"The Charisma Myth" by Olivia Fox Cabane

• Charisma is a skill that you can learn and practice.
• Charisma gets people to like you, trust you, and want to be led by you.
• Charisma is the result of specific nonverbal behaviors. Its presence depends on whether or not someone is exhibiting these behaviors.
• The equation that produces charisma is actually fairly simple. All you have to do is give the impression that you possess both high power and high warmth, since charismatic behaviors project a combination of these two qualities.
• Presence turns out to be the real core component of charisma, the foundation upon which all else is built.
• Three quick tips to gain an instant charisma boost in conversation:
• Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences.
• Reduce how quickly and how often you nod.
• Pause for two full seconds before you speak.
• To be successful, you have to be willing to put in the effort of applying what you read.
• Charismatic behavior can be broken down into three core elements: presence, power, and warmth. These elements depend on both on our conscious behaviors and on factors we don’t consciously control.
• When we’re not fully present in an interaction, people will see it.
• When you’re perceived as disingenuous, it’s virtually impossible to generate trust, report, or loyalty. And it’s impossible to be charismatic.
• Presence is a learnable skill. Like any other ability, you can increase it with practice and patience.
• Being present means simply having a moment-to-moment awareness of what’s happening. It means paying attention to what’s going on rather than being caught up in your own thoughts.
• Because so few of us are ever fully present, if you can manage even a few moments of full presence from time to time, you’ll make quite an impact.
• The very next time you’re in a conversation, try to regularly check whether your mind is fully engaged or whether it is wandering elsewhere.
• Being seen as powerful means being perceived as able to affect the world around us, whether through influence on or authority over others, large amounts of money, expertise, intelligence, sheer physical strength, or high social status. We look for clues of power in someone's appearance, in others’ reaction to this person, and, most of all, in the person’s body language.
• Warmth, simply put, is goodwill toward others. Warmth tells us whether or not people will want to use whatever power they have in our favor.
• Warmth is asses almost entirely through body language and behavior; it’s evaluated more directly than power.
• Both power and warmth are necessary conditions for charisma.
• For charisma, your body language matters for more than your words do. No matter how powerful your message r how skillfully crafted your pitch, if your body language is wrong, you won’t be charismatic.
• Our body language expresses our mental state whether we like it or not.
• Charismatic behaviors must originate in your mind.
• Individuals with strong internal skills are aware of what exactly is happening inside them and know how to handle it.
• Knowing your internal world starts with one key insight upon which all charisma is built: your mind can’t tell fact from fiction. This is the one dimension of your internal world that can help you get into the right charismatic mental state at will, and almost instantly.
• Because your brain cannot distinguish imagination from reality, imaginary situations cause your brain to send your body the same commands as it would for a real situations. Whatever your mind believes, your body will manifest. Just be getting into a charismatic mental state, your body will manifest a charismatic body language.
• The mind-over-body effect also has a corresponding downside, called the nocebo effect. In this case, the mind creates toxic consequences in the body in reaction to completely fictional causes.
• Increasing your charisma requires first knowing which internal obstacles are currently inhibiting your personal charisma potential.
• Most of us tend to interpret events--whether they’re personal or impersonal--as relating to us.
• Any physical discomfort that affects your visible, external state--your body language--even slightly may affect how charismatic you are perceived to be.
• Whenever you interact with someone, assume that he or she will feel that whatever you do relates to him or to here.
• Counteracting charisma-impairing physical discomfort is simple:
• prevent
• recognize
• remedy or explain
• As much as you can, plan ahead to ensure you’re physically comfortable.
• People may gain valuable confidence, and therefore charisma, from feeling that they look impressive even if their clothing is not comfortable. It’s really up to you to decide: is the discomfort worth the gain in confidence?
• Check in with your face from time to time; notice if it is tense. If you realize that something has created tension in your face, do something about it.
• Knowing how to skillfully handle mental discomfort is even more important than knowing how to handle physical discomfort.
• Anxiety is a serious drawback to charisma.
• The minute our brain registers ambiguity, it flashes an error signal. Uncertainty registers as a tension: something that must be corrected before we can feel comfortable again.
• It’s worth learning how to handle uncertainty, not just because it increases charisma but also because the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of success in business.
• The single most effective technique I’ve found to alleviate the discomfort of uncertainty is the responsibility transfer.
• The very act of comparing and evaluating hinders our ability to be fully present. Trying to optimize both impairs our presence and creates anxiety due to the pressure of finding the best possible choice.
• Few things impact people’s performance more than how they feel about themselves.
• Physiological negativity can have real physical consequences.
• Self-criticism is one of the most common obstacles to great performance in any field.
• Self-doubt, simply put, is lack of confidence in our own ability to achieve something: we doubt our capacity to do it or our capacity to learn how to do it.
• With greater responsibility comes greater internal doubt as the cost of failure gets higher and higher.
• Negativity exists to spur you to action, to either resolve the problem or get out of the situation. Feelings like fear or anxiety are designed to get you to do something. They’re uncomfortable because they’re “designed” to be uncomfortable.
• Skillfully handling any difficult experience is a three-step process: destigmatize discomfort, neutralize negativity, and rewrite reality.
• Destigmatizing an experience means reducing its power simply by understanding that it’s normal, common, and nothing to be anxious about or ashamed of. Feeling internal discomfort and negativity is a natural part of life. Everyone experiences it.
• Shame is the real killer. Of all the emotions that human beings can feel, it is one of the most toxic to health and happiness.
• Shame hits us so powerfully because it conveys a message about our fundamental acceptability as human beings.
• The next step in handling internal negativity is to neutralize negative thoughts. The best way to do this is to realize that your thoughts aren’t necessarily accurate at all.
• Our mind’s view of reality can be, and often is, completely distorted.
• When your brain spins negative scenarios, remind yourself that you may not be getting an accurate perception of reality. Your brain might be following its negativity bias, playing up some elements more than others, or omitting some positives entirely.
• Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it.
• Once the fight-or-flight response is aroused, it’s hard to quiet down. Anger is a difficult emotion to flush out of your system.
• Deciding to change your belief about what happened effectively decreases the brain’s stress levels.
• Deciding to change beliefs is a far more effective and healthier solution than attempting to repress or ignore emotions.
• They key questions are: Which mental state would be most useful in this situation? And which version of reality would help you get there? For charisma, you can use this technique whenever a situation threatens your level of warmth or confidence.
• Being comfortable with discomfort is a secret weapon.
• Focusing on the minute sensations of your physical discomfort serves a dual purpose: it gives your mind something concrete to focus on other than its growing conviction that this situation is unbearable.
• The ability to handle discomfort is a highly valuable skill.
• Because of its powerful mental and physiological effects, visualization is one of the most effective charisma-boosting tools available.
• An alternative to visualization is to select key phrases to mentally focus on.
• Because physiology affects psychology, creating certain movements or postures can bring up specific emotions in your mind.
• Visualization is indeed a powerful tool. Of all the charisma boosting techniques, this is the one I recommend making a permanent part of your toolkit. If you gain nothing else from this book, this one technique will make a critical difference to your charisma.
• One way to invoke a sense of gratitude is to focus on little things that are physically present.
• Another good gratitude-enhancing tools is to view your life through a third-person lens, writing a narrative about yourself cast in a positive light.
• Goodwill is the second step on the road to accessing warmth and, ultimately, charisma. Using goodwill in your daily interactions can instantly infuse your body language with more warmth, kindness, care, and compassion--all very charismatic qualities.
• Goodwill is the simple state of wishing others well. You can think of it as a mental muscle that can be strengthened through practice.
• One simple but effective way to start is to try to find three things you like about the person you want to feel goodwill toward. No matter whom it is you’re talking to, find three things to appreciate or approve of.
• Goodwill means the you wish someone well without necessarily knowing how they’re feeling.
• Empathy means that you understand what they feel; perhaps you’ve had a similar experience in the past.
• Compassion is empathy plus goodwill: you understand how they feel, and you wish them well.
• First comes empathy, the ability to understand what someone is failing, to detect distress; second, sympathy, being emotionally moved by distress; and third, compassion, which arises with the desire to care for the well-being of the distressed person.
• Self-confidence is our belief in our ability to do or to learn how to do something.
• Self-esteem is how much we approve of or value ourselves. It’s often a comparison-based evaluation.
• Self-compassion is how much warmth we can have for ourselves, especially when we’re going through a difficult experience.
• The higher one’s level of self-compassion, the lower one’s level of self-pity.
• Self-compassion is feeling that what happened to you is unfortunate, wheres self-pity is feeling that what happened to you is unfair.
• Self-pity can lead to resentment or bitterness, and to feeling more isolated and alienated. In contrast, self-compassion often leads to increased feelings of connectedness.
• Emotions and body language are so linked that adopting a certain posture or facial expression will, in fact, create the corresponding feelings in your mind.
• You can reverse-engineer many emotions be adopting the corresponding body language.
• Willpower is a bit like a muscle that fatigues depending on how much we use it. Exerting willpower physically fatigues us. It is a finite resource, so be strategic about where and when you expend it.
• Be aware that everything that enters your mind affects your internal state.
• Stay charismatic by regularly using all the tools you’ve learned.
• Just as there are different leadership and personality styles, there are also different charisma styles.
• Focus charisma is primarily based on a perception of presence. It gives people the feeling that you are fully present with them, listening to them and absorbing what they say.
• Remember that one of the foundations of charisma is making other people feel good about themselves.
• We assess focus charisma entirely through demeanor.
• Focus charisma requires, of course, the ability to focus and be truly present.
• Focus charisma is appropriate for almost all business situations. It’s particularly useful when you need people to open open and share information.
• Visionary charisma makes others feel inspired; it makes us believe.
• Visionary charisma is so effective, because of our natural discomfort with uncertainty.
• Conveying visionary charisma requires the ability to project complete conviction and confidence in a cause. In this way, visionary charisma is based on power. However, it is also based on warmth.
• The message matters for visionary charisma. This means knowing how to craft a bold vision and knowing how to deliver the message charismatically.
• One of the keys to communicating your visionary charisma is getting yourself into a state of complete conviction, shedding any doubt.
• Kindness charisma is primarily based on warmth. It connects with people’s hearts, and makes them feel welcomed, cherished, embraced, and, most of all, completely accepted.
• The human reaction to authority runs deep; it’s hardwired into our brains.
• Authority charisma is primarily based on a perception of power: the belief that this person has the power to affect our world.
• We evaluate someone’s authority charisma through four indicators: body language, appearance, title, and the reactions of others.
• We are biologically programmed to care about status and to be impressed by it because this instinctive reaction favors our survival: high-status individuals have the power to help or hurt us.
• Your main aim if you want to gain authority charisma is to project power by displaying signs of status and confidence.
• To project power and confidence in your body language, you’ll need to learn how to “take up space” with your posture, reduce non verbal reassurances (such as excessive nodding), and avoid fidgeting.
• Give yourself “introversion breaks” during a social gathering: five-minute pockets of solitude.
• Facial expressions are universal.
• People like people who like them.
• No matter how hard we try to be objective, clothing matters.
• If you want to impress others, look at the range of choices [of clothing] within that environment and choose the upper end.
• The right handshake costs far less and will do far more for you than a designer suit can.
• Having a great handshake is critical to authority charisma.
• An easy way to start interactions in a way that both communicates warmth and sends the conversation down the right path is to offer a compliment about something the person is wearing. Continue with open ended questions.
• The word story has a very strong emotional effect on most people--it sends them straight into storytelling mode, which instantly changes the rapport between the two of you.
• To keep people talking, simple ask open-ended questions.
• When you’re speaking, the one word that should pop up most often in your conversations is not I but you.
• Becoming a charismatic conversationalist means that people will really enjoy being around you, and may be increasingly reluctant to let you go.
• The more charismatic you become, the harder it will be to escape your new found fans.
• What impacts people isn’t the words or content used. Rather, they remember how it felt to be speaking with you.
• Listening skills are an absolute requirement for charisma.
• Three keys to communicating presence: attentive listening, refraining from interrupting, and deliberate pausing.
• Great listening skills start with the right mindset: both the willingness and the mental ability to be present, pay attention, and focus on what the other person is saying.
• Effective listening means behaving in a way that makes whomever you’re speaking with feel truly understood.
• Good listeners know never, ever to interrupt--not even if the impulse to do so comes from excitement about something the other person just said.
• To stop interrupting others could be the single most important skill I’ve learned.
• Great listeners know to let others interrupt them. When someone interrupts you, let them!
• People really do love to hear themselves talk. The more you let them speak, the more they will like you.
• Master listeners know one extra trick, one simple but extraordinarily effective habit that will make people feel truly listened to and understood: they pause before they answer.
• When someone has spoken, see if you can let your facial expression react first, showing that you’re absorbing what they’ve just said and giving their brilliant statement the consideration it deserves. Only then, after about two seconds, do you answer.
• Our minds link the sensations we’re experiencing to the places, people, and physical sensations we notice while we’re experiencing them.
• To be charismatic, you need to create strong positive associations and avoid creating negative ones.
• The next time you’re given a compliment, the following steps will help you skillfully handle the moment:
• Stop.
• Absorb the compliment. Enjoy it if you can.
• Let that second of absorption show on your face. Show the person that they’ve had an impact.
• Thank them. Saying “Thank you very much” is enough, but you can take it a step further by thanking them for their thoughtfulness or telling them that they've made your day.
• Don’t try to impress people. Let them impress you, and they will love you for it.
• Image generation has a powerful impact on emotions and physiological states and a high impact on brain functions.
• When you craft your images and metaphors, try to make them sensory-rich: involve as many of the five senses as possible.
• Attention is a precious resource, just like time and money. Anytime you ask people to listen to what you say or read what you’ve written, you’re asking them to spend both their time and their attention on you. You’re asking them to give you some of their resources.
• The longer you speak, the higher the price you’re making them pay, so the higher the value ought to be.
• Voice fluctuation is the foundation for both vocal warmth and power.
• The degree to which your voice fluctuates affects your persuasiveness and your charisma.
• Increasing voice fluctuation means making your voice vary in any of the following ways: pitch, volume, tone, tempo, or rhythm.
• One classic exercise to hone your projection skills is to imagine that your words are arrows.
• A slow, measured tempo with frequent pauses conveys confidence.
• The only thing you need to do in order to project more warmth in your voice is smile.
• Nonverbal modes of communication are hardwired into our brains much deeper than the more recent language-processing abilities and they affect us far more strongly.
• As a leader, the emotions conveyed by your body language, even during brief, casual encounters, can have a ripple effect through your team or even your entire company.
• The potency of your emotional contagion is one good measure of your level of charisma.
• Imitating someone’s body language is an easy way to establish trust and rapport.
• When you consciously mirror someone’s body language, you activate deep instincts of trust and liking.
• Because people focus primarily on themselves while interacting they usually won’t notice you’re mirroring unless you are exceedingly obvious about it.
• Once you’re in a mirrored position, spend your entire listening time in that mode: as long as you’re listening, match your body language to hers.
• Being charismatic means making others feel comfortable, at ease, and good about themselves when they are around us.
• Good eye contact is incredibly important.
• Eye contact is one of the main ways charismatic masters make you feel the you are the most important person in the room.
• Keep eye contact for three full seconds at the end of your interaction with someone.
• Two of the most common eye contact issues people have are the lack of eye contact due to shyness and lack of eye contact due to distraction.
• Charismatic eye contact means switching to a softer focus. This immediately relaxes our eyes and face, and quiets down our stress system.
• Few things impair charisma more than bad eye contact and few things gain you charisma points more than improving your eye contact.
• People simply accept what you project.
• We read confidence by how much space people are willing to take up.
• Your job is to learn to take up space and get comfortable doing so.
• High status, high-confidence body language is characterized by how few movements are made. Composed people exhibit a level of stillness, which is sometimes described as poise.
• When you want to increase your poise, there are three major issues to look out for. The first is excessive or rapid nodding. The second hindrance is excessive verbal reassurance. The third issue is restlessness or fidgeting.
• Be aware that broadcasting too much power can come across as either arrogant or intimidating for some people.
• Every time someone sees you, their perception of you is filtered through the context in which you both operate: their internal state and their persona and cultural filters.
• We all crave honest appreciation.
• People are incredibly susceptible to praise.
• The most effective and credible compliments are those that are both personal and specific.
• Hostility is often nothing but the external manifestation of internal turmoil.
• When you’re delivering unpleasant new of any kind, your body language is everything.
• The right body language for delivering bad news is one of warmth: care, concern, understanding, and empathy. Essentially, demonstrate as much kindness charisma as you can.
• Human beings remember “firsts” and we tend to remember “lasts” as well.
• Having a disagreement or a conflict can actually improve a relationship and be a great thing in the end.
• When apologizing your first concern is to let the other person have their say. The simplest and most effective way to do so is just to listen: give them the complete presence of focus charisma.
• Once you’re sure that you fully understand the complaint, and if you agree that the fault was yours, a true-blue apology is in order. A simple “I’m very sorry” delivered with full presence and full warmth can work wonders.
• To communicate presence try closing your eyes while listening.
• Stay standing and walk around while focusing entirely on the phone call.
• Do not answer the phone in a warm and friendly manner. Instead, answer crisply and professionally. Then, only after you hear who is calling, let warmth or even enthusiasm pour forth in your voice. This simple technique is an easy and effective way to make people feel special.
• Write your email as you normally would, but before you send it, simply cut and post so that whatever pertains to the other person appears first and most prominently.
• Select the single most important idea you want to convey and make it as crystal clear and easy to understand as you possible can. Ideally, you should be able to articulate your message in one sentence.
• Within your main message, have three to five key supporting points.
• The human brain thinks in triads, and it cannot immediately comprehend numbers greater than four.
• Stories have a particularly strong impact on people.
• For your stories to be most effective, choose characters that are similar to the people in your audience to make them more relatable and make them as entertaining (and short!) as a Hollywood sneak preview.
• Charisma takes practice.
• Moving comfortably around the stage will make you appear much more confident, powerful, and charismatic.
• It takes courage to pause, but pausing regularly during your presentations is an important skill to acquire. It’s one of the hallmarks of effective speakers and really is one of the key tools for great speaking. Throughout your speech, pause frequently, deliberately.
• When you walk on stage, come to the center, face the audience, and stop. Remain completely silent as you count three full seconds while slowly sweeping your eyes across the crowd and making eye contact. Nothing rivets and audience's attention like this kind of silence.
• The single most important guideline for a successful speech is simple: make it about them, not about you.
• It’s easier to be perceived as charismatic during a crisis because people facing an emergency are more readily affected by a leader's magnetism; they become “charisma hungry.”
• Express high expectations. Sometimes, simply assigning to people the labels you want them to live up to is enough.
• Expressing high performance expectations while communicating a high degree of confidence in their ability to meet those expectations is the hallmark of charismatic leadership.
• To be charismatic, your vision must vividly illustrate the difference between the way things are now and the way they could be. Charismatic leaders often point out deficiencies in the status quo, contrast this picture to a glorious future, and show how they intend to get there.
• Having a vision isn’t enough; you also must be able to communicate it.
• In times of crisis, people instinctively turn to individuals who are bold, confident, and decisive.
• Giving people a sense of ownership for your success is a great way to prevent resentment and engender good feelings, such as pride and loyalty, instead.
• Because charismatic people seem endowed with extra powers, we expect more of them than we do of others. We expect greater results and will not be content, much less impressed, with good but not extraordinary performance,
• Charisma has three essential components: presence, power, and warmth.
• Being present--paying attention to what’s going on rather than being caught up in your thoughts--can yield immense rewards. When you exhibit presence, those around you feel listened to, respected, and valued.
• Because your body language telegraphs your internal state to those around you, in order to be charismatic--to exhibit presence, power, and warmth--you must display charismatic body language.
• Because your mind can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, be creating a charismatic internal state your body language will authentically display charisma.
• In terms of achieving charisma, your internal state is critical. Get the internal state right, and the right charismatic behaviors and body language will pour forth automatically.
• Any internal discomfort--either physical or mental--can impair how you feel, how you perform, and how others perceive you.
• Physical tension caused by something as simple as the sun in your eyes produces the same changes in body language as a more serious discomfort, like anxiety or irritation.
• Prevention is optimal: plan ahead to ensure comfort in clothing location, and timing.
• Aim to stay aware of any physical sensation of discomfort. If physical discomfort arises during an interaction act promptly to alleviate or explain it.
• Use techniques such as the responsibility transfer to reduce the feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, and dissatisfaction that play out in your body language and inhibit your charisma.
• Understand that mental negativity such as anxiety, dissatisfaction, self-criticism, or self-doubt is normal and something that everyone experiences.
• To be charismatic, you must first learn to overcome the primary obstacle to charisma: internal discomfort.
• Skillfully handle internal discomfort with a three-step process: destigmatize your discomfort, neutralize your negative thoughts, and rewrite your perception of reality.
• Destigmatize and dramatic uncomfortable feelings be remembering that they are survival instincts and a natural part of the human experience. Think of others who’ve gone through this before--especially people you admire--and see yourself as part of a community of human beings experiencing the same feeling at the same moment.
• Neutralize unhelpful negative thoughts by remembering that the mind often distorts reality and filters your environment to highlight the negative. Think of your negative thoughts as graffiti on a wall--you may find it an ugly sight, but just because you see an ugly sight doesn’t mean you’re an ugly person.
• Rewrite reality by considering a few helpful alternatives to your current perspective. For maximum effect, write down your new realities by hand and describe them in vivid detail.
• For advanced practice, delve into the physical sensations of discomfort. Focusing on the sensations gives your mind something concrete to focus on, drawing your attention away from your feeling that the experience is unbearable.
• Creating an optimal mental state is crucial to unleashing your full charisma potential.
• Visualization can help you create the right mental state and this the right charismatic body language. To make visualizations most effective, vividly engage all five sense in your imagination.
• You can increase both warmth and confidence by practicing gratitude, goodwill, and compassion for others as well as for yourself.
• Just as professional athletes and performers do, plan a gradual warm-up to reach your peak charismatic performance. Before important events, avoid experiences that would impair your mental state and plan warmth- and confidence-boosting activities instead.
• Your body affects your mind. Flip the visualization technique on its head and practice adopting the right posture and facial expressions to access more of almost any desired internal state.
• Choosing the right charisma style depends on your personality, goals, and the situation.
• You can alternate among different charisma styles or even blend them together. Don’t force yourself into a charisma style that is just too awkward for you. Doing so would negatively affect how you feel and how others perceive you.
• The more charisma styles you can access, the more versatile and confident you will be.
• Stretch out of your comfort zone in low-stakes situations.
• Let goodwill by your safety net. Coming from a place of genuine goodwill gives you the best chance of getting your charisma right.
• First impressions happen within seconds and can affect not only the rest of the interaction but also the rest of your relationship with that person.
• People feel most comfortable with those who are similar to them in some way, including appearance and behavior. Do your homework and decide how much you want to adapt your dress and word choice to your environment.
• A good handshake can go a long way. Likewise, a bad one can leave an unfavorable and lasting first impression. It’s worth spending some time perfecting the right way to greet someone.
• Great conversationalists keep the spotlight on the other person and make them feel good about themselves.
• Know how to gracefully exit a conversation, leaving others with positive feelings.
• Power, presence, and warmth are important for both charismatic speaking and charismatic listening.
• Great listening skills are the key to communicating charismatic presence.
• Never interrupt people, and occasionally pause a second or two before you answer.
• People associate you with the feelings you produce in them. Avoid creating negative associations: don’t make them feel bad or wrong.
• Make people feel good, especially about themselves. Don’t try to impress them--let them impress you, and they will love you for it.
• Get graphic: use pictures, metaphors, and sensory-rich language to convey a compelling, charismatic message.
• Use as few words as possible, and deliver as much value as possible: entertainment, information, or good feelings.
• To emanate vocal power, use a slow, measured tempo; insert pauses between your sentences; and drop your intonation at the end.
• To emanate vocal warmth, you need to do only one thing: smile, or even just imagine smiling.
• While our words speak to a person’s logical mind, our nonverbal communication speaks to a person’s emotional mind.
• Nonverbal communication amplifies verbal communication when the two are congruent.
• When verbal and nonverbal messages contradict, we tend to trust what we see in the other person’s body language more than what we hear them say.
• Through emotional contagion, your emotions can spread to other people. As a leader, the emotions conveyed by your body language, even during brief casual encounters, can have a ripple effect on your team or even your entire company.
• To communicate warmth, aim to make people feel comfortable: respect their personal space, mirror their body language, and keep your eyes relaxed.
• When people come to you in need of reassurance, first mirror their body language, the lead them to more calm, open, and confident, positions.
• When people are defensive, break their body language lock by handing them something to look at or something they will have to lean forward to take.
• To project power, take up space (be the big gorilla) and be still (adopt a regal posture).
• Cut out verbal and nonverbal reassurances like head bobbing and excessive uh-huh-ing.
• Approach difficult people individually and choose the right charisma style for each person and each situation.
• Express appreciation for their help or positive impact: it'll make them rationalize their actions in your favor.
• When delivering bad news, get into a state of compassion, and show warmth and care in your timing, body language, and verbal language.
• When delivery criticism, get into a state of goodwill, and focus the request for change on specific behaviors rather than on personal traits.
• When delivering apologies, show presence in hearing them out completely, show warmth in your apology, and show power in how you’ll correct the mistake or prevent its reoccurrence.
• With phone and email communication, use all the tools you’ve learned for in-person communication.
• Your presentation should have one main, simple, crystal-clear message, supported by three to five key points.
• Support each point with an entertaining story, interesting statistic, concrete example, or vivid metaphor.
• Make your presentation short and entertaining. Watch the value of each sentence.
• Arrive early if you can; walk the stage to visualize and own it.
• Use a wide, well-balanced stance and take up as much space as possible on stage. Limit superfluous gestures that distract the audience’s attention.
• Speak as if you’re sharing a secret with the audience, telling them something special and confidential.
• Use smiles and fluctuation to warm your voice.
• Keep eye contact for one to two seconds per person.
• Pause frequently and deliberately to show confidence and add drama as well as give yourself a chance to breathe.
• Charisma is particularly effective in crisis situations.
• Stay in a calm, confident internal state so that your emotional contagion effect is positive.
• Express high expectations of people, and communicate your complete confidence in their ability to rise to the occasion.
• Articulate a bold vision, show your confidence in your ability to realize that vision, and act decisively to achieve it.
• Charisma has a few possible downsides: you can become the target of envy and resentment, others can reveal too much during your interactions, you are held to a higher standard, it can be lonely at the top, and charisma may work even when it shouldn’t.
• To mitigate envy and resentment, reflect or transfer raise and glory. Highlight others who deserve praise and give people ownership of your success.
• To stop people from oversharing, interject a “me, too” story, or help them stigmatize if it’s too late to do so.
• Showing vulnerability will make you more likeable and more relatable, and will prevent people from expecting you to be superhuman, all-powerful, all-knowing, and always right. Charisma is a powerful tool--use it responsibly.

"The First 20 Hours" by Josh Kaufman

• Being the best in the world at anything, even for a little while, requires years of relentless practice. If you’re not willing to put in the time and effort, you’ll be overshadowed by those who do.
• Developing world-class mastery takes time.
• Word-class mastery may take ten thousand hours of focused effort, but developing the capacity to perform well enough for your own purposes usually requires far less of an investment.
• Deliberate practice is the core of skill acquisition.
• Embracing the idea of sufficiency is the key to rapid skill acquisition.
• If you ultimately decide to master a skill, you’ll have a better chance of success if you start with twenty hours of rapid skill acquisition.
• By knowing what you’re getting into, learning the fundamentals, practicing intelligently, and developing a practice routine, you’ll make progress more quickly and consistently, and you’ll achieve expert status in record time.
• Rapid skill acquisition is a process--a way of breaking down the skill you’re trying to acquire into the smallest possible parts, identifying which of those parts are the most important, then deliberately practicing those elements first.
• Rapid skill acquisition has four major steps:
• Deconstructing a skill into the smallest possible subskills;
• Learning enough about each subskill to be able to practice intelligently and self-correct during practice;
• Removing physical, mental, and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice;
• Practicing the most important subskills for at least twenty hours.
• The desire for instant gratification is one of the primary reasons people don’t acquire new skills very quickly.
• The amount of time it will take you to acquire a new skill is largely a matter of how much concentrated time you’re willing to invest in deliberate practice and smart experimentation and how good you need to become to perform at the level you desire.
• Academic learning and credentialing have almost zero overlap with skill acquisition, let alone achieving it quickly.
• Learning concepts related to a skill helps you self-edit or self-correct as you’re practicing.
• Learning helps you plan, edit, and correct yourself as you practice. That’s why learning is valuable.
• If you want to acquire a new skill, you must practice it in context. Learning enhances practice, but it doesn’t replace it. If performance matters, learning alone is never enough.
• There’s a huge difference between skill acquisition and training. Training, in this context, means improving a skill you’ve already acquired through repetition. It’s what happens after you’ve acquired a basic skill if you want to keep improving.
• Preparation and conditioning can make some forms of skill acquisition easier, but they can never replace practice.
• Skill acquisition requires practicing the skill in question. It requires significant periods of sustained, focused concentration. It requires creativity, flexibility, and the freedom to set your own standard of success.
• Creativity, flexibility, and freedom to experiment--the essential elements of rapid skill acquisition--are antithetical to the credentialing process.
• If you want to get good at anything where real-life performance matters, you have to actually practice that skill in context. Study, by itself, is never enough.
• You can improve any skill, provided you’re willing to practice.
• As you learn any new skill, physical or mental, the neurological wiring of your brain changes as you practice it.
• Over time, your neurons begin to fire in more efficient patterns in response to the feedback you receive from your environment as you practice.
• The three-stage model of skill acquisition:
• Cognitive (Early) Stage--understanding what you’re trying to do, researching, thinking about the process, and breaking the skill into manageable parts.
• Associative (Intermediate) Stage--practicing the task, noticing environmental feedback, and adjusting your approach based on that feedback.
• Autonomous (Late) Stage--performing the skill effectively and efficiently without thinking about it or paying unnecessary attention to the process.
• Your brain is learning, encoding, and consolidating new skills all the time.
• The more you practice, the more efficient, effective, and automatic the skill becomes.
• Rapid skill acquisition happens naturally when you become so curious and interested in something that other concerns fall away, at least temporarily.
• 10 major principles of rapid skill acquisition:
• Choose a lovable project.
• Focus your energy on one skill at a time.
• Define your target performance level.
• Deconstruct the skill into subskills.
• Obtain critical tools.
• Eliminate barriers to practice.
• Make dedicated time for practice.
• Create fast feedback loops.
• Practice by the clock in short bursts.
• Emphasize quantity and speed.
• The more excited you are about the skill you want to acquire, the more quickly you’ll acquire it.
• You’ll naturally learn things you care about faster than things you don’t.
• If you focus on acquiring your prime skill (that is, your most lovable project) before anything else, you’ll acquire it in far less time.
• One of the easiest mistakes to make when acquiring new skills is attempting to acquire too many skills at the same time.
• Pick one, and only one, new skill you wish to acquire. Put all of your spare focus and energy into acquiring that skill, and place other skills on temporary hold.
• Focusing on one prime skill at a time is absolutely necessary for rapid skill acquisition.
• A target performance level is a simple sentence that defines what “good enough” looks like.
• Once you determine exactly how good you want or need to be, it’s easier to figure out how to get there.
• The best target performance levels seem just out of reach, not out of the realm of possibility.
• Remember, world-class mastery is not the end point of rapid skill acquisition. We’re shooting for capacity and sufficiency at maximum speed, not perfection.
• Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills.
• Once you’ve identified a skill to focus on, the next step is to deconstruct it--to break it down into the smallest possible parts.
• Once the skill is deconstructed sufficiently, it’s much easier to identify which subskills appear to be most important.
• By focusing on the critical subskills first, you’ll make more progress with less effort.
• It’s more effective to focus on the subskills that promise the most dramatic overall returns.
• Deconstructing the skill before you begin also allows you to identify that parts of the skill that aren’t important for beginning practitioners. By eliminating the noncritical subskills or techniques early in the process, you’ll be able to invest more of your time and energy mastering the critical subskills first.
• Taking a moment to identify critical tools before you start practicing saves precious time. By ensuring you have the resources you need before you begin, you maximize your practice time.
• We only have so much willpower at our disposal each day, and it’s best to use that willpower wisely.
• The best way to invest willpower in support of skill acquisition is to use it to remove these soft barriers to practice.
• By rearranging your environment to make it as easy as possible to start practicing, you’ll acquire the skill in far less time.
• “Finding” time is a myth. If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.
• The best approach to making time for skill acquisition is to identify low-value uses of time, then choose to eliminate them.
• I recommend making time for at least ninety minutes of practice each day by cutting low-value activities as much as possible.
• I also recommend pre-committing to completing at least twenty hours of practice. Once you start, you must keep practicing until you hit the twenty hour mark.
• If you’re not willing to invest at least twenty hours up front, choose another skill to acquire.
• “Fast feedback” means getting accurate information about how well you’re performing as quickly as possible. The longer it takes to get accurate feedback, the longer it will take to acquire the skill.
• Fast feedback naturally leads to rapid skill acquisition. If feedback arrives immediately, or with a very short delay, it’s much easier to connect that information to your actions and make the appropriate adjustments.
• The more sources of fast feedback you integrate into your practice, the faster you’ll acquire the skill.
• In the early phases of practicing a new skill, it’s very easy to overestimate how much time you’ve spent practicing. When you’re no good (and you know it), time seems to slow to a crawl, and it feels like you’ve been practicing for a longer period of time that you actually have.
• The more periods of sustained practice you complete, the faster your skill acquisition.
• Set aside time for three to five practice sessions a day, and you'll see major progress in a very short time.
• When you begin to acquire a new skill, it’s tempting to focus on practicing perfectly--a recipe for frustration. Instead of trying to be perfect, focus on practicing as much as you can as quickly as you can, while maintaining “good enough” form.
• Skill is the result of deliberate, consistent practice, and in early-stage practice, quantity and speed trump absolute quality.
• The faster and more often you practice, the more rapidly you’ll acquire the skill.
• First, ensure you’re practicing using form that’s good enough to satisfy your target performance level. Once you’re practicing in good form at least 80 to 90 percent of the time, crank up the speed for faster skill acquisition.
• It doesn’t take much practice at all to go from “very slow and grossly incompetent” to “reasonably fast and noticeably competent.”
• The general pattern of the learning curve looks like this: When you start, you’re horrible, but you improve very quickly as you learn the most important parts of the skill. After reaching a certain level of skill very quickly, your rate of improvement declines, and subsequent improvement becomes much slower.
• It’s all too easy to feel like you’re investing a lot of time in a skill without practicing very much at all.
• The most well-known general method of rapid skill acquisition is immersion: completely changing your environment in a way that results in constant deliberate practice. In general, immersion works.
• Immersion works because it ensures that you complete the crucial first hours of practice without fail: you can’t escape your environment, so the practice happens automatically.
• The downside of immersion is that it usually requires making the skill your primary focus for an extended period of time.
• Take the immersion opportunities as they come, but don’t count on them.
• Learning isn’t the same thing as skill acquisition.
• Doing a bit of research before you jump into practice can save you precious time, energy, and emotional fortitude.
• Learning makes your practice more efficient, which lets you spend more of your practice time working on the most important subskills first.
• 10 major principles of effective learning:
• Research the skill and related topics.
• Jump in over your head.
• Identify mental models and mental hooks.
• Imagine the opposite of what you want.
• Talk to practitioners to set expectations.
• Eliminate distractions in your environments.
• Use spaced repetition and reinforcement for memorization.
• Create scaffolds and checklists.
• Make and test predictions.
• Honor your biology.
• Time spent reading or watching is not time spent practicing.
• The intent of early research is to identify the most important subskills, critical components, and required tools for practice as quickly as possible. The more you know in advance about the skill, the more intelligently you can prepare.
• For rapid skill acquisition, skimming is better than deep reading.
• Early research is one of the best ways to identify critical subskills and ideas, but it’s also very likely you won’t know what they mean yet.
• Noticing you’re confused is valuable. Recognizing confusion can help you define exactly what you’re confused about, which helps you figure out what you’ll need to research or do next to resolve that confusion.
• If you’re not confused by at least half of your early research, you’re not learning as quickly as you’re capable of learning.
• If you start to feel intimidated or hesitant about the pace you’re attempting, you’re on the right track.
• Not being willing to jump in over your head is the single biggest emotional barrier to rapid skill acquisition.
• Mental models are the most basic unit of learning: a way of understanding and labeling an object or relationship that exists in the world.
• As you collect accurate mental models, it becomes easier to anticipate what will happen when you take a specific action.
• Mental models also make it much easier to discuss your experiences with others.
• The more mental models and mental hooks you can identify in your early research, the easier it will be to use them while you’re practicing.
• A counter intuitive way to gain insight into a new skill is to contemplate disasters, not perfection.
• By studying the opposite of what you want, you can identify important elements that aren’t immediately obvious.
• Early learning helps you set appropriate expectations.
• When you jump into acquiring a new skill, it’s very common to underestimate the complexity of the task, or the number of elements involved that are required to perform well.
• Talking to people who have acquired the skill before you will help dispel myths and misconceptions before you invest your time and energy.
• Distractions are enemy number one of rapid skill acquisition.
• Distractions kill focused practice, and lack of focused practice leads to slow (or nonexistent) skill acquisition.
• The most significant sources of distraction come in two forms: electronic and biological.
• The fewer distractions you have while practicing, the more quickly you’ll acquire the skill.
• To make use of material you’ve learned while practicing, you have to be able to recall related ideas quickly.
• Many skills require at least some level of memorization.
• Whenever you learn something new, you’ll probably forget it unless you review the concept within a certain period of time. This repetition reinforces the idea, and helps your brain consolidate it into long-term memory.
• Researchers have found that memory follows a decay curve: new concepts need to be reinforced regularly, but the longer you’ve known a concept, the less regularly you need to review it to maintain accurate recall.
• Spaced repetition and recall is a memorization technique that helps you systematically review important concepts and information on a regular basis.
• It's important to note that skill acquisition is usually much more involved than academic learning.
• Checklists are handy for remembering things that must be done every time you practice. They’re a way to systematize the process, which frees your attention to focus on more important matters.
• Scaffolds are structures that ensure you approach the skill the same way every time.
• Creating scaffolds and checklists make your practice more efficient. They also make your practice easier to visualize, which helps you to take advantage of mental rehearsal, which can help with some forms of physical practice.
• Part of skill acquisition involves experimentation: trying new things to see if they work.
• Getting into the habit of making and testing predictions will help you acquire skills more rapidly.
• The optimal learning cycle appears to be approximately ninety minutes of focused concentration. Any more, and your mind and body will naturally need a break.
• Remember: no practice, no skill acquisition.
• Procedural memory is the term cognitive scientists use for motor skills that happen in a certain order.
• Learning the most important subskills first makes it very easy to keep progressing.
• If you want to acquire a new skill, you have to practice. There is no other way.
• Zero-practice shortcuts don’t exist. No practice, no skill acquisition. It’s as simple as that.
• The major barrier to skill acquisition is not physical or intellectual: it’s emotional.
• Doing something new is always uncomfortable at first, and it’s easy to waste a ton of time and energy thinking about practicing instead of practicing.
• The frustration barrier is deceptively easy to break through: skill acquisition always feels bigger than it actually is.
• By creating time for practice, doing a bit of early research, and leaning into the initial discomfort, you will always see major progress in the first ten to twenty hours of practice.
• Pre-commit to practicing that skill for an hour or so a day for the next month.
• Once you start practicing, you’ll always pick it up more quickly than you expect.
• Break it down, make the time, try new things, and your brain will begin picking up the technique automatically: that’s what brains do.
• The only time you can choose to practice is today.

"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey

• The 7 Habits:
• Habit 1 - Be Proactive
• Habit 2 - Begin with the end in mind
• Habit 3 - Put first things first
• Habit 4 - Think Win/Win
• Habit 5 - Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Habit 6 - Synergize
• Habit 7 - Sharpen the saw
• You always reap what you sow; there is no shortcut.
• "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
• Be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it.
• We will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire.
• Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.
• Dependence is the paradigm of you -- you take care of me; you come through for me; you didn't come through; I blame you for the results.
• Independence is the paradigm of I -- I can do it; I am responsible; I am self-reliant; I can choose
• Interdependence is the paradigm of we -- we can do it; we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together.
• Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.
• Effectiveness lies in the balance -- that I call the P/PC Balance. P stands for production of desired results, the golden eggs. PC stands for production capability, the ability or asset that produces the golden eggs.
• There are three kinds of assets: physical, financial, and human.
• Keeping P and PC in balance makes a tremendous difference in the effective use of physical assets.
• Our most important financial asset is our own capacity to earn. If we don't continually invest in improving our own PC, we severely limit our options.
• One of the immensely valuable aspects of any correct principle is that it is valid and applicable in a wide variety of circumstances.
• The PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
• You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't' buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.
• What matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life.
• Anytime we think the problem is "out there," that thought is the problem. We empower what's out there to control us.
• If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control -- myself.
• The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct it and learn from it.
• Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish?
• The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.
• Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes you because it forces you to think through your priorities deeply, carefully, and to align your behavior with your beliefs.
• Effective management is putting first things first. While leadership decides what "first things" are, it is management that puts them first, day-by-day, moment-by-moment. Management is discipline, carrying it out.
• Organize and execute around priorities.
• The two factors that define an activity are urgent and important. Urgent means it requires immediate attention.
• Urgent things act on us. Urgent matters are usually visible. But so often they are unimportant!
• Importance, on the other hand, has to do with results. If something is important, it contributes to your mission, your values, your high priority goals.
• We react to urgent matters. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more pro-activity. We must act to seize opportunity, to make things happen.
• Time management matrix (aka The Eisenhower Matrix)
• Effective people stay out of Quadrants 3 and 4 because, urgent or not, they aren't important. They also shrink Quadrant 1 down to size by spending more time in Quadrant 2.
• Quadrant 2 is the heart of effective personal management. It deals with things that are not urgent, but are important.
• 80 percent of the results flow out of 20 percent of the activities.
• The enemy of the "best" is often the "good".
• The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
• Quadrant 2 organizing involves four key activities: identifying roles, selecting goals, scheduling, and daily adapting.
• Identifying roles - The first task is to write down your key roles.
• Selecting goals -The next step is to think of two or three important results you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next seven days.
• Scheduling - Now you can look at the week ahead with your goals in mind and schedule time to achieve them.
• Having identified roles and goals, you can translate each goal to a specific day of the week, either as a priority item or, even better, as a specific appointment.
• You may still find that third-generation A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 prioritization gives needed order to daily activities.
• You simply can't think efficiency with people. You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things.
• Frustration is a function of our expectations, and our expectations are often a reflection of the social mirror rather than our own values and priorities. 
• We accomplish all that we do through delegation -- either to time or to other people. If we delegate to time, we think efficiency. If we delegate to other people, we think effectiveness.
• Effectively delegating to other people is perhaps the single most powerful high-leverage activity there is.
• Transferring responsibility to other skilled and trained people enables you to give your energies to other high-leverage activities.
• Delegation means growth, both for individuals and for organizations.
• The key to effective management is delegation.
• There are basically two kinds of delegation: "gofer delegation" and "stewardship delegation."
• Gofer delegation means "go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it's done."
• Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people a choice of method and makes them responsible for results.
• Stewardship delegation involves clear, up-front mutual understanding and commitment regarding expectations in five areas: desired results, guidelines, resources, accountability, and consequences.
• Desired results -- Create a clear, mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished, focusing on what, not how; results, not methods.
• Guidelines -- Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate. The should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation, but should include and formidable restrictions. Point out the potential failure paths, what not to do, but don't tell them what to do.
• Resources -- Identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational resources the person can draw on to accomplish the desired results.
• Accountability -- Set up the standards of performance that will be used in evaluating the results and the specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.
• Consequences -- Specify what will happen, both good and bad, as a results of the evaluation.
• With immature people, you specify fewer desired results and more guidelines, identify more resources, conduct more frequent accountability interviews, and apply more immediate consequences.
• With more mature people, you have more challenging desired results, fewer guidelines, less frequent accountability, and less measurable but more discernible criteria.
• Effective delegation is perhaps the best indicator of effective management simply because it is so basic to both personal and organizational growth.
• Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.
• Really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit.
• To make a deposit, what is important to another person must be as important to you as the other person is to you.
• Unclear expectations in the area of goals also undermine communication and trust.
• The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals.
• Personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits.
• Lack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts.
• Integrity includes but goes beyond honesty. Honesty is telling the truth -- in other words, conforming our word to reality. Integrity is conforming reality to our words -- in other words, keeping promises and fulfilling expectations.
• One of the most important ways to manifest integrity is to be loyal to those who are not present.
• In the Win/Win agreement, the following five elements are made very explicit: desired results, guidelines, resources, accountability, and consequences.
• It is much more ennobling to the human spirit to let people judge themselves than to judge them.
• Discernment is often far more accurate than either observation or measurement.
• There are basically four kinds of consequences (rewards and penalties) that management or parents can control -- financial, psychic, opportunity, and responsibility.
• Financial consequences include things such as income, stock options, allowances, or penalties.
• Psychic or psychological consequences include recognition, approval, respect, credibility, or the loss of them.
• Opportunity includes training, development, perks, and other benefits.
• Responsibility has to do with scope and authority, either of which can be enlarged or diminished.
• When seeking Win/Win solutions: First, see the problem from the other point of view. Second, identify the key issues and concerns (not positions involved). Third, determine what results would constitute a fully acceptable solution. And fourth, identify possible new options to achieve those results.
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication.
• Communication is the most important skill in life.
• When another person speaks, we're usually "listening" at one of four levels: ignoring, pretending, selective listening, or attentive listening. But very few ever practice the fifth level, the highest form of listening, empathic listening.
• Empathic listening means to listen with the intent to understand.
• Empathic listening gets inside the other person’s frame of reference.
• Satisfied needs do not motivate. It's only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival -- to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.
• The human dynamic is more important than the technical dimensions of the deal.
• The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems. The professional learns how to diagnose, how to understand. He also learns how to relate people's needs to his products and services.
• Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways. We evaluate -- we either agree or disagree; we probe -- we ask questions from our own frame of reference; we advise --- we give counsel based on our own experience; or we interpret -- we try to figure people out to explain their motives and behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.
• The skills of empathic listening involve four stages.
• The first and least effective is to mimic contents. Mimicking content is easy. You just listen to the words that come out of someone's mouth and you repeat them.
• The second stage of empathetic listening is to rephrase the content. It's a little more effective, but it's still limited to the verbal communication.
• The third stage brings your right brain into operation. You reflect feeling.
• The fourth stage includes both the second and the third. You rephrase the content and reflect the feeling.
• Knowing how to be understood is the other half of habit 5, and is equally critical in reaching Win/Win solutions.
• The essence of seeking first to understand and then be understood is embodied in the Greek words: ethos, pathos, and logos.
• Ethos is your personal credibility, the faith people have in your integrity and competency.
• Pathos is the empathic side - it's the feeling. It means that you are in alignment with the emotional thrust of another person's communication.
• Logos is the logic, the reasoning part of the presentation.
• Synergy is the essence of principle-centered leadership.
• Simply defined, synergy means that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. One plus one equals three or more.
• The essence of synergy is to value differences -- to respect them, to build on strengths, to compensate for weaknesses.
• Preserve and enhance the greatest asset you have -- you.
• You have four dimensions: physical, spiritual, mental, and social/emotional. Most philosophies of life deal with these dimensions either implicitly or explicitly.
• The physical dimension involves caring effectively for our physical body.
• A good exercise program is one that you can do in your own home and one that will build your body in three areas: endurance, flexibility, and strength.
• The spiritual dimension is your core, your enter, your commitment to your value system.
• Education -- continuing education, continually honing and expanding the mind -- is vital mental renewal.
• It is extremely valuable to train the mind to stand apart and examine its own program.
• There's no better way to inform and expand your mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature. You can get into the best minds that are now or that ever have been in the word. The person who doesn't read is no better off than the person who can't read.
• The social and emotional dimensions of our lives are tied together because our emotional life is primarily, but not exclusively, developed out of and manifested in our relationships with others.
• When I can explain your point of view as well as you can, then I can focus on communicating my point of view to you so that you can understand it as well.
• A life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth.
• Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.
• The harder I work the more I live.
• Most people are a function of the social mirror, scripted by the opinions, the perceptions, the paradigms of the people around them.
• Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.
• Although renewal in each dimension is important, it only becomes optimally effective as we deal with all four dimensions in a wise and balanced way. To neglect any one area negatively impacts the rest.
• You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal.
• To keep progressing, we must learn, commit, and do -- learn, commit, and do -- and learn, commit, and do again.
• Change -- real change -- comes from inside out.
• That which we persist in doing becomes easier - not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.

"The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss

• The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the new rich: time and mobility.
• Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical.
• The DEAL of deal making is also an acronym for the process of becoming a member of the New Rich.
• D - definition
• E - Elimination
• A - Automation
• L - Liberation.
• Inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.
• If you can free your time and location, our money is automatically worth 3-19 times as much.
• Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of w’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it.
• Options--the ability to choose--is real power.
• Sports evolve when sacred cows are killed, when basic assumptions are tested. The same is true in life and in lifestyle design.
• Different is better when it is more effective or more fun.
• Retirement is worst-case-scenario insurance.
• It [retirement] is predicated on the assumption that you dislike what you are doing during the most physically capable years of your life.
• Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive let alone thrive.
• By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable.
• Interest and energy are cyclical.
• Less is not laziness.
• Few people choose to (or are able to) measure the results of their actions and thus measure their contribution in time.
• Focus on being productive instead of busy.
• The timing is never right.
• If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually”, just do it and correct course along the way.
• Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
• If it isn’t going to devastate those around you, try it and then justify it.
• If the potential damage is moderate or in any way reversible, don’t give people the chance to say no.
• Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses.
• Most people are good at a handful of things and utterly miserable at most.
• It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
• Things in excess become their opposite.
• Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.
• Money alone is not the solution.
• “If only I had more money” is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment--now and not later.
• Relative income is more important than absolute income.
• Absolute income is measured using one holy and unalterable variable: the raw and almighty dollar. Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours.
• Distress is bad, eustress is good.
• Distress refers to harmful stimuli that make you weaker, less confident, and less able. Eustress, on the other hand, is stress that is helpful and the stimulus for growth.
• There is no progress without eustress, and the more eustress we can create or apply to our lives, the sooner we can actualize our dreams.
• Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
• Conquering fear = defining fear.
• Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.
• Resolve to do one thing everyday that you fear.
• Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.
• Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.
• Doing big things begins with asking for them properly.
• Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
• Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.
• “I believe that success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have.”
• You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
• The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same.
• No matter how small the task, take the first step now.
• The most important actions are never comfortable.
• To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
• There is a direct correlation between an increased sphere of comfort and getting what you want.
• “One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase, but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” -- Bruce Lee
• Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
• Increase your productivity to increase negotiating leverage for two simultaneous objectives: pay raises and a remote working agreement.
• You need to liberate yourself from the office environment before you can work ten hours a week, because the expectation in that environment is that you will be in constant motion from 9-5.
• Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task in the most economical manner possible.
• Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
• What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
• Maximum income from minimal necessary effort (including minimum number of customers) is the primary goal.
• Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness--lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.
• Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
• It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
• 9-5 is arbitrary.
• Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
• The end product of a shorter deadline is almost inevitable of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.
• Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.
• Most inputs are useless and time is wasted in proportion to the amount that is available.
• The key to having more time is doing less, and there are two paths to getting there, both of which should be used together:
• Define a to-do list.
• Define a not-to-do list.
• Simplicity requires ruthlessness.
• You are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends.
• If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.
• Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities.
• There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day.
• Do not multitask. If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask.
• Stop the back-and-forth and make a decision.
• Stop asking for opinions and start propagating solutions.
• It is important that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.
• Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it
• Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it.
• More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it.
• Learn to be difficult when it counts.
• Check email twice per day, once at 12 noon or just prior to lunch, and again at 4. Never check email first thing in the morning.
• Emergencies are seldom that. People are poor judges of importance and inflate minutes to fill time and feel important.
• Don’t encourage people to chit chat and don’t let them chitchat. Get them to the point immediately.
• From this moment forward, resolve to keep those around you focused and avoid all meetings, whether in person or remote, that do not have clear objective.
• Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.
• It is your job to train those around you to be effective and efficient.
• Meetings should only be held to make decision about a predefined situation, not to define the problem.
• If you absolutely can’t stop a meeting or call from happening, define the end time. If things are well defined, decisions should not take more than 30 minutes.
• “The Puppy Dog Close” just try it and if you don’t like it bring it back.
• If a boss asks for overtime “just this once”, he or she will expect it in the future.
• Batching is the solution to our distracting but necessary time consumers, those repetitive tasks that interrupt the most important.
• There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale.
• Do not work harder when the solution is working smarter.
• Empowerment failure refers to being unable to accomplish a task without first obtaining permission or information.
• It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
• People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
• Realize that bosses are supervisors, not slave masters.
• Establish yourself as a consistent challenger of the status quo and most people will learn to avoid you, particularly if it is in the interest of higher per-hour productivity.
• Limit access to your time, force people to define their requests before spending time with them, and batch routine menial tasks to prevent postponement of more important projects.
• Do not let people interrupt you.
• Create systems to limit your availability via e-mail and phone and deflect inappropriate contact.
• Batch activities to limit setup cost and provide more time for dreamline milestones.
• Set or request autonomous rules and guidelines with occasional review of results.
• Remove the decision bottleneck for all things that are nonfatal if miss performed.
• “No” should be your default answer to all requests.
• Preparing someone to replace you (even if it never happens) will produce an ultra refined set of rules that will cut remaining fat and redundancy from your schedule. Lingering unimportant tasks will disappear as soon as someone else is being paid to do them.
• It is important to take baby steps toward paying others to do work for you. Few do it, which is another reason so few people have their ideal lifestyle.
• Unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it.
• Eliminate before you delegate.
• Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.
• Principle number one is to refine rules and processes before adding people.
• Set an hour cap for simple tasks.
• Never use debit cards for online transactions or with remote assistants.
• Develop the comfort of commanding and not being commanded.
• It’s called the criticism sandwich because you first praise the person for something, then deliver the criticism, and then close with topic-shifting praise to exit the sensitive topic.
• There are a million and one ways to make a million dollars.
• You don’t want to run a business. You want to own a business.
• Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.
• So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.
• Pick an affordably reachable niche market.
• Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to fill it. Find a market--define your customers--then find or develop a product for them.
• Be a member of your target market and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy.
• It is more profitable to be a big fish in a small pond than a small undefined fish in a big pond.
• Brainstorm (do not invest in) products.
• People can dislike you--and you often sell more by offending some--but they should never misunderstand you.
• The main benefit of your product should be explainable in one sentence or phrase. Keep it simple and do not move ahead with a product until you can do this without confusing people.
• There are three main benefits to creating a premium, high-end image and charging more than the competition.
• Higher pricing means that we can sell fewer units--and thus manager fewer customers--and fulfill our dreamlines. It’s faster.
• Higher pricing attracts lower-maintenance customers. It’s less headache. This is huge.
• Higher pricing also creates higher profit margins. It’s safer.
• Intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and business will be profitable.
• Micro-test your products.
• Micro-testing involves using inexpensive advertisements to test consumer response to a product prior to manufacturing.
• The basic test process consists of three parts.
• Best: Look at the competition and create a more-compelling offer on a basic one-to-three page website.
• Test: Test the offer using short Google Adwords advertising campaigns.
• Divest or Invest: Cut losses with losers and manufacture the winners for sales roll out.
• Reinventing the wheel is expensive--become an astute observer of what is already working and adapt it.
• Negotiate near closing time, choose your objective price, bracket, and make a firm offer with cash in hand for that amount.
• Get used to refusing offers and countering in person and--most importantly--on the phone.
• Our goal isn’t to create a business that is as large as possible, but rather a business that bothers us as little as possible.
• Customer service is providing an excellent product at an affordable price and solving legitimate problems in the fastest manner possible. That’s it.
• The more options you offer the customer, the more indecision you create and the fewer orders you receive.
• The art of “undecision” refers to minimizing the number of decisions your customers can or need to make.
• Offer one or two purchase options (“basic” and “premium”) and no more.
• Do not offer multiple shipping options. Offer one fast method instead and charge a premium.
• Do not offer overnight or expedited shipping, as these shipping methods will produce hundreds of anxious phone calls.
• Eliminate phone orders completely and direct all prospects to online ordering.
• Do not offer international shipments.
• Not all customers are created equal.
• Instead of dealing with problem customers, I recommend you prevent them from ordering in the first place.
• Those who spend the least and ask for the most before ordering will do the same after the sale. Cutting them out is both a good lifestyle decision and a good financial decision.
• Those who spend the most complain the least.
• Offer a lose-win guarantee instead of free trials.
• How to look like a fortune 500 business:
• Don’t call yourself the CEO or founder.
• Put multiple email and phone contacts on the website.
• Set up an interactive voice response remote receptionist.
• Do not provide home addresses.
• Don’t underestimate how much your company needs you. Perform well and ask for what you want. If you don’t get it over time, leave. It’s too big a world to spend most of life in a cubicle.
• Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile.
• Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10 and 20 years from now for the same reasons.
• Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
• Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple--many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
• It’s easier and less painful than you think.
• Few things are fatal, particularly for smart people.
• There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth. The first is the result of a decision to act--to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encourage. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth--to not do something--wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts.
• One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and sized-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mind-set, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.
• Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally.
• Most excuses not to travel are exactly that--excuses.
• Before spending time on a stress-inducing question, big or otherwise, ensure that the answer is “yes” to the following two questions.
• Have I decided on a single meaning for each term in this question?
• Can an answer to this question be acted upon to improve things?
• If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
• The top 13 New Rich mistakes:
• Losing sight of dreams and falling into work for work’s sake.
• Micromanaging and emailing to fill time.
• Handling problems your outsources or co-workers can handle.
• Helping outsources or co-workers with the same problem more than once, or with non crisis problems.
• Chasing customers, particularly unqualified or international prospects, when you have sufficient cash flow to finance your nonfinancial pursuits.
• Answering email that will not result in a sale or that can be answered by a FAQ or auto-responder.
• Working where you live, sleep, or should relax.
• Not performing a through 80/20 analysis every two to four weeks for your business and personal life.
• Striving for endless perfection rather than great or simply good enough, whether in your personal or professional life.
• Blowing minutiae and small problems out of proportion as an excuse to work.
• Making non-time-sensitive issues urgent in order to justify work.
• Viewing one product, job, or project as the end-all and be-all of your existence.
• Ignoring the social rewards of life.
• Focus on great for a few things and good enough for the rest. Perfection is a good ideal and direction to have, but recognize it for what it is: an impossible destination.
• Surround yourself with smiling, positive people who have absolutely nothing to do with work.
• Once you realize that you can turn off the noise without the world ending, you’re liberated in a way that few people will ever know.
• Just remember: if you don’t have attention, you don’t have time.
• Be focused on work or focused on something else, never in-between.
• Time without attention is worthless, so value attention over time.
• It’s deliberation--the time we vacillate over and consider each decision--that’s the attention consumer. Total deliberation time, not the number of decisions, determines your attention bank account balance (or debt).
• “Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance. The reason is simple: What you don’t do determines what you can do.
• Not-to-do:
• Do not answer calls from unrecognized numbers.
• Do not email first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
• Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time.
• Do not let people ramble.
• Do not check email constantly--”batch” and check at set times only.
• Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.
• Do not work more to fix overwhelmingness--prioritize.
• Do not carry a cell phone or crackberry 24/7.
• Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should.
• A big part of GTD (Getting Things Done) is GTP--Getting To the Point.
• There is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone.
• If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important.
• Work is not all of life.
• Your co workers shouldn’t be your only friends.
• Time is the most expensive asset a start-up has, and chasing delinquent accounts will prevent you from generating more sales.
• Well-designed and well-target advertising works the first time.
• Never make the first offer when purchasing. Flinch after the first offer, let people negotiate against themselves, then “bracket”.
• Being busy is not the same thing as being productive.
• Invest in duplicating your few strong areas instead of fixing all of your weaknesses.
• Not all customers are created equal. “Fire” high maintenance customers.
• Skills are overrated.
• Perfect products delivered past deadline kill companies faster than decent products delivered on time.
• Test someone’s ability to deliver on a specific and tight deadline before hiring them based on a dazzling portfolio.
• Products can be fixed as long as you have cash flow, and bugs are forgiven, but missing deadlines is often fatal.

"The $100 Startup" by Chris Guillebeau

• Freedom is what we’re all looking for, and value is the way to achieve it.
• Value is created when a person makes something useful and shares it with the world.
• Contrary to conventional wisdom, success in entrepreneurship isn’t necessarily related to being the best at any particular activity.
• To succeed in a business project, especially one you’re excited about, it helps to think carefully about all the skills you have that could be helpful to others and particularly about the combination of those skills.
• Here is the not so secret recipe for microbusiness alchemy: passion or skill + usefulness = success.
• The basics of starting a business are very simple; you don’t need an MBA, venture capital, or even a detailed plan. You just need a product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid. This can be broken down as follows:
• Product or service: what you sell.
• People willing to pay for it: your customers.
• A way to get paid: how you’ll exchange a product or service for money.
• It helps to have an offer: a combination of product or service plus the messaging that makes a case to potential buyers.
• The initial work can be a challenge, but after the typical business gets going, you can usually take a number of steps to ramp up sales and income.
• It helps to have a strategy of building interest and attracting attention described here as hustling.
• Instead of just popping up one day with an offer, it helps to craft a launch event to get buyers excited ahead of time.
• Build something the people want and give it to them.
• There’s no fail-proof method; in fact, failure is often the best teacher.
• To start a business you need three things: a product or service, a group of people willing to pay for it, and a way to get paid. Everything else is completely optional.
• If you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at other things too. Many projects begin through a process of “skill transformation,” in which you apply your knowledge to a related topic.
• Most important: merge your passion and skill with something that is useful to other people.
• Where do ideas come from?
• An inefficiency in the marketplace.
• New technology or opportunity.
• A changing space.
• A spin-off or side project.
• When thinking about different business ideas, also think about money. Get in the habit of equating “money stuff” with ideas.
• Ask three questions for every idea:
• How would I get paid with this idea?
• How much would I get paid from this idea?
• Is there a way I could get paid more than once?
• Value means helping people.
• If you're trying to build a microbusiness and you begin your efforts by helping people, you’re on the right track. When you get stuck, ask yourself: How can I give more value? Or more simply: How can I help my customers more?
• Freedom and value have a direct relationship: You can pursue freedom for yourself while providing value for others.
• A business ultimately succeeds because of the value it provides its end users, customers, or clients.
• Many business owners talk about their work in terms of the features it offers, but it’s much more powerful to talk about the benefits customers receive. A feature is descriptive; a benefit is emotional.
• Overall, the more a business can focus on core benefits instead of boring features, the more customers will connect...and purchase.
• Think more about what people really want than about what you think they need.
• You don’t need a lot of money or special training to operate a business.
• Six steps to getting started right now:
• Decide on your product or service.
• Set up a website, even a very basic one (you can get a free one from WordPress.org).
• Develop an offer (an offer is distinct from a product or service).
• Ensure you have a way to get paid (get a free PayPal account to start).
• Announce your offer to the world.
• Learn from steps 1 through 5, then repeat.
• If you’re not sure what to do, think about any of these ideas:
• Can you contact your customer list with a special offer or incentive?
• Can you introduce a new product or service to complement your existing portfolio?
• If you’re a coach or consultant, can you offer a special deal for clients who prepay?
• Is there a new way you can attract subscribers, clients, or customers?
• But one way or another...just do something. Friedrich Engels said: “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.” Choose the ounce of action today.
• Homing in on what customers really want from a business is critical. Simply put, we want more of some things and less of others. If your business focuses on giving people more of what they want or taking away something they don’t want (or both), you’re on the right track.
• When all else fails, ask yourself how you can help people more.
• At the end of the day, they [people] want to be happy, and business that help their customers be happy are well positioned to succeed.
• There is no “consulting school” or degree. You can start a new business as a consultant in about one day, if not sooner. Follow these two basic rules:
• Pick something specific as opposed to something general. Get specific about what you can really do for someone.
• No one values a $15-an-hour consultant, so do not under price your service. Charge at least $100 an hour or a comparable fixed rate for the benefit you provide.
• Building a business around a passion can be a great fit for many people, but not for everyone.
• You can’t just pursue any passion--there are a number of things you may be passionate about that no one will pay you for.
• You must focus continually on how your project can help other people, and why they’ll care about what you’re offering in the first place.
• Sometimes a false start precedes a successful microbusiness.
• You usually don’t get paid for the hobby itself; you get paid for helping other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it. This point is critical.
• You may just not want to combine your hobby with your work. Some people find that it’s better to keep their passion separate from their work.
• Reality check checklist:
• Instead of just during your free time, would you enjoy pursuing your hobby at least twenty hours a week?
• Do you enjoy teaching others to practice the same hobby?
• Do you like the ins and outs (all the details) of your hobby?
• If you had to do a fair amount of administrative work related to your hobby, would you still enjoy it?
• Have other people asked for your help?
• Are enough other people willing to pay to gain or otherwise benefit from your expertise?
• Are there other businesses serving this market (usually a good thing) but not in the same way you would?
• Only when passion merges with a skill that other people value can you truly follow your passion to the bank.
• Not every passion or hobby is worth building into a business, and not everyone will want to have a business that is based on a passion or hobby.
• You can establish a specialized consulting business in one day--the more specific the better.
• It’s usually easier to operate a business while roaming the world than it is to start one. Be sure to spend plenty of time getting set up before you hit the road.
• As much as possible, keep your work “in the cloud” by using online services such as Google Docs and Dropbox. This way, you can access it from anywhere and don’t have to worry as much about keeping your data with you.
• Change your password frequently, and don’t use the name of your cat as the password.
• You can start from anywhere, but as a general recommendation, Latin America and Southeast Asia are two of the easiest and most hospital regions to begin your nomadic adventures.
• As you roam, maintain a balance between adventure and work. Remember that most people work regular jobs and travel only once in awhile, so be sure to take advantage of sightseeing and experiencing the local culture. But similarly, don’t feel bad about needing to devote more hours to work whenever needed. It’s OK, the work allows you to travel.
• Become your own publisher:
• Find a topic that people will pay to learn about. It helps if you are an expert in the topic, but if not, that’s what research is for.
• Capture the information in one of three ways:
• write it down
• record audio or video
• produce some combination of the first two
• Combine your materials into a product: an ebook or digital package that can be downloaded by buyers.
• Create an offer. What exactly are you selling, and why should people take action on it?
• Decide on a fair, value-based price for your offer.
• Find a way to get paid PayPal.com is the most ubiquitous method, with the ability to accept payment from users in more than 180 countries.
• Publish the offer and get the word out.
• Cash in and head to the beach!
• As you focus on getting to know “your people,” keep this important principle in mind: most of us like to buy, but we don’t like to be sold. Old-school marketing is based on persuasion; new marketing is based on invitation.
• When you’re brainstorming different ideas and aren’t sure which one is beast, one of the most effective way to figure it out it simple to ask your prospects, your current customers, or anyone you think might be a good fit for your idea.
• Since you’re trying to build a business, not just a hobby, a better method is to ask if they’d be willing to pay for what you’re selling. This separates merely “liking” something from actually paying for it.
• Questions like these are good starting points:
• What is your biggest problem with X?
• What is the number one question you have about X?
• What can I do to help you with X?
• Generally speaking, it’s good to keep surveys to less than ten questions or so. To get more overall responses, ask fewer questions. To get more detailed responses, ask more questions.
• Sometimes, deciding not to pursue a promising project or deliberately turning away business is one of the most powerful things you can do.
• The customer is often wrong.
• Creating a “possibilities list’ helps you retain ideas for when you have more time to implement them.
• Keep in mind the most basic questions of any successful microbusiness. If you don’t have a clear yes on all of them, go back to the drawing board.
• Does the project produce an obvious product or service?
• Do you know people who will want to buy it?
• Do you have a way to get paid?
• Score your ideas according to these criteria:
• Impact: Overall, how much of an impact will this project make on your business and customers?
• Effort: How much time and work will it take to create the project?
• Profitability: Relative to the other ideas, how much money will the project bring in?
• Vision: How close of a fit is this project with your overall mission and vision?
• You can often follow a fad, craze, or trend by establishing yourself as an authority and simplifying something about the process for others hoping to benefit from it.
• Get started quickly and see what happens. There’s nothing wrong with planning, but you can spend a lifetime making a plan that never turns into action. In the battle between planning and action, action wins.
• When you’re just getting started, how do you know if an idea is marketable? Well, you don’t always know for sure--that’s why you start as soon as you can and avoid spending much money.
• Here’s how you do it:
• Select a marketable idea
• Keep costs low
• Get the first sale
• Market before manufacturing
• Respond to initial results
• Seven steps to instant market testing:
• You need to care about the problem you are going to solve, and there has to be a sizable number of other people who also care.
• Make sure the market is big enough.
• Focus on eliminating “blatant admitted pain.” The product needs to solve a problem that causes pain the the market knows it has.
• Almost everything that is being sold is for either a deep pain or a deep desire.
• Always think in terms of solutions. Make sure your solution is different or better.
• Ask others about the idea but make sure the people you ask are your potential target market.
• Create an outline for what you are doing and show it to a subgroup of your community. Ask them to test it for free in return for feedback and confidentiality.
• The first time you make a sale in a new business, no matter the amount, it’s a very big deal.
• Freely give, freely receive.
• Define the mission statement for your business (or your business idea in 140 characters or less. It may help to think of the first two characteristics of any business: a product or service and the group of people who pay for it. Put the two together and you’ve got a mission statement. Focusing like this helps you avoid “corporate speak” and drill down to the real purpose of the business as it relates to your customers.
• Understand that what we want and what we say we want are not always the same thing.
• A good offer has to be what people actually want and are willing to pay for.
• Most of us like to buy but we don’t usually like to be sold.
• The very best offers create a “You must have this right now!” feeling among customers, but many other offers can succeed by creating a less immediate sense of urgency. Providing a gentle nudge to encourage immediate action separates a decent offer from a high performing one.
• The way we make purchasing decisions isn’t always rational. All of us place a subjective value on goods or services that may not relate to what they “should” be.
• Three tools will assist you in making it [your offer] more compelling: the FAQ page, an incredible guarantee, and giving your customers more than they expect.
• The additional purpose of a FAQ is to provide reassurance to potential buyers and overcome objections. Your mission is to identify the main objections your buyers will have when considering your offer and carefully respond to the in advance.
• The specific objections relate to an individual product or service, so it’s hard to predict what they might by without looking at a particular offer. General objections, however, come up with almost any purchase. These objections usually relate to very basic human desires, needs, concerns, and fears. The core concern for each of these objections relates to trust and authority.
• You must create customer confidence in order to overcome objections.
• As you craft the offer, think in advance about the objections...and then flip them around in your favor.
• As much as possible, connect your offer to the direct benefits customers will receive.
• As with everything else in life, it’s important to keep your word with launches.
• If you admit to a flaw, weakness, or limitation in your product, this will probably help instead of harm you. This is because when we are evaluation a purchasing decision, we like to consider both the strengths and the weaknesses. If a product developers personally tells us it’s not perfect--”and here’s why”--we tend to trust him or her more.
• Without timelines, customers may evaluate the offer and agree that it’s interesting, but fail to take action because there is no need for them to do so right away. You don’t want to pressure people into buying if they’re not ready, but you do want to instill a sense of urgency.
• Thirty-nine-step product launch checklist
• Ensure that your product or service has a clear value proposition.
• Decide on bonuses, incentives, or rewards for early buyers.
• Have you made the launch fun somehow?
• If your launch is online, have you recorded a video or audio message to complement the written copy?
• Have you built anticipate into the launch?
• Have you built urgency into the launch?
• Publish the time and date of the launch in advance.
• Proofread all sales materials multiple times, and get someone else to review them as well.
• Check all web links in your shopping cart or payment processor, and then double check them from a different computer with a different browser.
• If this is an online product, is it properly set up in your shopping cart or with paypal?
• Test every step of the order process repeatedly. Whenever you change any variable, test it again.
• Have you registered all the domains associated with your product?
• Are all files uploaded and in the right place?
• Review the order page carefully for errors or easy-to make improvements.
• Rad important communications out loud.
• Have you or your designer created any custom graphics for the offer, including any needed ads for affiliates or partners?
• Set a clear monetary goal for the launch.
• Advise the merchant account or bank of incoming funds.
• Create a backup plan for incoming funds if necessary.
• Can you add another payment option for anyone who has trouble placing an order?
• For a high-priced product, can you offer a payment plan?
• Clear as much email as possible in addition to any other online tasks so you can focus on the big day tomorrow.
• Write a strong launch message to your lists of readers, customers, and/or affiliates.
• Prepare a blog post and any needed social media posts.
• Set two alarm clocks to ensure that you’re wide awake and available at least one hour before the scheduled launch.
• Schedule your launch time to suit your audience, not you. All things being equal, it’s usually best to launch early in the morning, East coast time.
• Soft launch at least ten minutes early to make sure everything is working. It’s better for you to find the problems than to have your customers find them!
• Write the first three to five buyers to say thanks and ask, “Did everything go OK in the order process?”
• As long as it’s possible, send a quick personal note to every buyer in addition to the automated thank-you that goes out.
• Most important: ask for help spreading the word.
• Write to affiliates with a reminder about the new offering.
• Write to journalists or media contacts, if appropriate.
• Post on twitter, facebook, linkedin, and any other social networks you already participate in.
• Write the general thank-you message that all buyers will receive when purchasing.
• If applicable, write the first message for your email follow-up series that buyers will receive.
• Outline additional content for future communication and plan to schedule it after you recover from the launch.
• How can you over deliver and surprise your customers with this product? Can you include additional deliverables or some kind of unadvertised benefit?
• Is there anything special you can do to thank your customers?
• Don’t forget to celebrate.
• Start thinking about the next launch. What can you build on from this one?
• Many customers will support you for life as long as you keep providing them with great value.
• A good launch blends strategy with tactics. Strategy refers to “why” questions such as story, offer, and long-term plan. Tactics refers to “how” questions such as timing, price, and specific pitch.
• A charlatan is all talk, with nothing to back up their claims. A martyr is all action with plenty of good work to talk about, but remains unable or unwilling to do the talking. A hustler represents the ideal combination: work and talk fused together.
• Being willing to promote in an authentic, non-sleazy manner is a core attribute of micro business success.
• Take the time to make something worth talking about.
• The more you focus your business on providing a valuable service and helping people, the more your business will grow.
• Strategic giving is about being genuinely, truly helpful without the thought of a potential payback.
• Getting to know people, helping them, and asking for help yourself can take you far.
• When you’re thinking about how to get the word out and build your business, think about hustling first and paid advertising later (if at all).
• Make something worth talking about and then talk about it.
• Busy entrepreneurs can easily become overwhelmed with all kinds of projects and tasks that have nothing to do with making money.
• Putting the focus on income and cash flow--measuring everything else against those standards--ensures that a business remains healthy.
• Many aspiring business owners make two common, related mistakes: thinking too much about where to get money to start their project and thinking too little about where the business income will come from.
• Spend as little money as possible and make as much money as you can.
• Spend only on things that have a direct relationship to sales.
• A business should always focus on profit. Always remember, no money, no business.
• Borrowing or investing a lot of money to start a business is completely optional.
• Three key principles to focus on profit.
• Price your product or service in relation to the benefit it provides, not the cost of producing it.
• Offer customers a limited range of prices.
• Get paid more than once for the same thing.
• Some people will always choose the biggest and best, even if the biggest and best is much more expensive than the regular version.
• Having a high-end version creates an “anchor price.” When we see a super high price, we tend to consider the lower price as much more reasonable...thus creating a fair bargain in our minds.
• Offer a limited range of prices: not so many as to create confusion but enough to provide buyers with a legitimate choice.
• Experimenting with price is one of the easiest ways to create higher profits in a business.
• If you’re not sure what price to use for something, try a higher one without changing anything else and see what happens.
• The longer a microbusiness is around, with customers and onlookers saying good things about it, the more the word will spread.
• The not-so-secret to improving income in an existing business is through tweaks: small changes that create a big impact.
• Increase traffic. Increase conversion. Increase average sale price.
• Ironically, people who pay for high-end products tend to be better customers all around.
• Another easy thing many existing business can do to add a new revenue source quickly is to create a service from a product-based business or create a product from a service-based business.
• When your clients complain about the price being too low, you should listen.
• Maintain a practice of regular rate increases so that it becomes normal and expected.
• Remember to price on the basis of value, not time. Customers pay for what you deliver, not how long you spend at lunch.
• People follow you (or your business) because that’s what they’re interested in--you. Talk about yourself and your business.
• As business models go, buying a franchise that is based on someone else’s company is usually a bad idea.
• As a business grows and the business owner begins itching for new projects, he or she essentially has two options for self-made franchising:
• Reach more people with the same message.
• Reach different people with a new message.
• The goal of a partnership is to grow beyond what each person can create on his or her own.
• As your project grows, take some time to look at each aspect of it, especially any public communication that customers review while making a purchasing decision. Answer these questions and think about how you can improve. The goal is to fix little problems and identify small actions you can take that will reap significant results over time.
• Every morning, set aside forty five minutes without Internet access. Devote this time exclusively to activities that improve your business--nothing that merely maintains the business. Think forward motion...What can you do to keep things moving ahead?
• Don’t confuse advice for permission. You don’t need anyone to give you permission to pursue a dream.
• If you've been waiting to being your own $100 startup (or anything else), stop waiting and begin.
• Sometimes the best advice is none at all. If you know what you need to do, the next step is simply to do it. Stop waiting. Start taking action.
• The quest for personal freedom lies in the pursuit of value for others. Get this right from the beginning and the rest will be much easier. Always ask, “How can I help people more?”
• Borrowing money to start a business, or going into debt at all, is now completely optional.
• Focus relentlessly on the point of convergence between what you love to do and what other people are willing to pay for.
• Remember that most core needs are emotional: we want to be loved and affirmed.
• Use the process of skill transformation to think about all the things you’re good at, not just the obvious ones.
• Find out what most people want, and find a way to give it to them.
• There is no consulting school. You can set up shop and charge for specialized help immediately. Just remember to offer something specific and provide an easy way to get paid.
• The biggest battle is against our own fear and inertia.
• Don’t waste your time living someone else’s life.