The Only Thing To Do Today
January 18, 2007 by Ryan Merlin · Leave a Comment
You only have one job today. Only one thing you have to do.
In any area of your life, business, athletics, relationships, financial, intellectual, spiritual. Just take one small step out of routine, out of habit, and into living the life that you dream. The only time is Now.
30 Days To Success – Trial Period
January 17, 2007 by Ryan Merlin · Leave a Comment
What to try out a new life? Why not take it for a test drive? Steve Pavlina has a great article on 30 Days To Success; a fantastic analogy to trial period similar to software.
Everybody has things they want to change in their life. Areas to improve, skills to develop, ideas and experience to gain and use, lose weight, quit smoking….. Just think about it. What are 2 important things you’ve been putting off? Procrastinating for whatever reason, maybe 
because you think you aren’t ready to dive in yet? The greater the change the higher the mountain can seem to climb looking at the whole thing from the bottom. What’s the secret?
Break it down into bite size pieces.
Making any change for 30 days feels much more reasonable than a permanent one, even though you know it takes the same effort and focus. It’s more manageable, able to be boxed, labeled, finalized, you can see the end at all times. Like climbing a hill where you can see the top. Just trying it out, what do you have to lose?
There’s a ton of cliches for this:
- How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. African Proverb
- “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” – Lao Tzu
- And my favorite in response to the question, “How did you bike all the way up here?” – One pedal stroke at a time of course!
The hardest part being the decision and commitment to take those first few steps and build momentum. It’s pretty much a rule of thumb, that it takes 21 days to make or break a habit.
What would it take to commit for only 21 days towards taking steps in the direction of what you really want? Write it down, post some pictures on your walls bathroom mirror, talk to friends, relatives, attend a seminar, call him, call her. It only takes one step.
Related:
Steve Jobs: Stay Hungry Stay Foolish
“Our Greatest Fear Is Not…..”
Secrets Of Greatness
Break Bad Habits Patterns & Beliefs
January 11, 2007 by Ryan Merlin · Leave a Comment
I was just meeting with a good friend of mine who is amazingly creative, genuine and an incredible artist. But like so many, she has some pretty strong negative patterns of guilt, shame, and unworthiness that really limit her amazing potential to be great and shine in so many ways. So what do we do? Recondition her mind and body. Interrupt the pattern when it happens breaking the chains that hold her back. Motivate and give her the tools to grab a hold of herself to remove the blockages to let the genius flow.
As we’re talking she has a habit of apologizing for any small slip, mistake, misunderstanding, and even apologized for things she shouldn’t have. It’s a habit, it’s subconscious and comes out automatically. And was somehow how she learned to navigate and deal with her environment growing up.
But as long as she’s around me, I will not play along. Knowing what it feels like to be stuck in that rut, having overcome depression myself, I took every opportunity that I could to interrupt her patterns of beating herself up. Interrupt it how? Anything! Anything that shocks the system, creates a bump in the road, throws a wrench in the gears.
Breaking a habit or pattern, good or bad needs to happen in the moment. Because it comes down to reconditioning your mind AND BODY: nervous system, muscle tension, physiology, posture, gestures, etc. Just like training for anything, sports, business, speaking, sales, to name a few, reconditioning takes practice, persistence, and patience. Removing old habits and patterns and putting in new ones is hard to do without something reflecting back to us. Which is why having someone on your side helping you, makes all the difference, like a friend, coworker, sibling, or coach.
One of the other things that I suggested to her, is to own her habits and quirks. Own it? Exactly, take control of it by figuring out a fun and empowering way to be open and honest. Something like saying, “Oh, don’t mind me, I have a case of beat-myself-up-itis.”
When you own your quirks you gain power and confidence in any situation. It actively takes away any ammo that someone else could potentially use. If you’re ok with it upfront, what can they do if you do happen to fall in your own trap subconsciously? Not much. When you can effectively own your habits, patterns, beliefs, appearance(?) several neat things happen:
- Lowers the tension and expectations from others around you. Nobody’s perfect but almost everybody needs to be reminded of it.
- Introduces humor and humility and gives other an excuse to be ok with their own quirks.
- Draws the habit into your awareness which will let you make a different choice if you want.
- Communicates honesty, authenticity, which is vital for trust and better relationships
- Disarms people who might hold it against you, which is usually a subconscious, automatic reaction from them anyway.
One of the hardest things is to be open and honest about a “flaw.” Because many of us have been conditioned to believe that we shouldn’t show our foibles. So recruit some trusted help. Stay away from spouses & family since they might be part of the original conditioning. Give yourself a winning edge by recruiting a friend or like a coach like me, that isn’t emotionally involved. Send me and email at any time. Given what I’ve overcome in my life, I’m always more than happy to get anyone to take those crucial first steps. Just let me know if I can help. When will you be ready to remove the blocks and startliving and extrodinary life? You don’t have anything to lose, and everything to gain.
Related:
Take A Quantum Leap In Your Productivity And Results
Steve Jobs: Stay Hungry Stay Foolish
January 10, 2007 by Ryan Merlin · 1 Comment
While rummaging around and doing more research into Apple, I’ve found so much great stuff especially on Steve Jobs. No matter what you do or what your goals are, this is the kind of person you want to role model. A true example in excellence. Especially considering he’s a college dropout.
I found this video which I saw a while back and you might have already seen this also, but it’s too good to pass up watching again. This is Steve Job commencement address to Stanford in 2005.
Following my intuition turned out to be priceless.You have to trust in something. Trust that the dots will connect in the future….and will give you the confidence to follow your heart…and that will make all the difference.
I’d been rejected, but I was still in love [on getting fired from Apple]
I you haven’t found what you love yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.
If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.
If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do today?Death is the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it by living someone else’s life.
Stay Hungry Stay Foolish!
Here’s to you. Dare To Be Great!!
This Week’s Power Topic – Money – Your Surrounding Environment
November 30, 2006 by Ryan Merlin · 2 Comments
From This Weeks Power Topic – Money
In working on understanding your own beliefs about money, take a second and write down the 5 people that you have the most contact with in your life. Think clearly about those 5 people;
- How do they view money?
- How do they make money?
- How do they spend money?
- How much do they have?
- Do they talk about money?
- Do they take calculated risk, or do they gamble?
Think about it. These are just a few questions but begin to really paint a picture of where a lot of your influence comes from. If you want to be rich, you have to condition your mind to think rich. Even the strongest people are influenced by their environment to some degree. The key is to understand how much and in what ways that happens. But this is where you always have the important choice to make; are you going to create your environment or let it create you?
Where you are at in your life right now is the sum of all your decisions, thoughts, beliefs, influences and resources. And the same mind that got you to this point is not going to get you to where you want to go. So start giving yourself new input. But first you have to create some space
- Stop. That’s right, stop right now anything that you’re doing (ie. reading my blog).
- Understand where you are at now. What’s good, what’s not?
- Decide what you really want. Where do you want to be?
- Name 1 or 2 people that are there right now. People that you can understand and model from.
- Get excited! think to yourself, “I can do that too!”, of course you can.
- Now: Act On It!
Create a supportive environment by surrounding yourself with those people that can push you forward towards where you want to go. What would it take to have someone with the influence you want show up in your list of 5 people?
Winning is a habit, built by taking little steps at a time towards your goal. Unfortunately so is losing. That’s why teams like the Bulls, Yankees; Companies like Google, Whole Foods; and People like Warren Buffett, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, are Winners, is that they’ve learned to develop that Habit of Winning. The ability to consistently take small steps to constantly improve and become the best. They cut out any dis-traction. Do you have your list of influence you want in your life? I know I do.
You don’t have to be great, to become great!
Related Posts:
How To Raise Children To Be Rich
“Mind the Gap”
Surrounding Context & Determining Value
Secrets of Greatness
This Week’s Power Topic – Money – Surrounding Context & Determining Value
November 29, 2006 by Ryan Merlin · Leave a Comment
One of the sub-notes that really stuck with me from Paul Graham’s Mind The Gap article was that you can’t measure anything without the context surrounding it, in this case value and buying power. Relativity of Money, (Einstein meets Warren Buffett), that you not only have to understand the picture but also the frame surrounding it.
What does that mean? It’s not only about what you have now, what you really want, or what you’re doing to get there; You also have to understand the system, or the rules of the game if you will. What are the rules? Do you understand them? Who makes the rules? Can you change the rules? Money is only a reflection of value. What creates value in our society at this point in time? What creates loss? Can you anticipate how that will change?
What’s fascinating is what happens when the rules are confused with opinions. For example:
Who determines how much you are worth, really?
An opinion from your parents? How much your boss says she’ll pay you? Maybe a teacher in school said you’re lazy or a trouble maker?
Think about it. If you had to write down on paper right now, the total of how much you’re worth, what would you write? Does that include what you could be worth? Who determines how big or little that number is? Is that the number that YOU would choose?
Some other thoughts:
- What determines what you really think you want? (which is relative to the time period anyway, right?)
- What are the steps you can take to leverage OPM, or maybe more importantly in the Information Age, Other People’s Time.
This Week’s Power Topic – Money – "Mind The Gap"
November 28, 2006 by Ryan Merlin · 1 Comment
http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
Do yourself a huge favor, take a break for a few minutes and read this, this article is fantastic! It is probably one of the best articles that I’ve ever found, for understanding personal and society concepts of money, wealth & success. This is a complete essay and is pretty long but based on this:
Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?
I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?
Some Great Quotes:
…wealth is not money. Money is just a convenient way of trading one form of wealth for another. …few of us create wealth directly for ourselves. Mostly we create wealth for other people in exchange for money, which we then trade for the forms of wealth we want. In the real world, wealth is something you have to create, not something that’s distributed by Daddy. And since the ability and desire to create it vary from person to person, it’s not made equally. Will technology increase the gap between rich and poor? It will certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive. The only thing technology can’t cheapen is brand. Which is precisely why we hear ever more about it. Brand is the residue left as the substantive differences between rich and poor evaporate. But what label you have on your stuff is a much smaller matter than having it versus not having it. Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don’t see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren’t doing it, or (c) that they aren’t getting paid for it.
Bottom Line – Wealth is created through vision, change, focus, determination, work smarter, not harder. THE ONLY WAY to get rich, is to produce more value for others than they would have otherwise. What is that value that you have to give? What is your gift to the world?
Paul Graham – is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer.