Quotes - sumanksp/reference GitHub Wiki
Effort is the BEST indicator of interest
Intelligent people know how to get what they want.
Wise people know what's worth wanting.
What's the smallest step you can take right now to make progress?
Action feels better than motivation.
Desire changes Nothing. Decision changes Something. Determination changes Everything
In the short term, you are as good as your intensity.
In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.
Your top tasks for the day should be determined by importance, not urgency.
DO what you say you will do. You are not your thoughts. You are your actions. You are what you do. Not what you say you will do.
You don't need more time; you need more focus.
Fewer projects. Fewer commitments. Fewer obligations. Fewer responsibilities.
Carefully choose your commitments, then go all in.
The less you have to think about it, the more your system is working for you. The more often you use a tool, the easier it should be to access.
Anxiety is thought without control. Flow is control without thought.
The thought of finishing is often the biggest obstacle to getting started.
Five focused minutes can outperform a wandering hour.
Work has to be satisfying to be sustainable.
Work can only be done right now. Planning is important, but it doesn’t accomplish any useful work. The only way you can get work done is by working on it this moment.
Action creates both confidence and momentum.
When action seems hard, narrow the gap between where you are and what you focus on.
A marathoner who hits a wall running at mile 5 doesn't focus on the end of the race; they focus on getting around the next corner. Then, the next corner.
What's the smallest step you can take right now to make progress?
Yesterday is experience, Today is experiment, Tomorrow is expectation
Learn to Sit back and OBSERVE Not everything needs a REACTION
Do not mistake movement for achievement.
Self-Discipline Muscle Go the extra 10-minutes when you feel like quitting.
Sprinting Theory
Timebox the activities according to task category. It is a Marathon (requiring patience) or a 100-meter Dash (quick finish item). Define the critical period: Say, 10 minutes, 1 year Commit to the critical period: Once you find the critical period, set out a written goal and motivate yourself to follow through in that sliver of time. This will focus all your self-discipline in one place.
For Example: Waking up. - If you are developing a habit of waking up early, Force yourself to stay awake for TTTT (say 10 minutes) before hitting the snooze button again. Usually, after that point, it is easier to just stay awake. The "TTTT" threshold is specific to the values, personality and you. Some people may need 10-minutes some may need 30-minutes gap to keep themselves awake to develop the habit. Find your time threshold that keeps you in-check to be disciplined.
Focusing on what matters requires continuous effort.
There is always something calling for your attention, pulling you away from what matters. It might be a grammar mistake begging to be corrected, an expectation put on you by someone else, or even the gas station across town that's a few cents cheaper. Individually, none of these things really distract you much, but as days turn to weeks, they become an anchor.
It's easy to overestimate the importance of winning the moment and underestimate how it can cost you the ultimate goal.
It's a daily battle to focus on your ultimate goal, not the quick wins that lead to nowhere you want to go.
Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
What's ONE thing you can do today that makes tomorrow easier? Repeat.
Learning from what didn’t work is necessary. The pain of regret is optional.
Reading a great book twice is more valuable than reading ten average books.
The less you have to think about it, the more your system is working for you.
The Feynman Technique is the best way to supercharge your learning. And it works no matter the subject.
Anyone can do it once. The best do it consistently.
Anyone can order a healthy meal once. Anyone can get up early to workout once. Anyone can save more than they earn for a month. Anyone can take their partner on a date once. Anyone can write a page. Anyone can focus on one thing for an hour.
Most people can’t do it consistently because they want instant gratification. They want to see the results ... right now. Just because the results aren't immediately visible, doesn’t mean they are not accumulating. Ordinary moments compound over weeks and months into extraordinary results.
Consistently boring days make for extraordinary decades.
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Of course, you can learn a lot about something without writing about it. However, writing about something complicated and hard to pin down acts as a test to see how well you understand it. When we approach our work as a stranger, we often discover how something that seems so simple in our heads is explained entirely wrong.
It’s in rethinking how we organize our work, not just in how fast we can accomplish it, where the real improvements are to be found,
The greatest threat to success is inconsistency.
The answers you seek never come when the mind is busy, they come when the mind is still.
It's easier to get more recognition for putting out a dozen fires than for fireproofing a dozen systems.
Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance While the rest of us are chasing brilliance, the best in the world know they must avoid stupidity before they can win.
To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
You have to live anyhow, so why not live well? It all depends on you, for you can generally take out in as great a measure as you put in.
Results Are Not Actions (Yet)
Telling a few select people about your goals can help you achieve them. They’ll encourage you and help hold you accountable.
If you tell too many people, it actually starts getting harder to achieve your goals. Talking about your goals activates the same reward center in your brain as achieving your goals. You haven’t started, but your brain starts to feel like you’ve already arrived. Motivation? Gone.
Once you’ve selected the ideas you’re going to work on, it’s time to get going. Protect those ideas and give them the room they need to develop into results.
The courage to start. The discipline to focus. The confidence to figure it out. The patience to know progress is not always visible. The persistence to keep going, even on the bad days.
The key to productivity is doing more of what matters and less of what doesn't. When you concentrate your mental and physical energy in one direction, you have the most impact.
One way to reduce the surface area of your attention is to ask yourself the difficult question of whether what you are doing really matters to the outcome you want. If you are ruthless, you can eliminate 20-40% of what you are doing today without impacting the most important things.
All the time you spend on the least important things comes at the expense of the most important things.
Asking the question is easier than answering it honestly. Admitting you're doing something that doesn't matter means you've been wasting your time. It's much easier to keep doing what we've been doing and tell ourselves that if we just had one more productivity hack, we'd make more progress.
Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Running around in circles is busy. Going toward your destination is productive. It's easy to be busy. It's hard to be productive.
The real "work" of productivity is less about improving efficiency and more about improving effectiveness.
Being productive is not about doing more; it's about concentrating all your energy on the few things that matter.
The less you have to think about it, the more your system is working for you.
Every action has a cost. Every action has a reward.
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
When you focus on the outcome, the gap between where you are and where you want to go seems large. To cover ground quickly, the tendency is to look for a hack or shortcut.
The problem is that no one who got the outcomes you wanted used a hack or shortcut to get them. Instead, they consistently inched forward.
Instead of focusing on the ultimate outcome, focus on the next move. There is always something you can do today to get a little better, to move a little closer, to put yourself in a better position. It's not pretty. It's not fast. It doesn't even make for a good story. But it works.
You don't build an empire in a day. You build it brick by brick. Day by day. Consistent daily progress for a long period of time.
Aristotle wrote: “exercise in repeatedly recalling a thing strengthens the memory.
MAP Growth identifies a student’s zone of proximal development. That zone is the sweet spot where the best learning happens, where students are challenged just enough to stay engaged but not so challenged that they give up.
A simple rule for the decision-maker is that intervention needs to prove its benefits and those benefits need to be orders of magnitude higher than the natural (that is non-interventionist) path. We intuitively know this already. We won’t switch apps or brands for a marginal increase over the status quo. Only when the benefits become orders of magnitude higher do we switch.
Performance is something that we will give more time; behavior we won’t. And that’s because behavior is a choice, not a skill set. by Frank Slootman
You hear in business meetings that if you can’t measure it, you cannot improve it. These kinds of statements are taken as truths. And over time, I realized [that] used in the wrong context, they tend to cause a lot of damage that we don’t even realize because we feel like we are being smart when we say, “This thing must be measured before we can improve it.” The way I realized some of the flaws in this thinking—of “you cannot improve something that you don’t measure”—is [by] looking at my personal life and evaluating it.
I am a parent. And I asked myself, “Am I measuring how I’m doing as a parent, or am I measuring how I’m doing as a spouse?” And while I clearly improved in certain areas of parenting, I had not done any measurement there.
So then I started asking myself, “Well, if I’ve clearly improved in this area of parenting or this area of being a spouse, but I don’t measure it, I don’t track it on a daily basis, I don’t have any metrics associated with it, and yet I can tell that I’m improving in these areas, … how am I doing that?”
The way I know that I’m improving is because I’m evaluating. And that’s where I feel like there’s a difference between the idea of evaluating how you’re doing and measuring how you’re doing.
The fundamental observation here is that sometimes evaluating how something is going is enough. And sometimes if you try to measure a thing, you might improve the measurement, but you might not actually be improving the underlying thing."
Your position determines if you're playing on easy mode or hard more.
Many people unintentionally choose to play on hard mode by not sleeping enough, not eating healthy food, or not investing in their most important relationships.
You can't remove struggle or emotion from life, but you can put yourself in a position where they don't control you.
Consistently doing the simplest things makes the biggest difference.
Look Back to Look Forward
The month of January is named after Janus. The god of transitions and new beginnings, Janus was usually depicted with two faces—one facing forward, one facing back.
When we’re planning and setting goals, we spend most of our time looking forward.
Every now and then, it helps to look back.
As much as we do it, looking forward can be hard. Imagination is fun, but there’s uncertainty.
If looking forward is hard, reframe the question by looking back.
Clarity affords focus. - Thomas Leonard