Book: 20211107 to 20211219, "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari" by Robin Sharma

20211107 - The wake-up call

"Unscripted" says that building business needs put most of the attention into work, for a few years.

What does this "a few years" mean exactly?

For this famous lawyer Julian, what's the best solution to solve the problem? He needs more partners.

He loved his job, but in the end, he hated it. His job ruined his life.

Balance is still important. No one can work long time for too many years. Even to Elon Musk.

20211107 - The mysterious visitor

So it's about balance inside instead of balance outside?

When pay attention to the full picture all the time, it's easier to remain balance inside.

20211107 - The miraculous transformation of Julian Mantle

It needs at least 3 years? Anything great takes time, knowledge and practice.

20211108 - A magical meeting with the sages of Sivana

This book is like mixture of "The Power of Now" and "The best salesman of the world". But, because it mentioned the importance of diet, I hope it's more real.

Read itself doesn't improve ourselves. We need practice.

20211109 - A spiritual student of the sages

Self-mastery and the consistent care of one's mind, body and soul are essential to finding one's highest self and living the life of one's dreams. p35.

20211110 - The wisdom of personal change

The garden, the lighthouse, the sumo wrestler, the pink wire cable, the stopwatch, the roses and the winding path of diamonds - 7 timeless virtues for an enlightened life. p47.

20211121 - A most extraordinary garden

On an average day the average person runs about 60k thoughts through his mind. 95% of those thoughts are the same as the thoughts the day before. Most of them negative, have fallen into bad mental habits. p50.

Mind management is the essence of life management. p51.

Distance = Time * Speed

Speed = Initial Speed + Acceleration * Time

This chapter is about Acceleration

When we do something, we always do it twice. Initially do it in our mind (as blueprinting), then do it in reality.

If we can control our thoughts, then we can do the first round effectively. "Think ahead, think hard" is another way to improve our blueprinting capability.

Weak minds lead to weak actions. p75

Rose technique is meditation.

Opposition Thinking is self-hypnosis/panadol. It doesn't solve the problems, but makes life much easier. A cup could be half full and half empty. We can make life better with the same situation. And, thoughts lead our behavior. A happy person is more likely to be kind to other people, and more likely to do better job.

The Secret of the Lake is about long term self-hyponosis. But "think ahead" is much better, because it not just build envision, but also with the details of the approach and plan.

Our mind has mistery power. When we feel sleepy, one thought can get us excited and energetic. When we feel cold, on thought can turn us sweaty. So, if we can control our mind, we could be always energetic and feel warm. We may even get stronger and sharper mind. It's miracle that everyone can obtain.

20211204 - Kindling your inner fire

To some extent, love is based on wisdom.

The points of setting goals:

1. Reduce the number of thoughts everyday;

We know what is important, what is not. It's more likely to ignore the minor ones.

2. "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will start treating all your problems like a nail." 

When we have a clear goal, everything related to it would attract our attention.

Whatever you try to get from life, if try hard enough, you will get it.

21 days to form a new habit to replace the old one. (Don't be lazy. Starting from tomorrow, I will use meditation to replace web surfing in the morning, right after exercise and before breakfast.)

Life is good. Don't forget to enjoy every moment of life, although it's not perfect. Every inhilaration and exhilaration feels good. Every bite of food, every sip of water, every word speak out, every word we hear, feels great.

In the end, the whole universe will end with entropy. So any inverse-entropy is miracle, which worth cherish.

20211217 - The ancient art of self-leadership

Body, mind, spirit.

Anything we can measure, we can improve it.

How to turn recreative activity into physical exercise? Measure it first, then find out our limit, then push the limit further.

How can we measure our spirit?

https://www.spirituallyhealthyyou.com/measuringthewind/

https://www.allenparr.com/5-ways-measure-spiritual-growth/

What we think, say and do will form the habit of the future self. That decides what we will be in the future. Same, our current self is decided by our past thoughts, words and actions. If we don't change our thoughts, we cannot change our future. 

Why people don't want to change it? Because the first goal of our gene is survival. Our gene knows that if only do what we did in the past, then we have a good chance to survive to the future. Our subconscious always prepare for the worst cases. However, if we always prepare for the worst cases, we are not likely to get the best result. We need to overcome our fear, and take some calculated risks, to get much better result. If we can do that, we would get much more freedom. We can choose to live in survival mode or creation mode.

How to change ourselves? Vision first. When we set up a goal, we can make changes for it. In details, we need to focus on "NOW", instead of following our habit and emotion, which are all decided by the past self.

How to Unlock the Full Potential of Your Mind | Dr. Joe Dispenza on Impact Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La9oLLoI5Rc

"Your heart will follow what you do." - Steve Jobs (The psychology of money)

Don't try to get something out of the books. Instead, let the books get something out of you.

Should we use mantras (self-hypnosis) as a tool to improve ourselves? Yes. Tool is tool, it can hurt use, and can also benefit us. Mantras is beyond perception. It acts on identity level, so may affect our subconscious directly. p156

Priority. Think about it before doing anything. Do I really need to do this right now? Is there anything more important that I should do?

I never thought that "The secret garden" has any deep meaningness. Interesting. p166

20211218 - The power of discipline

"I am more than I appear to be, all the world's strength and power rests inside me." p180

Rely on habit is the lazy way to improve ourselves. The better one is using attention. Using attention means thinking intentionally. Think ahead, think hard, think all the time. Then we don't need to reply on habit to choose difficult but hard choices, and paying attention itself can be the ultimate habit.

Life is like a curved river. Habit can only push us forward along straightline, then, from time to time, we need to adjust our habit to adapt to the new situation. This type of adjustments are painful and time consuming, and it may fail. Live in the moment means we don't rely on habit. Instead, we keep asking ourselves about the priority in our lives. So we can adjust our direction at any time.

What would happen if someone pay full attention all the time? He/she would stop meaningless web surfing, live in heathier status, don't get controlled by emotions. To me, the most important part is to find my identity(what I want). Does this help to improve our spirit? If yes, then how?

From this point of view, AI is at much higher level. Even if we ignore the 1000 times faster response, they pay full attention to everything all the time.

Lazyness is like gravity. Those alpha people live on high mountain, and they bear almost the same gravity as the people live in the bottom. Live in the bottom need the same effort (to overcome gravity), but the situation is much worse. So, why not live on mountain?

20211218 - Your most precious commodity

Time is about priority, based on our long term benefit.

Simplifying our life means more about stopping doing trivial time-wasting things. Keep life simple materially also helps a lot: we can spend less time to look after them.

What about adopting pets? Pets can give us more life experiences. It could be worthy.

We only have limited time. So, why waste it on meaningless stuff?!

20211218 - The ultimate purpose of life

Everybody share the same gene. So helping others always make us happy. This is decided by gene, and no one can/want to disobey.

What is the best way to help others? We need to change our view of other people. We are together. When one get hurt, the whole get hurt. If we are not isolated from other people, then confrontation is meaningless, and then we will be happy to support each other.

Always start from the people around us. Strangers or acquaintances.

20211219 - The timeless secret of lifelong happiness

"The journey is to be enjoyed. The road is just as good as the end." p229

Anytime that we don't pay attention, we let time slip through our fingers like tiny grains of sand.