If the only tool in your tool box is a hammer, then every problem will look like a nail. If you have to cut a piece of wood but all you have is a hammer, you're not going to be able cut a clean piece of wood and will just create more of a mess than if you did nothing. To prevent making things a mess in your life when you try to get a job done, you need to get skills or delegate that task to someone who has that skill. Delegating is also a skill so you need to add to your toolbox if you want to solve your problems cleanly. 

When you're able to have a toolbox full of tools, you can complete any project and create a lot of great looking things. Having only one tool will make you less effective so don’t over value one tool over another, because different jobs will require different tools.

Journal Prompts

1. Are you only using one tool to solve most of your problems? How do you know this is the case or not?
2. What happens when you solve your problems only using one tool?

In this life you're not going to go through it without interacting with other people. So that's why we need to be an apprentice of human nature. We should understand why people act the way they act. From there we can break down walls and start building bridges. Some walls might be tougher to take down than others but that's why you need to study the other side's thinking even more and how you can come up with a plan to build that bridge. 

We spend so much time trying to become better at our jobs but if we spent that same amount of time on human engineering where we learn how to communicate better, become better negotiators, and lead folks more efficiently, then that would get us a lot farther in life since only 15% of our success at work is due to our technical competence. So read all the books by Robert Greene and learn how to be an apprentice of human nature.

Journal Prompts

1. How would your life be if you knew how to effectively take down walls and build bridges with other people?
2. What are some resources that you can learn so that you can be a better apprentice of human nature?

Not every rule that is in place is a good rule. Some rules that were placed in effect 200 years ago have no right to be enforced in today's society. Just look at slavery and laws that banned interracial marriage. There might be other rules in your household or work that just don't need to happen anymore. 

Take a look at how meetings are run. It's a rule that we need to go to them, but if we understand the rule and why it is in place, then we can break them and free ourselves from that bureaucracy. Don't just accept a rule as valid, if there is a better way to do something. If there is a better way then we should strive to do it. There is no sense in wasting our time or potential because we want to play it safe and not break a rule.

Journal Prompts

1. How much more progress can you make in your life if you break a rule that is holding you back? 
2. What are some rules in your life that should be broken? How can you know the rules better so it is easier to break them?

You don't need to workout for an hour and seven days a week to be considered a winner when it comes to your workouts. A workout can be as long as 15 minutes or 5 minutes, the key thing is that you raised your heart rate and your muscles were tested. 

If you can workout all you did was wall push ups, squats, and lunges in two minutes, then it was a good workout. The key thing to focus on is consistency and maintaining the habit. You don’t want to lose the habit because it can be a lot of hard work to get it back.

Journal Prompts

1. What is the quickout that you can do in case there is not enough time to do your full workout?
2. What happens when you let go of the habit of working out?

If you want to ensure that you have a mediocre life, then be realistic with your life. Do what you think you can do and not what is possible. But living a mediocre life is not okay. Life has a lot of amazing things to offer, but you have to be unrealistic with your life in order to enjoy them.

If you do enough of the unrealistic and work on improving your craft, then you will eventually get your best life. There are times when you might need to modify the goal, but at least you’re still living a great life. If you’re a musician but haven’t got your hit album yet, you can still work with other musicians and producers to create a hit album. This is still an unrealistic life to live and can still have many amazing moments that fill up your soul.

Plus when you’re unrealistic with your life, then you can create something that can benefit society. It can be a lonely road to take but it’s one that will fill you up the most.

Journal Prompts

1. How would you feel at the end of your life if you lived a realistic life?
2. What are you doing to not be realistic with your life?

In finance, there is a concept called the rule of 72. You take the number 72 and divide it by your average rate of return and that number will tell you how often something will double. So if your rate of return is 8, then something will double every 9 years. 

This is how $10k at the age of 25 can grow into $320k by the time you're 70. Same thing can happen with your life. If you put enough energy into developing yourself as a person in all areas (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual), you can start seeing aspects of your life start to grow exponentially. It can take a while initially to see some growth, but with enough persistence the compounding effect will come in full force.

Journal Prompts

1. How can you ensure you get the right rate of return on your growth financially and personally?
2. How can you ensure that you have a strong foundation so that you can higher a multiplying factor on your growth?

It takes courage to go to someone and admit your mistakes but this will be the fastest way to remedy this situation. When you make a mistake, you can start to fix the situation by saying that you messed up and that these are the steps you will do to ensure that you don't make the same mistake again. Do this and your mistakes will be forgivable. 

To be perfect is to be inhuman and it’s okay to make a mistake, but make sure you do the right things to resolve them and not to make the same mistake again. Do this and life is going to be a lot more joyful because you won’t have to hold on to your secrets anymore.

Journal Prompts

1. What happens to your life when you don’t admit your mistakes?
2. How can you get the courage to admit your mistakes and formulate a plan to resolve them?

If you want to become happier as a person, one of the first steps you should consider is to care less. Once you stop caring so much, you can take that energy and apply it to some useful action that will actually make a difference. Once you stop caring how your co-worker are acting, it can give you more energy to focus on projects that will make you stand out. 

There are some things that you should care about but that list should be less than the list of the things that you don't care about. You're only one person and your energy can't be directed everywhere, so decide what you really want to care about, choose that and start caring less about the other things in your life.

If you're afraid of doing stuff because you're worried what somebody else will think, just stop caring and starting doing more. Your actions are going to have a lot more impact on your life than caring about things.

Journal Prompts

1. How would caring less about the right things change your life?
2. How would your actions change your life more than other caring?

When you don't get a good night's sleep, you become 14% less effective as a person. This might not seem like a big difference but you have to understand that A players are 32 times more effective than B players. 

If you get a full night's sleep every day for a month and go against someone who misses an hour of sleep every night for a month, you'll be over 500% more effective than that person of a month and over 6000% more effective over a year. 

If you say that you don't need that amount of sleep, it's probably because you got used to being mediocre and can't remember how much more effective you were with a full night's sleep. You'll be able to think clearer and will get less frustrated when things don't work out. It might take a while to get back to normal but if you want to be the best version of yourself possible, go get a full night sleep. 

Journal Prompts

1. How would you feel if you could outperform all your competitors and could give your projects 100% of your energy? What difference would this make in your life?
2. When was the last time you got a full night’s sleep, drank your water, had no alcohol, and ate nothing but nutritious meals? How can you make sure 80% of your days look like this?

The way you act today has a lot to do with what people thought was normal in the previous generation. You have to realize that the job is something that is really only 120 years old. Most people worked on farms and now less than 2% of folks work on farms. But what keeps the world changing is the technological advances that disrupt different sectors of the economy. 

There is always going to be some type of friction between the older generations and the newer ones. People don't really like change and there will be resistance or conflict with such change. 

So when you're doing something, ask yourself if this is the most appropriate thing for me to do. People used to put leeches on their body to get rid of illnesses and doctors used to cut people's wrists to get rid of the bad blood. There are things that we shouldn't be doing anymore because they don't fit with the times. Don't get caught up in doing something that is not effective anymore. It might seem normal now but it will harm you down the road. 

Journal Prompts

1. Are the things that you’re doing today, going to be normal or helpful in the future? How do you know?
2. What is something that you thought was normal in the past, but was something that you shouldn’t have believed or done? How did you know to stop doing that thing?