to work and entertainment, to the earphone from this brand, Ipad, and the Apple Watch. It looks like Apple covers most of the needs for me (and many people) from the working, entertainment, healthcare (with Apple Watch) demands.
This strategy makes the brand to be an integral part of many people, including me, and encourages our loyalty with the brand to be stronger.
2. Using stock buyback strategy
This is the strategy that Apple did for years when using its own money to buy its stocks.
Following the NYTimes, from the time when the company reaches $1 trillion in value, it has “returned $175.6 billion to shareholders, including $141 billion in stock buybacks”.
And also “repurchased more than $360 billion of its own shares since 2012, by far the most of any company, and has announced plans to spend at least tens of billions of dollars more on Apple stock”.
It helps to reduce the risks of stocks falling down when the company can play a significant role as the stock buyer to maintain the stability of the stock price on the market.
3. The positive impact of COVID 19
The pandemic makes people value tech stocks higher than normal.
When the COVID 19 just exploded, Apple stock also falls down rapidly as a result of the global stock market being impacted (The S&P 500 dropped 7% in March) to lower than $1 trillion in the middle of March.
Moreover, the lockdown from pandemics leads to thousand of Apple stores being virtual. It helps the brand can save a huge amount of money that needs to spend for locations, manager fees while just needing to focus on online retails.
For Apple, the pandemic actually brings more benefits rather than issues for this brand.
And the clearest evidence is just in 21 weeks, this brand already can increase its value double to $2 trillion dollars and become the world’s most valuable company
Take away from apple value lessons:
For me, after doing the research about the way how Apple works so well during the pandemic and grow the value rapidly.
There are several takeaway lessons that I can learn from Apple about how to build up a massive success, especially in the struggle time as this COVID 19 pandemic.
The diversity in products and services created an ecosystem for users.
The Buyback stock strategy.
COVID 19 impacts on the investment decision of investors (More demands on the tech blue-chip company that makes stock prices soared).
The reduction in physical stores helps to reduce fees while online retail to be more thrive.
This is a great example for any company to see the opportunity in a tough circumstance.
It means that if you have the right way to approach and a good strategy to develop and market, even the hardest time you face, you still can make it to be the most profitable time.
Disclaim: All the information here be collected from the news sources and analyzed based on the personal point of view of the author. This is just for information purposes only. If you want to use this information for making a decision on investment with this brand, make sure to ask your professional advisors before doing it.
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
This is a tough question, especially when you face difficult problems in life.
However, let always remember that:
Everything that happens in our life has its reason. And the reason has its origin from our decisions.
And when you look back to the things that happen to you, you will recognize that it will belong to 1 in 2 ways, these are:
Decision — Choose to make your own.
Indecision — Not decide what to do and let fate decide for you.
Don’t make a decision is also a kind of decision. And it’s hurt.
“You are what you are today because of the choices you made yesterday, and the choices you make today will make you what you are tomorrow.” — Michael Josephson
When you choose the first way, you own 100% of our decision. And it means that if you choose wrong, you will get a valuable lesson, but this is your own.
However, when you choose the second way — Indecision. You are letting fate makes choice for you, and you lose control of your life.
And we all know that hesitating or making no decision is so far worse than having your own decision. But the reality is we normally choose to let fate decides for us when we need to come up with the decision in life.
Because it’s easier (or because you are afraid to make your own choice).
A clear example is when you choose to use the coin to throw in the air and choose the up or downside to make the decision instead of letting your mind decide it.
This is indecision and lets fate decide what to do for us.
Why do we love indecision?
Because it gives us a reason to blame if we fail.
As the game of coin that we use to decide what we should do.
For example, as I used it to decide if I should hang out with friends on Friday evening or spend that time to finish all my editing writing on medium.
Apart from my head said that I should spend time with my friends. While another part said that, you need to spend time on Medium if you don’t want to miss the deadline to publish the next day.
But the feeling of laziness and wanting to enjoy life rather than a sacrificed time for writing, I choose to use the coin game.
And normally, when you play the “indecision game”, you will come up with the worse option rather than a good one.
For me, as choose to use the coin game to decide if hang out with friends or stay at home to work on my blog writing. I get the result to hang out.
Even at the beginning, I just have around 1/3 thoughts that I will have fun on Friday with my friends, but that game gives me more motivation to go out and enjoy the party night.
It’s a good feeling for a moment, but when I wake up the next day, after being drunk. This is a terrible feeling when I have a headache of drinking too much and still have a lot of content waiting for me.
And in this case, my decision about “indecision” has a poor result for me, (and most of the time, when I let my “indecision” control, I get the worse result.
This is the reason why I always try to make the decision by myself as much as I can.
And actually, to make you become a decisive person, you need to have skills (It’s not just grown from the tree, for sure).
1. Listen to your mind and heart. Then making your own decision
Don’t let the “coin game” decide your choice.
Even the feeling to play the “decision game” with the coin is normally easier than using your heart and mind to do it.
But the coin game is riskier for us to play with, especially when you come to the important decision that makes you think for days and then don’t know what you should do (normally at this time, people start looking for help from “coin game”).
And it also the reason why you are easier to fall into the trap of failure. When your choice be decided by your coin side.
Listen to the heart and mind is what I do when I come to make 99,99% of decisions in my life. (The small 0,01% I like to do random coin game is when I have fun with friends to choose where to go or what to eat — the basic and daily demands for us to make it a little bit more surprised and interesting).
But to listen to your heart and mind then working on it is not an easy game. Life is full of distractions, and many times you will face the situation where your mind and heart said you should make decision A, while the others surround you said you should make B.
And most of the time, what others recommend for you is what works for them in their specific case, but for you, this is totally not fit.
What can be the best fit for your situation normally already have in your mind and heart, the importance here is will you ready to listen and work on what they recommend for you or not.
Let live your own life.
How To Practice it
Let practice this skill by making small and daily decisions firstly.
Let self-decision become your habit. It will help you to grow yourself to make bigger decisions better and easier.
If you all the time choose to make indecision or play the “coin game” to come up with your decision, you are building a habit for indecision which will let you to the bigger indecision in your life.
2. Always keep learning
The more you learn, the smarter ways you know how to deal with the options.
Because when you have more knowledge and experience, it’s easier for you to make the decision because you can recognize more options and know which one can be the best option for you.
It likes the story of Little Frog in the Well we read when we are kids. You will always feel that you can make the best choice from what you have in your mind.
But the world is bigger than the well for the Frog, as the better options are always available for you. The important thing is can you recognize it or not.
And keep learning is the best way to help you go out of your “little well” to discover the world and make better decisions for yourself.
How to do it
So how you should learn to make a better decision in your life.
There are 2 main ways that I’m doing right now and believe that these are the 2 best ways ever for me to do it (for you, maybe you even can figure out some other ways to do it more effectively for yourself, who know!)
Having more life experience
Traveling more, making more decisions, and working on more projects to learn from real experiences.
The lessons from real life will teach you more valuable lessons than just from your schools.
And it is easier for you to remember these lessons because they related to your emotions and actions in life.
It’s different from the lessons in schools, where you mainly just learn by heart from the book without adding emotion to these lessons.
Reading and listening to more content from successful people to see the ways how they make decisions.
Books, videos, and podcasts from successful people are great sources for any of us to learn about the way how to create success and make decisions in tough situations from the top leaders.
With just $5–$20 bucks, you can easily buy great books from famous leaders like Jack Ma, Tony Robbins, Elon Musk, Brian Tracy,…who give us their intelligence in solving the issues that take them years to learn.
It also gives you more motivation to have bigger ambitions and make your own decisions.
Recently I read the book called “What’s Your Genius” by Jay Niblick.
In his book, he said
Our thinking talents and decision-making styles comprise the very core of who we are.
They make us the unique individuals that we see in the mirror each morning, and they hold the greatest potential for delivering our greatest levels of performance and success.
As it teaches me a big lesson about the value of our decision when we come up with making choices.
It means that when you can make the right one, it will help you to explore the greatest potential and perform successfully at a greater level and show who you are.
3. Asking advice from the 3 most trustful and erudite in your life circle
And use their recommendations as good points to consider which decision you should make.
But make sure to make the final decision based on yourself, don’t need to fully 100% work on what these people comments.
Pro tip:
So who you should take the advice from?
This is an important question you need to ask yourself. Because if you choose the wrong person to ask for advice, a better solution is don’t ask.
Because this person can lead you in the wrong direction and make you feel more confused about your option.
For me, I normally use this technique by asking the advice of 3 people who I most trust from 3 different environments.
It helps me to have a better view and easier to make a better decision. They will be
One is my family member — Normally is my mother
One of my best friends
A close college
3 different circles in family, friendship, and life will give you a better view to make your decision. Because they are having different backgrounds and environments. So the angles they choose to give you also look very different and varied.
But it’s also very useful.
And most of the time, when I think that I just have the option “Do or Not Do” and ask advice from them. I find out a better option which is combined between “Do and Not Do” and make me the option to be more effective and I feel more comfortable when doing this option.
Final Thought
It’s hurt when you fail with your choice, but it will be more hurt if you know that you can do better and gain success instead of failing if you choose to make a decision instead of choosing indecision by playing the game as the “coin game”.
Choosing to make your own decision is always better than letting fate decide it for you.
And these 3 ways that I recommended for you here are what I did for myself for years. Even many times I fail with my choice, but I still feel happy as I consider them as my life lessons.
And these lessons come from my decision, not from the random game.
You can start to practice your habit of self-make decisions from these 3 methods
1. Listen to your mind and heart. Then making your own decision
2. Always keep learning
3. Asking advice from 3 most trustful and erudite in your life circle
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
These are 10 important life lessons that finally I learned when I turn to 26s that totally change the way how I think and work.
How do you feel when you turn 26? Do you feel you be older and need to be stable or do you feel full of energy and enthusiasm because you find out your own goals to chase?
Being in the middle of your 20s somehow like you are riding a bike up to the middle of the hills.
You can see your destination (your life goals) be clearer than when you stay on the ground but you also know that you need to keep working harder if you want to reach the top of the hill.
Each of us will have different feelings when we reach this age. While some of your friends will think that this is a good age to be stable with a good job, have a family; some will start to save to invest or buy the first house; some will spend time to reflex on what they did during their first 26th years.
To see what good, what bad happened in their lives and figure out what needs to do next to make the following years to be better and achieve more goals in life.
So, how about you? What important life lessons did you learn that make you feel the most valuable when you are 26?
For me, there are a lot of life lessons that I learned and feel very appreciated when I can understand them before I turn 26.
And the following list is what I consider as the most valuable lessons that I have until now.
1. When you are in the middle of your 20s, you need to think seriously about your life and future
You are not a kid anymore, but an adult full of life experiences is still not yet.
You are someone in the between of both.
At this age, you have a lot of energy and enthusiasm as a young person, and you try to look for more experiences in life to fill up your soul and your mind.
But this is also the time you need to think seriously about who you want to be and what life you want to have. Ask yourself if the job you are doing is what you really want, or your dream is to be your own boss who opens a coffee shop, or making your own novels, or being a businessman.
Many people at this age (or even older) think that a job with a good salary is enough (even they don’t like it and feel extremely happy when coming into the weekend while feeling tired and lose mood when Monday comes).
But if you can figure out what do you want to achieve at the age of 20s, you are helping yourself to get out of this rat race. Let clear about what you really want to do in your life, what can make you feel excited to wake up and proud to talk about instead of using the money as the calculation for your success and happy life.
2. You need to learn how to be positive in any circumstance
This is the first and most important thing that you need to own when you reach this age.
Because we all don’t know what can happen in the future, every day we all face the risk of good or bad things that can happen. And if you don’t learn to have a positive mindset that helps you go through hard times.
You will be lost by the tough circumstance.
How To Do It
Having a positive mindset is the same way you build up your muscle.
It means that you need to grow it every day and make it to be your habit.
The main key to making it happen is having your positive goals and keeping following them, doesn’t matter how hard the journey you are going on. The more concentration you put on the current circumstance, the more likely you will feel negative about the things you are facing.
So don’t do it, and let focus on your final goal instead.
Like the way, I told myself every day to help me reframe the mindset to focus on the final goals instead of the present hard situation. Let check this blog if you want to know more about the way how you can reframe your mindset to crush your goals better.
No.3 important life lessons: Learn to take responsibility
Take responsibility for all the things that happen in your life
Because you are already old enough to think and decide what you should do and shouldn’t do in your life.
You can’t ask your parents to take responsibility for you anymore as you made mistakes when you were a kid. Your life now belongs to your decision. When you make the right choices, you will get good results.
And when you make wrong choices and lead to failures, let think these are your valuable lessons in life.
Don’t blame others for the results you get in your life. You deserve it. But let make it better the next time.
4. You need to have a better plan to achieve any goal you want
Let remember around 15 years ago, have you ever thought that one day, you can buy a car that is fully run electricity and can self-drive for you in just the next 15 years?
And your goal also somehow has the same way as Tesla grows.
It means if you want something really happen (even everyone thinks it is impossible to achieve). You just need to have a good plan and really work on it.
Then you will get whatever you want.
5. Be grateful for all the things that happen in your life, both good and bad
Life is full of up and down.
This is the way how we live. And life just balances for the dead people. So if you face the good or the bad things that happen to you, always keep in mind that this is a part of life.
By having these thoughts, you will easily go through the tough times in your life and feel grateful for the things that you experienced rather than fall down because bad things happened.
No.6 important life lessons: Self-improvement daily by learning new things
Learning is a life-long process benefit.
It helps you to learn valuable lessons from great people all over the world by reading, listening, or watching the contents about them.
By doing this, you can save many years of trial and error and go faster to achieve your goals.
And for me, I did it by listening to the Youtube videos from Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Grant Cardone,… when I doing exercise. And also spend at least one hour per day reading books as well.
Some of the good books I’m reading now are “Your Money Or Your Life, The 10x Rule, Key Person of Influence,…”.
Finish your school life doesn’t mean finish study. The more things you want to achieve in life, the more you need to learn.
7. Don’t promise if you can’t sure 99% you can do it
We want to make a promise to evidence with others that we can do something. And that’s a good motivation for you to focus and work on your goals.
But it is more important to keep your promise because it shows your personality.
So, if you don’t sure about the things you are going to do, and you just want to show off with others by your promise, it looks like a double-edged sword to ruin your reputation when you can’t keep the promise.
So let carefully when you decide to promise to achieve something in front of others. You don’t need to promise to achieve it, just do it to evidence for what you said, this is the best way.
8. Your family is the most valuable asset in your life (not money or title)
When we are young, we all want to show off with the world that we are the best when we have a lot of money or a title such as CEO at the age of 20s.
It is great if you can achieve these things early in your 20s, but the more important thing that you need to care about is your family.
I know some friends who are always busy with their work and try to earn money as much as they can, and they rarely come back to their hometown to visit their family or have phone calls together.
And the gap in the relationship between the member of the family day-by-day become larger when the conversations are less and replace by dollars they give each other as gifts on special occasions.
But actually, money or material gift is not the thing that can really build a good relationship between family members.
The only thing that can do it is the real connections between members.
Just 30 minutes a day for a family reunion by calling or having dinner together will help your relationship with family members maintain positively and make you feel happier in your life.
9. Most of the time, the best things will come just after the worst things happen, so never quit.
There is a harsh reality that we never know when we will be successful, or when the worse things will stop happening to us and are replaced by good things.
If you are facing tough times when you are chasing your dream now, maybe tomorrow you will face more struggles on your journey.
Or you will start to receive the benefits from what you did for your dream.
We all don’t know.
But I know that if you quit today when you are facing struggles, you will never meet the success that you are looking for.
Because success and failure always go together.
And most of the time, success comes later than failure, and if you quit, you just can meet one — it means failure.
No.10 important life lessons: You always have 2 characters inside you
One will encourage, challenge you to do the hard things that grow you — I call it is “Positive character”.
One will always tell you to stop doing things; make everything easy, and live in your comfort zone — I call it is “Negative character”.
You will experience it whenever you think or work on any topic. Apart from your mind will encourage you to do it while another part of your mind will tell you don’t do it.
When you understand that inside you always have 2 characters, let put your focus on the positive character more often, doing the things it recommends rather than being impacted by the negative character.
By doing this, you will see more opportunities in life that you didn’t notice before when you be impacted by the negative character.
Final thoughts about the important life lessons in the 20s
For some people, they feel like they reach their top hill at the age of 26 when they already have a family, a career, and feel comfortable with it.
But for many, the age of 26 is just in the middle of the hill, when we are old enough to recognize the goals we really want to achieve in life, and understand that what really values to us.
And the list of “10 important life lessons everyone should learn in the 20s” just like a mirror reflection that I recognize in the first half of the way I went to reach the top of (my life goal) hill.
To share with you what I believe are the most valuable things each of us should recognize in our lives when we reach this age. Many of them can totally fit with you, some maybe you don’t feel like and want to change with another factor.
That’s all right, at least you can recognize that you have already gone half of your (life goal) hill and need to be more serious with your life is already so good.
You already stand in the middle of the (goal life) hill, look back to feel inspired and motivate to keep going, don’t feel regret about what you did.
Life is going and learning.
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
These are the mindset methods to help you can build a growth mindset and achieve your dream goals more effectively.
Have you ever experienced the feelings that your goal always goes around in your mind? Whenever you go to work, have meals, workout, or even in your dream it also appears?
If it really happens to you, it means that your goal is becoming a part of your life. And your mind, your body wants you to admit it and work harder to achieve it.
And for me, whatever my goal is, if it appears in my mind all the time, I understand that this goal needs to be achieved.
However, there is a reality that, we normally have the goals that we feel over our ability to achieve at the beginning.
And somehow, we just “hope” that the goal can happen on a nice day, but deep in our souls, we never think that it can happen to us.
Because we feel like it is too great to be true.
And if you start at the bottom point, where you don’t have the family that can support you, don’t have knowledge, skills, and relationships that you think you need to have to make your goal come true, it makes the belief that this goal can really happen become smaller in you.
I totally understand this feeling, because I used to face it many years ago when I start my journey to be a content creator.
My content creator game started in my mind in 2017. However,
At that time, I didn’t know anything about digital marketing, video content, CPM, content creation process,…
But what I know is I want to learn all of them, and it must be from the top education in the world to help me have the best understanding about being a great content creator who can share the most valuable content for free to everyone by using the Internet.
This goal is really too ambitious for a boy who doesn’t know anything about digital content creation until 22 years old and doesn’t speak English as well.
But after I set this goal for myself, until now, this is 4 years.
And I finally graduated with my master’s of “Global Media and Communication” from the University of Melbourne, the №1 University in Australia, and the top 32 of the world.
Now, finally, I can create fluently digital content, from writing to video format, from optimized SEO to optimized Ads,…
For me, to be understood and do a good job in digital marketing, especially social media marketing in just 4 years is incredible, and be graduated from one of the best universities all over the world is my dream goal come true.
To achieve this goal, I went through a lot of tough times when I mistrust myself if I am good enough to learn in this field from the top University and can turn it into my dream career or not.
So I totally understand if you are having a great goal that you always dream about but also feel scared when you feel you are not good enough to get it.
And let be honest, to achieve whatever your goal is, the most important thing that I figure out to do is change “the mindset”.
Why is your growth mindset really important?
Because when you have the right mindset and the appropriate number of time, you can achieve whatever you desire to have in life.
Personally, these are 3 sentences that I addicted to using during the last 4 years when the first time I put my goal to be graduated from the top global university about the media and communication field.
I need to admit that these 3 sentences look very simple but when you remind it daily, as I do, in the morning just after waking up and in the evening before I go to bed, every single day.
It likes the hypnotism to change my mind and the way how I approach my goal rapidly that I never imagine that these simple sentences can create that big impact on my mind.
And I also have a strong belief that if you try to apply these sentences to your mind daily, you will see the massive impact on the way you think about your goals and help you to find better ways to approach them.
1. Understand mindset methods:
“You can do it. You just use 10% of your mental ability. Let boost it up”
This is the first sentence that I always remind myself firstly every day when I wake up.
Because I want both my conscious and unconscious mind to get this signal every day. So I can try to do more things to achieve my dream goals without the concern that maybe my brain has negative impacts because I use it too much.
Following the research of Harvard University, our brain has the unlimited ability and it can grow to be faster and work better when we train it daily.
Therefore, when trying to approach the tough goal, instead of thinking that this goal is too hard to achieve or impossible, let train your brain to start to work on it.
For me, I tell myself that I just use 10% of my brain as a way to encourage myself daily that I still haven’t fully discovered all my abilities to achieve my goal yet.
But there is a reality that the brain’s ability is unlimited and if we use the right way to grow and develop it, we can make its capability to be better.
So instead of suspect about your brain ability, let talk to yourself “You can do it. You just use 10% of your mental ability. Let boost it up”, and spend the time to focus on achieving your goal instead.
2. Understand mindset methods:
“Let make all the tasks today done. That’s it!”
Let be honest together. So many times I skipped my schedule because of laziness and feel uncomfortable working on it.
But the reality is if you want to achieve the big goal, like for me to study at the top University about the major I want to work later as my career, it all required us to put a lot of hard works into it. And laziness and uncomfortable can’t help you to achieve this kind of big goal.
As there are a hundred times I did pre-English tests, many self-education hours to prepare for interviews, and a lot of unnamed tasks I did for nearly a year to achieve this goal.
And when you stay in today to work on the things that can take you years to achieve the goal, the feeling of vague and tired is unavoidable, but you need to learn to get over all of these feelings.
And to stop worrying about the uncertain things that can happen in the future, let choose to live in the present. It means that every single day let always remind yourself that
“Let make all the tasks today done. That’s it!”.
This is one of the best mindset methods that helped me to just focus on the tasks I have on this day, and stop to think about the uncertain future.
Then, I feel enjoy the moments when I finish a day, look back in my journal, and recognize that all the tasks I need to do in a day be completed.
It creates fulfill feelings in my mind; as fuel for my inner engine to continue to run substantially toward my big goal.
However, completing all the goals on time is a big issue that many people can’t control. If you want to know more about the way you can save your time and make it more effective. Let check this blog “4 Simple Ways You Can Do Immediately To Protect Your Time”.
3. Understand mindset methods:
“Imagine, what it will look like when you achieve your goal?”
Let give yourself a maximum of 10 minutes a day to think about the future of complement.
Think about the positive impacts that will happen in your life when you can achieve your goal. Don’t focus on how hard it is to get the goal, just focus on the great and positive things that you can get.
This is the mindset method that helps me to refuel my energy when studying English and prepare the documents and certifications to get the entrance requirement for my master’s degree in “Global Media and Communication” at this University.
I still remember these days, I spend around 10 hours a day just learning English and preparing the documents, every single day for roughly a year. And if I said I enjoy it, not exhausted, it means I’m telling a lie.
The reality is very harsh when you need to spend so many hours doing tasks daily for the goal that you just can see the result after a year. And what I did during this time to feel more positive is think about what it will look like when I achieve this goal.
Normally, I spend around 10 minutes a day thinking about it.
Think about my opportunity to learn from the top educational environment in the world, think about the chance to meet and greet with a lot of interested people; and learn from the top experts in my field that help my dream to be a great content creator become true.
Although it is all about imagination at this time, it is super important for me because it gives me a lot of energy to continue my journey to achieve this goal.
As William Arthur Ward used to say:
If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.
So whatever your goal is, just try to imagine how it looks like when you get it. And always keep your mind to be positive about the ability you can achieve your goal. This will be the decisive factor for your goal to come true.
A final thought about mindset methods
These three sentences I shared with you about the mindset methods are my great sources of input that I use daily to help me keep that positive vibes on my ambitious goals.
And it doesn’t matter how big your goal be if you can have the right mindset and a strong belief in yourself about it. Whatever you can dream of, you can get it.
The sentences I shared with you that can be used as a panacea for the mindset daily, to help you build the bigger and stronger belief from inside to chase your ambitious goals which can take you years to complete.
A strong mindset will be your fuel to help you run on this marathon journey.
Best wishes to you and hope that these mindset methods will help you to achieve your dream faster and make you live a better life.
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
The first thing I want you to understand about McDonald’s business strategy is:
It’s not only a fast-food chain, it’s a business empire with genius marketing strategies.
Be established in 1948 and nowadays have more than 36,000 stores globally. The value of McDonald’s is 154.92 billion U.S. dollars in 2021 and making this brand to be one of the most valuable fast food brands in the world.
So what are the marketing strategies behind this massive success?
For McDonald’s, there are a hundred marketing campaigns that have been run from the day it was established until today. And if cover all of them, I believe that we will need to spend a couple of months and thousands of pages to figure them out.
It’s too massive for me to do this, and also not really necessary for us to understand all the marketing strategies that did in years from this brand.
Knowing the best they did already help us learn a lot about the way how we should think and work on the marketing strategy for our business.
In this article, there are 3 biggest lessons I figure out when I study this brand marketing strategy that I believe plays the main role to build massive success for McDonald’s.
No.1 McDonald’s business strategy: Create an Ecosystem for the Brand
Hamburgers and beverages are the main products of McDonald’s that the public knows about.
But the real estate empire, franchise system, and food supply should be known as the main sources of income for McDonald’s.
This is the way how McDonald’s earns money and makes its brand to be the most valuable in the fast-food market.
Difference from other fast-food companies, McDonald’s builds a massive franchise system. It gives the brand the opportunity to have a great number of stores in a short time globally while creating many products and services circles for the corporation. Besides, McDonald’s parent company also receives benefits from most of the stores’ activities.
From food supply for franchise stores to doing global and national marketing for the brand. And leases the real estate for business owners to rent and build their own McDonald’s store in these areas.
In a short word, you can think about the ecosystem of McDonald’s like this.
For example, we have Henry, a business owner who wants to sell McDonald’s hamburger.
So Henry will need to sign a franchise contract with McDonald’s to pay the amount of fee for using the brand.
Then, the foods, beverage, and types of equipment need to serve clients he also need to buy from McDonald’s or their partner’s suppliers to make sure the quality of foods in his stores will similar to the food chains globally.
McDonald’s also recommend for him the location to place the store (most of the time will be at the intersection, shopping malls, or the places with high population rate where McDonald’s makes sure he can sell the most).
And McDonald’s owns this land and let Henry rents it again from the brand (Most of stores be own directly by McDonald’s and the brand has its real estate value up to 30 billion dollars).
And as former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn used to say that “We are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business”.
When you want to start to join in the circle of this brand to sell its products, you already start to join in its ecosystem and help the brand to be stronger.
No.2 McDonald’s business strategy: The focus on convenient and daily healthy demands.
After opening the first McDonald’s in 1955, after 65 years, this brand has grown to about 38,000 restaurants globally that serve close to 70 million (that’s 1% of the world’s population) hungry stomaches who love burger and chicken nuggets that serve quick and cheap.
The brand focuses on the convenience of customers when the average time for a person to have their meal from McDonald’s just between 112s–180s for a burger meal. This is super fast when compared to having a meal from a traditional restaurant.
And the location of McDonald’s store is often in crowded areas such as intersections, malls, or nearby office buildings and schools. So, it’s very convenient for clients to come and have a meal or take-away easily.
And adding more healthier options such as Grilled Chicken Salad, Fruit & Maple Oatmeal, Fruit ‘N Yogurt Parfait,…as the demands from people about the healthy foods which made faster become more popular.
The healthy options help this brand change the prejudice about the fast-food equal unhealthy from people.
Now, they focus on building the brand image as fast-casual foods instead of fast food. It means that they provide consumers healthier selections with a higher price (just slightly) and still have fast-food convenience that consumers are willing to pay.
No.3 McDonald’s business strategy: The targeted group of customers is kids and families
If parents let the kid choose where to have a meal, McDonald wants to be the first option in the kid’s head.
The reason is McDonald’s doesn’t want to be just a food store, it wants to be a place where any kids love to come.
And for many parents, letting a kid complete a meal is really tough challenge per day and normally can take up to an hour for kids to finish a meal.
But when you go to McDonald’s stores, you will see the kids choose the foods by themselves and love to self-eating without any support from parents.
This is a great time for young parents when they don’t need to feed their children and have a little bit of time for themselves.
And for groups of teenagers, the store where has a valuable menu with a lot of yummy foods at an affordable price and free wifi is a great place to enjoy the meal and have a fun time with friends.
As stated earlier, McDonald’s markets towards families and children and presenting the restaurant as a fun place to go with your family. Some advertisements talk about how children “always have a friend with big red shoes”.
And when you check the top 10 best commercial videos of McDonald’s, you will see the main theme is focusing on the family and happy moments of kids when they have the opportunity to go to the McDonald’s stores.
Final Thoughts
These are 3 lessons about marketing that we can learn from McDonald’s business strategy:
1. Create an ecosystem of products that can be franchised to optimize the benefits — Make products can go over the border.
2. The focus on convenient and daily healthy demands — Meet the real needs of clients.
3. The targeted group of customers is kids and families — Clear about the targeted customer section.
When it comes to doing marketing for your brand, doesn’t matter which area you are in.
If you can find the solution to make your brand an ecosystem that can be franchised and create the benefits for a massive group, you will win the market for your brand quickly than you even can’t imagine.
Like the way how McDonald’s used these three main strategies to win the fast-food market and is the largest player in this game.
Disclaimer: This article is a personal analysis from my own research, I don’t work for McDonald’s or any organization to make this article. It should be used as reading material for expanding understanding of business models only. You (and only you) are responsible for the way you use and understand this topic.
If you want to read more about Media and Marketing topics, let check it out at “Wiki Media & Marketing”
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel @anthony lecturer. On this channel, I share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
When you understand these 5 healthy eating guidelines, you will find out that you don’t need to be vegan or have a strict diet to be healthy.
What you really need is to understand your stomach.
Just one more week, I will finish my course “Master of Trainer” from The Australia Institution of Fitness and be ready to be a PT who be trained professionally in fitness and health.
This is really cool for me when I can get this degree.
It’s not because I get this one from the top №1 Australian Fitness School but it is more about what I learned during a year in this degree. These are the knowledge related to health, how to build the body, and nutrition I learned.
And one of the most interesting things I get after learning this course is
I don’t need to be vegan or having a strict diet to be healthy and strong.
I still can enjoy what I used to and even can add some other foods that I used to think unhealthy in my diet (the foods that I love to eat too much but too scared if it can make a negative impact on my body, like milk tea, sweet snacks,…).
Because the more I understand about my body and stomach, the more things I can eat, not vice versa.
No.1 Healthy Eating Guidelines: Eat 6 meals a day instead of just 2 or 3 meals.
You need to eat more to keep fit and have a healthy body, not to eat less.
This is one of the very important lessons that my teacher always reminds us in the class about how to build a healthy diet plan.
The reason is the more meals you eat, the easier your body can consume nutritions and reduce the feeling of craving — the main reason for many people eat a larger meal and normally lead to overweight.
And following the study that is published on Time Of India, it shows that
The small healthy snacks that you have during the day curb hunger till your next big meal. It helps you make sensible food choices and make healthier choices. These aides you in getting you to your desired weight goal.
Before learning about the technique to eat 6 meals a day, I always think that have fewer meals a day means I can lose weight while keeping eating more foods in each meal will help me to supply enough ingredients for my body.
But I was wrong.
And my weight told the truth!
When I just ate 3 meals a day, and eat a lot in each meal, my body weight always stays around 75, 76 kg, and have a lot of belly fat.
But when I started to apply the method that my teacher shows me, I can reduce my weight from 76 kg to now just around 69 to 71 kg.
And now, I’m eating 6 meals a day.
Moreover, the article is published on Healthline, shreds of evidence that the big meals are the reason that leads to “rapid highs and lows in blood sugar while eating smaller and more frequent meals should stabilize blood sugar levels throughout the day”.
So if you see people who have fewer meals and still have problems related to blood sugar, you can ask what they eat and how much they eat in each meal.
So you will know why!
Why you should apply this method
The reason for this method is when you eat more meals in a day, it helps you to reduce the feeling of hungry and lead to the lower food demand in-take.
Because normally, your stomach will take around 20 minutes to receive the signal that it is all full. But your mouth is not like that, it wants to be active and wants you to consume more.
So this is the reason why many people feel their mouth still wants to eat but their belly can’t receive anymore.
No.2 Healthy Eating Guidelines: Having all 5 groups of foods
Following the Australian Dietary Guideline, each person needs to have all 5 groups of foods every day include: grain, vegetables & beans, fruit, lean meat, and products from milk.
Besides, plenty of water is also a necessary part of building a healthy body when our body has 60% of water.
The big problem here is we normally equal the feeling of fullness in the stomach with the feeling of energy nutrition.
It likes you each a full big-size pizza and feels you are enough nutrition for the lunch but actually what you did is fill your stomach, not fill the nutritions for yourself.
To eat healthily, you must combine your meal with veggies, meat, fish, milk products,… as what the food guideline from the government show us.
Because your intake decides who you will become. Fatter or thinner, stronger or weaker. And this is your choice.
No.3 Healthy Eating Guidelines: Eating the things that make you feel happy
Your feeling plays an important role in the digest process.
If you don’t feel happy, it’s can impact the process you digest the nutritions.
Pro tip:
If these are unhealthy foods, you still can enjoy them, but choose to eat before 5 p.m and have at least 3 meals before having this one. This is the way how I am doing with my favorite “unhealthy snacks”.
It helps to reduce the demand for eating unhealthy food while I still can enjoy it.
For me, I’m a big fan of spicy snacks and love to eat daily. But this kind of food is very unhealthy and easy to have acne.
And to keep enjoying this food while don’t make a negative impact on my health, I choose to buy just 1 small pack a week and just eat a small part of the pack daily before 5 p.m.
It makes me feel happy when I still can enjoy junk food (in a small amount) instead of not having any of it.
No.4 Healthy Eating Guidelines: Reduce the intake of sugar, salt
Sugary and salty foods are the rival of a healthy diet.
The foods with high salt and sugar can lead to many issues related to health while these are the 2 favorite ingredients for many kinds of foods, from milk tea, cakes, to honey chicken or salty fried fish,…
Dr. Zachary Bloomgarden, professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City explained that
Sugar is bad for you because it has calories, and because if you have diabetes or a diabetes-related condition — let’s say high blood fat levels — then having sugar will increase your blood sugar and your triglycerides, which is a risk factor for heart disease. (Triglycerides are a type of fat in the blood.)
While salty foods make your blood pressure be increase because salt holds excess fluid in your body which leads to the added burden on your heart.
Moreover, salty foods are also one of the main reasons that lead to a higher risk of stroke, heart failure, stomach cancer, kidney disease,…
Therefore, for me, I try to quit putting any salt in my foods if I cook at home all the time.
You can’t control sugar and salt intake in the restaurant but you can control in your own kitchen.
It makes the food can be a little bit less yummy but totally great for your heart and body.
Sometimes, we need to quit some unnecessary things to achieve real good things.
No.5 Healthy Eating Guidelines: Workout more often
The best natural multivitamin you can have for free is your daily exercise.
Because when you’re fit, the amount of blood diverted from your digestive system decreases because the need is less urgent. Your muscles are more efficient when you’re in shape.
It helps you to increase the metabolic process in your body more effectively without requiring you to add multivitamin drinks.
For me, I keep maintaining workout twice a day for years. One time in the morning is a quick workout for 30 minutes to make me feel fresh and enjoy the day better.
Another time is for 1 hour in the afternoon after finishing working. It helps me to relax and stretching full body after a hard-working day.
And the interesting thing I noticed when having the habit of workout twice a day is when I work out, I feel more enjoyable eating and feel fresh all day.
But when I quit workout for a day (could be because of traveling or being too busy), I feel tired and less enjoyable to eat while preferring unhealthy food intake.
This is the reason that I always try to maintain the habit of workout daily. Because it does not only make me feel more fresh and healthy but also makes me eat more enjoyable.
Final Thoughts
Now, you can find a lot of instructions from the internet about how to build a healthy diet.
Each of them has its own benefits.
But the idea of eating less or just focusing on eating on one or two groups of foods is not the right way to approach a healthy diet.
And you shouldn’t equal eat fewer foods to lose weight equal healthy when you are overweight.
The real healthy diet is the diet that makes you feel enjoy to eat, that help you to lose weight/or gain weight (depend on your demand) and make yourself to be stronger and feel happier.
If it can’t make these things, you should consider having a new diet now to have a real healthy one.
To read more content about Personal Development, let check HERE!
P/s:
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You can use these 4 simple but effective methods immediately to protect your time from today. As Jim Rohn said:
“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” — Jim Rohn
But many of us make the mistake when we value money higher than time!
The typical example that many people fall into is the guilty feeling when they spend too much money on material things and later on feel regret about buying.
But they don’t have this kind of guilty feeling when they wasted many hours on the couch watching TV or having parties with friends.
This was also the feeling I have many times before when I studied at University.
At that time, I felt the money is more important than time. And spending a few hundred dollars for a new jacket makes me feel (happy for a while then) guilty rather than spending 5–6 hours checking my social media accounts daily.
I don’t have the feeling of wasting my time because I think that I have plenty of time in life. But the reality is each of us just has the same 24 hours in a day.
And absolutely nobody know how long we can live.
In the middle of the pandemic, when millions of people are stuck at home, the rate of wasting time on useless things even becomes higher.
Because we don’t need to rush for public transport to the office, come early for the meeting…And we can work next to our own lovely bed that often seduces us to take a short break to enjoy the comfort of working from home.
This causes a big problem for us when controlling the time.
As Benjamin Franklin described for the first time in his essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman” (1748).
Time is gold!
It means that time is precious and the more time you waste, the more gold you lost! It is still right nowadays.
Because in the same 24 hours a day, why someone can earn a lot of money while others are struggling with their financial life?
This is all about how you control your precious 24 hours a day.
If you want to become someone like Elon Musk, Warren Buffet,…, you need to learn to use the time like the way they do, not the way how a couch potato uses his time.
So how to stop wasting your time and make it works for you more effectively?
Each person will have a different way to approach and find ways to make their time work better for them.
And for me, by analyzing and learning hundred of hours about this topic. These are the 4 biggest lessons that I wish I know about it earlier to optimize and protect my time.
1. To protect your time by delegation
The delegation will make you become more successful and happier, not perfectionism.
The belief that
“Only you can do the tasks perfectly and nobody can do it as good as you”
is a wrong belief that will kill your success and make you run out all of your time invaluably.
But this is a belief that I have had for years.
Because I thought that an A+ grade student like me will always create a better result than a C grade student when doing a task.
Then I choose to do most of the things by myself instead of asking my teammates who have lower scores in class to give me a hand.
And I recognized that I was wrong. As you try to chase all the goals at the same time, it will ruin your time rather than create a positive impact on your life.
Being a perfectionist and self-made everything doesn’t equal effectiveness. Instead, this makes a person be easier to burn out and waste a lot of precious time.
And follow Prof. Jeffrey Pfeffer,
Delegation is a skill.
And your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn’t go to hell if you take a day off.
It means that learning to delegate effectively will make you be a great leader and create a massive outcome, not trying to do everything by yourself to make your work more effective.
Because when you delegate your tasks, instead of using your own 8 hours/day. Now, if you have 1 person to support you, it means that you get 16 hours instead of 8 hours.
And if you have 10 people working for you, you can get 80 hours done your job in just one day.
This is the power of delegation.
But many people fall into the trap of “perfectionism and self-made”.
It means that they just trust themselves and believe that they can do all the tasks with the best outcomes by themselves, and no one else can make a better outcome than them.
Let be honest together, I did it for years as well.
And I totally understand this feeling.
In the beginning, it helps you to be more flexible and can come up with the final decision quickly.
But when you have more tasks to do, you start to feel overwhelmed and face the dilemma
1. If you try to complete all the number of tasks, you need to reduce the quality of each task you did. So you can have enough time to complete tasks on the deadline.
2. If you still keep working on tasks with the same quality, you will late for the deadline because there are so many tasks that come up at the same time.
As Warren Buffet says,
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Therefore, if you don’t want to face this dilemma, still having the tasks be completed with high quality while increasing the quantity, you need to delegate your job to others effectively.
If you say “YES” with one thing, it means that you also say “NO” with something else.
And to protect your precious time effectively, you need to learn how to say “NO” more than you say “YES”.
Because your time in a day is limited. And we all have the same 24 hours, nobody has the advantage of the extra hours in a day.
And as Marcus Aurelius discusses in his book “Meditations”:
“Most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?”
It likes your friends want you to join their parties, or hang out with them when they have free time or feel boring. But let ask yourself, does it really essential for you to go like this?
If you have free time and want to take a break, hanging out with friends, or having a BBQ party will be a great idea.
However, if you have a plan to learn for your English test or finish your CV but still haven’t finished yet when your friends invite you to their party. Do you think it will be better to hang out with them or keep working on your works until you finish it firstly?
You have your own answer.
But always remember that your friends invite you to have a party or hang out with them when they have free time, not when they are busy with work.
However, if you sacrifice your time to work on the CV or prepare for the English test to go with them, the high potential is you will lose your opportunity to get the job (because you apply later than others) or get the lower scores in the test (because you don’t have enough time to review).
So learning to say “NO” with the things that don’t make your life better (while wasting a lot of time) to spend more time saying “YES” with tasks to improve your life is what you need to master.
It will help to protect your precious time rather than ruin it for useless things.
3. To protect your time, let learn to disagreement
You can learn more from disagreements rather than agreements. And it will help to save you a lot of time.
Because when you approach the tasks from the point of view of disagreed people, it helps you to view your problems in more ways and can find out more effective solutions to solve them.
And in life, finding a better solution equals saving more time and money to invest in “trials and errors”.
But many people normally ignore the disagreeing point of view and try to protect their own opinions.
It will be good if you and your competitor are having a competition together and need to protect your own ideas.
But if you are a boss/leader/a person who is looking for a better solution to solve your issues.
Learning to carefully listen and notice the other ideas (who disagree with your primary idea) will bring the best benefits and save you a lot of time for finding the best solution.
4. To protect your time, let ask for the things you want from the experts
It will help you to save a lot of time instead of doing everything by yourself.
“Going from seeing things through just my eyes to seeing things through the eyes of these thoughtful people was like going from seeing things in black and white to seeing them in color. The world lit up.
“That’s when I realized that the best way to go through the jungle of life is with insightful people who see things differently from me”
Why do you need to spend hours, months, or even years trying things in your new ways? (But you are still not sure it works or not). Instead, you can choose to learn or get advice from the “insightful people” who already did it successfully.
Asking advice from experts who has years of experience in solving your issue will help you to avoid unnecessary mistakes and create better results in a shorter time.
And in the research from Harvard, they point out the best way that you can use to seek the best answer you want from the experts will include 6 steps:
Start with a positive tone
Identify the type of advice you’re seeking
Come prepared with specific details
Don’t ask everyone, Ask the right person
Don’t assume you already know the answers
Be grateful
By doing this, you will get the best result in the quickest time. Because you are “borrowing the brain” from the others who have more years of experience than you.
The people who use their time, money, and health to “trial and fail” before finding the right way to work on after years. And now, you can get it just in a few days, or even just a couple of hours when you consult with them.
Final thoughts
Time is precious!
Because when it’s gone, you never can gain it back.
It is different with the money, if you lost it, you just need time to work and gain it back. And even you can be richer.
Or if you get sick, you just need time to do exercise and recover. Then you even can be stronger.
So using your time wisely will be the best investment in your life. Because it helps you to work on yourself more effectively and have time to achieve the life you want.
And instead of laying on the couch to watch TV and waste your time, let learn to appreciate every minute in your life and try to apply these 4 simple methods to help you work more effectively with your time.
As Steve Jobs used to say
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
The lessons about life traps that I learned from billionaire Ray Dalio.
Nobody wants to be a loser, but why do many people always feel like being a loser in their life game? And what are the traps most people fall into in life?
These are the questions that I found out the answer to last week when I read the book “Principle “Life and Work” by the billionaire Ray Dalio.
From this great book, I learned 4 very valuable lessons.
It is not easy to be a winner all the time, but if you can understand what makes you fail, it makes the chance to be a loser become smaller and you have more opportunities to win your own games.
No.1 of life traps: Chase all the goals at the same time
This is the way how you will run out all of your energy even before you can get the first win.
And it’s also a very popular trap that many people fall into.
It looks like you are joining a buffet party, where you can find various kinds of foods you want.
And they look so yummy to put into your mouth all.
At that moment, you seem to forget a reality that your stomach is limited to have all at the same time.
If you can join the same buffet party for a whole week, maybe you can try all of the things you want without worrying about your stomach capability.
But the reality is you just can join this buffet for a few hours this night, not the whole week as you wish.
So knowing what you really want to eat and prioritizing your choices is the most important thing you need to do to enjoy the buffet the most as you can.
And it’s not about what you put in your hungry stomach, it’s more about what’s your priorities to eat first.
It’s the same psychology in choosing your goals.
The goals are the food at your buffet party. And your time is your hungry stomach.
Within the limitation of time you have each day, you need to set your own goals more affordable and specific to achieve.
But the problem with many people is they have a lot of goals they want to achieve in a short period of time. And when they focus on the number of goals to get, the quality of their completed tasks normally be reduced as these people try to reach the quantity rather than the quality.
To avoid this trap, what you should really focus on is choosing what is the most important goal that you really want to achieve first. Then put all your attention and energy to achieve this goal before moving to another one.
As Ray Dalio said
“If you just keep doing, you will burn out and grind to a halt.”
It means that if you fail in finding your priority, you will come up with burnout all your energy even before you can achieve your first achievement.
How to avoid this trap
Having your own prioritized checklist
This list will include all the goals that you want to achieve in a specific period of time. For me, I have lists of specific goals I want to achieve daily, monthly, and yearly.
The list to be arranged with the most important goal needed to achieve be located at the №1 position, and then the second most important goal, the third one,…
For daily goals, I always set a limit of a maximum of 3 goals I need to achieve instead of putting too many goals and making me feel overwhelmed.
And this technique is what I learned from Thomas Oppong, a very successful writer on Medium who is my idol in positive writing.
Whenever I complete a goal, I will make a tick on it. This creates an exciting and fulfilling feeling for me when my brain be noticed that I completed a goal.
For monthly and yearly goals, I set up 5 big goals to achieve.
Because this is an affordable number for me, not too little to lose motivation but not too much to make the goals be overwhelming.
………
No.2 of life traps: You are misunderstanding between goals and desires
The goal is the things you want to have and work on it to achieve.
The desire is the things you want to have, but you don’t really work on it to complete the tasks you need to make.
As the example that Dalio writes in his book
Your goal is to have a healthy body.
While your desire is to eat your favorite snacks like cakes, fried potatoes.
And if you really want to achieve the goal of having a healthy body, you need to learn to quite your desire of having your snacks.
Any of us have a lot of desires in life. But converting the desires to be the goals and really working on them to achieve them is not an easy game.
It requires us to have a high discipline character and follow the rules to make good desires consistently appear and work on them to make them come true.
While the losers are very good as the step to create a lot of desires for themselves. The step to turn these desires to be real actions normally be ignored and makes the desires just be desires; then never can come true.
In contrast, the winners are the people who have many desires and doing well in turning these desires into real actions to make them become their achievable goals.
And the more desire you have and be turned into the goals, the more success you will gain.
How to avoid this trap
1. Give yourself time to consider
It means that when your mind pops up with any new desire, let give yourself a little bit of time to consider if this really deserves to be your goal.
For me, this is one morning/afternoon/evening time for a desire to be considered. And for the big desire, it normally is considered after a day. If this desire makes me feel excited enough, I will keep it and start to write a map on how to achieve this goal.
It helps you to be more selective in the goals to achieve and the desires also become more clear and trustworthy.
2. Make your desires equal your goals
If you have too many desires and don’t have the ability to turn all of them to become real, you will make yourself feel frustrated with yourself.
And this is a very dangerous situation when you make your mind start to learn to admit your failure in turning your desire to be an achievable goal. It loses your self-confidence and belief in achieving the goals.
So when you have desires, let carefully consider if you can make it be your goal or not. And don’t build up a lot of desires for yourself while you still haven’t completed your first goal. As C.S. Lewis says
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
But let make sure to complete your desired goal before having the next one, to make all the desires to be a reality, not just your dream.
No.3 of life traps: Choose the wrong motivation
What is your motivation for doing what you are doing?
This is the question that each of us needs to spend time thinking seriously about it.
The wrong goal will lead to wrong results.
While the wrong motivations will lead to a lack of ability to win the goal.
As Ray Dalio said
If the motivation for someone is just the money — big numbers on the bank account, the person will hardy to understand and achieve the fulfilling of completing their goals.
One of the popular life traps is money. Although money is important, the final goal never should be all about money. Because this is just numbers and you will never feel enough with the numbers.
What really makes sense is the feeling of fulfillment, the values that you can contribute to society, and your feeling of happiness when you can achieve the goal.
How to avoid this life trap
Let ask yourself these questions whenever you come up with your motivation to work on something you want
a. If the money is not the motivation, what else could be the main motivation for you to achieve this goal?
b. Why you really want to achieve this goal?
c. What is the most regrettable thing that you will have if you can’t achieve it, except money?
d. Does your motivation make you feel happy and positive every time you think about making this goal come true?
These questions are what I use to ask myself every time I find the motivation for my new goal.
It helps me to figure out what I can use as a true motivation for myself to achieve the goal (instead of just using money as the main goal all the time).
In many cases, the motivation for happiness, love, friendship, the family is more important than the financial motivation for us to achieve the goal.
And when you can figure out the right motivation for yourself, you can achieve the goal faster and feel fulfilled about your achievement.
We all have the same 24h. It means that we have the same opportunity to use time to achieve our dream.
So while we don’t choose to have a big dream and achieve it instead of having the small one that we also need the same time but make the smaller results?
This is one of the key points that Ray Dalio presented in this book.
He showed a cruel reality is that many young people are having now. This is about losing the ability to dream high.
They were afraid to set big goals and focus their attention on the negative impacts that can happen when they fail the big game rather than thinking about how great it will be when they can achieve it.
And when thinking about the successful people in the world, we all can see the normal people with the big dreams that lead them to achieve massive success in their life, from Mark Zuckerberg to build the biggest social media platform in the world, or Tony Robbins to build the best personal development course on the planet, or Elon Musk to make the best electric cars in the 21st century,…
You can’t find a successful person with a small dream but you can find a lot of people who have a big dream but unsuccessful.
Because it’s not only about how high and big your dream can be, it’s more about how much you commit to achieving this big dream as well. As Walt Disney says
“All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.”
How to avoid this life trap
1. Have a big goal that is achievable, not unrealistic.
Have a plan for your little wins, not only the big one.
If you are having an income of $3,000/month and now want it to turn to be $30,000 in the next month. This makes you feel exhausted and stressed rather than being your motivation to achieve this financial goal.
It means that having a higher goal is good but having an unrealistic goal is very dangerous.
Instead of moving rapidly, your goal is to be 10x higher in just a month because you see your friend achieved this level already and want to catch his level quickly. Let put the goal to 1,5–2x higher than your present instead.
It makes your goal become more achievable and avoids the trap of aiming the goal too high.
As Lao Tzu said
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”
Don’t worry about the destination of a thousand miles journey, let walk on and win the steps first.
The final thoughts
The book “Principle “Life and Work” is a great book that I read last week. This book is not only teaching me about how I should live my life but also about many valuable lessons related to the working environment.
And through the “4 life traps that make you become a loser in life and how to avoid it”, I hope that this article gives you some valuable lessons about the way how you can avoid falling into the trap of failure because of choosing the wrong things to focus on that I learned from Ray Dalio.
To sum up, let make a note of these 4 traps and practice reading them every morning after you wake up (put it in front of your mirror will be an ideal one, as I did) to remind yourself daily.
And let them be your guideline to avoid life traps while increasing the opportunity to be a winner.
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
This article will show you four things you shouldn’t do before bed to help you sleep deeper and wake up earlier.
Having a deeper sleep in a short time is so far better than having long hours to sleep but you are easy to be awake in the middle of the night just by tiny voices.
But to have a deeper sleep is not what we always have, especially if you don’t know the factors that can impact the quality of your sleep.
Therefore, I want to share with you the 5 crucial things that I try to quit to improve my sleeping time and make me feel better and more energetic in the morning.
These are the things that the majority of young generations like Millenials (me included) and Gen Z are doing frequently before sleeping time without notice of the negative impacts on them.
But luckily for me, after spending nearly a year to learn my “Master of Trainer”, I get a better understanding of the value of deep sleep to a healthy body and know what I shouldn’t do to protect the precious sleeping time.
And these are what I want to share with you about what I learned and apply for myself in the last 10 months.
No.1 You shouldn’t do before bed: Don’t use electric devices before sleeping
Stop using electronic devices 30 minutes before bed.
The National Sleep Foundation recommends that you should stop using electronic devices, like your cellphone, at least 30 minutes before bedtime.
Because the electric devices will delay your body’s internal clock (a.k.a., your circadian rhythm), and reduce the time to release of the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin that leads to the result that your brain keeps working and feel more difficult to fall asleep.
How to do it
Leave your electric device outside of reach in the bedroom
Replace with a book to read and listen to deep music
Adding deep music to your pre-sleeping time will be one of the best ways to increase the quality of your sleep.
A 2014 study out of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland found that subjects who listened to sleep-promoting audio recordings containing hypnotic suggestions spent as much as 80 percent more time in deep sleep compared to those who did not listen to the recordings.
And in the study about “Effects of Relaxing Music on Healthy Sleep” that be published in Scientific Reports, the experts evidenced that
Music consistently improves subjective sleep quality, whereas results for objective sleep parameters diverge
So this is the reason why I keep the habit of reading books while listening to deep music for sleep for the last couple of years.
It makes my mind feel calmer and being fresher the next morning when I wake up rather than feeling tired and exhausted as I used to when I spent the time checking social media accounts until exhausted to sleep.
Foods containing the amino acid tryptophan — a building block of the sleep-related chemical serotonin — could potentially make you drowsy, although evidence is mixed as to whether the amount in food is enough to change your sleep.
Foods that tax or upset your stomach, such as fatty, fried, or spicy foods, are best avoided before sleep.
It is recommended that we should finish the meal at least 2–3 hours before going to bed.
This is a reasonable time for the stomach to release the necessary chemicals to digest the foods effectively.
No.3 You shouldn’t do before bed: Don’t make your bed tobe your office desk
Your bed should only use for 2 exclusive purposes: Sleep and having sex.
Because when you use your bed as a place to work as well, your conscious mind will not equal the bed as “the resting place” anymore.
And it makes you feel harder to fall asleep.
This is a mistake that I used to do for years. When I was still in University, I normally work in bed until 1,2 a.m until my eyes feel so tired to turn off the computer.
But I still can’t sleep for the next 1 to 2 hours because I didn’t feel the change in the environment to encourage me to have a rest.
After that, when I decide to change to work only in the studying room, and my bed only for sleeping purposes. Whenever I reach my bed, my mind knows that this is the time for a rest.
And thank for that, nowadays, I can fall into sleep so easily and quit insomnia that I have for years when I was a student.
No.4 You shouldn’t do before bed: Don’t check your clock when you prepare to sleep or wake up at the midnight
Because it will make you feel awake and hard to have a deep sleep.
Dr. Nerina Ramlakhan, asleep and stress management expert and also a psychologist suggests that
Never check the time if you wake during the night — it is completely normal to wake during the night but if you’re a sensitive sleeper then checking the time can send you into a whirl of calculations and worry about how much sleep you will or won’t be getting.
Because when you spend too much time thinking about how many hours you can sleep, you actually can’t sleep.
Many people do it when they prepare to go to sleep to check what time they on the bed, and the second time (for some, not all people) they check again at midnight after going to the toilet or drinking water.
The best way to make your deep sleep keep going after you wake up for these purposes is by quitting your clock. Don’t check it and just simply back to your bed and keep your dream going.
You already set the alarm for the morning to wake up, don’t need to waste your time to check how long you still have on the bed. It’s not necessary or makes your night be fulfilled.
Final thoughts
While you can find a lot of things to add extra to your schedule to make you have a better sleeping time.
In my mind, I believe that minimal the things you need to add to your “To-do list” will make you can do everything more effectively and get a better result.
And having better sleep is also not an exception.
Why do you need to add more things to make you sleep better while you can easily extract these 4 simple things you normally do — And that already makes you have a great night and wake up energetically.
1. Don’t use the electric devices before sleeping
2. Don’t eat before going to sleep
3. Don’t make your bed into your office desk
4. Don’t check your clock when you prepare to sleep or wake up at the midnight
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel to share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can
