The Systems Mindset by Sam Carpenter

• Almost always, it's better to get the various wheels of your life rolling immediately and at maximum efficiency.
• Now is all there is.
• Your future results will be determined by the systems that are executing in this moment.
• Your personal peace will arrive after you secure control of your mechanical world.
• First, find a way to control you.
• Get good at what you do. As you improve your expertise in a particular area, pay attention to feedback, tweak incessantly, and become more efficient at creating value for others, and getting ahead will happen almost spontaneously.
• Personal control is a good thing, and you want as much of it as you can get.
• You are the supreme commander of you!
• Your life is a collection of individual systems!
• Your whole existence and all the world around you is an immense collection of independent systems and subsystems.
• Via a host of separate processes, our lives are spent in a constant quest for control.
• A system is a linear sequence of steps that execute over time, leading to a result.
• There is no disputing that each result of your life came about because of a series of steps that executed over a period of time.
• This is the absurdly simple blueprint: If you put consistent effort into system improvement; you'll reach your goal of living the exact life you want.
• Your world is unsatisfactory because you are not deliberately and intensely controlling the machinery that created your life results.
• If you want a different result form a system, you must go inside it, and adjust its configuration.
• For real, tangible improvement to occur in your life, you must make mechanical changes within it.
• Get mechanical control first and then, I promise, the emotional control will follow.
• Here's how to use Ockham's law in everyday life: When there is a decision to be made and one of the solutions is more complex than the other, and you really, really can't decide which solution to take, pick the simplest option.
• Personal freedom--meaning, among other things, lots of money and spare time--is a direct result of creating value for others.
• There is a connection between feeling good and accomplishment, but the accomplishment comes first while the "feeling good" tags along behind as a by-product.
• Once a Major is established, every action and decisions that's made, large or small, should contribute to the betterment of the Major, while contrary actions and decisions are to be avoided.
• I ruthlessly take care of things now.
• What matters is the machinery.
• Your life is in the here and now, and it's entirely up to you to either work within your circle to make ti what you want it to be, or to stand by paralyzed, fretting about the things you can't control.
• Identify the most important system elements of your life on paper, declare them equal in importance, and then spend most of your day focusing on the system elements of each.
• Being able to decisively walk away from a dead-end scenario like this is a powerful personal attribute.
• I like the automate-delegate-delete formula because it simplifies decisions making.
• If you're going to communicate, send your message now.
• Be militant about protecting your focus time.
• Do what you say you're going to do.
• As the leader of my business, and in my personal life, my job is to envision tasks and then, whenever I can pull it off, quickly give those tasks to other people to complete.
• My job is to decide what must be done, not to do the work.
• The brain is not capable of processing more than one thought at a time.
• The world is a vast collection of individual systems.
• Stop fire-killing and expend your time and energy on incremental system-improvement efforts that will deliver the life results you want.