Fifteen of the 100 little ideas

My blog­ging friend and cowork­er Nick shared this list of 100 Sim­ple Truths in a recent post on his blog. I love read­ing such lists because you find some ideas you iden­ti­fy your­self with and also:

In quot­ing oth­ers, we cite our­selves.

Julio Cortázar

Fol­low­ing is a selec­tion of the fif­teen ideas that I high­light­ed in my Kin­dle as I read through those 100 ideas. My thoughts are in brack­ets.

1. It’s 100% off if you don’t buy it. (I use this trick to post­pone or avoid van­i­ty pur­chas­es.)

10. Be hap­py with what you have, while you work for what you want. (Helps me appre­ci­ate my cur­rent life while I con­stant­ly work to imporve it.)

14. Demo­ti­vat­ed because of how long it’ll take? Remem­ber the time will pass any­ways. (We suc­cess­ful­ly applied this truth to move to the first world, and for both my wife’s and my careers — all long-term daunt­ing pur­suits with longer lead times and no guar­an­teed out­comes, but have luck­i­ly turned out in our favor and sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved our stan­dard of liv­ing. We are reap­ply­ing this to our next project we are cur­rent­ly work­ing on.)

18. Choose con­sis­ten­cy over inten­si­ty, because con­sis­ten­cy com­pounds. (Why I am keen on my med­i­ta­tion, and exer­cis­ing habits.)

32. If you low­er your expec­ta­tions, you’ll rarely be dis­ap­point­ed. (Helps upkeep my san­i­ty in situ­tions that invlove oth­er humans which is almost all the time!)

39. Speak when you have some­thing to say, not when you want to say some­thing. (I would like to think this is what I do on this blog, and in oth­er real-life sit­u­a­tions, with mixed suc­cess.)

41. Being busy is not a badge of hon­or — it’s a lack of free­dom. (A sim­i­lar thought came to my mind just last week when some­one told me they are busy in back-to-back meet­ings, and again this week when some­one showed me 800+ count of their unread emails and how much it would go up by that evening if they did­n’t inter­vene.)

45. Admit when you’re wrong, show humil­i­ty when you’re right. (Helps me be gen­tle and grace­ful when peo­ple are apolegetic, arro­gan, or angry.)

49. Life only gives you what you decid­ed you could have. (I can do bet­ter here by decid­ing I can have more.)

52. Avoid­ing stu­pid­i­ty can often be a bet­ter strat­e­gy than seek­ing out bril­liance. (I think this is the same thing as the men­tal mod­el I am learn­ing called Inver­sion.)

58. Read to find new ideas, write to under­stand them, imple­ment to learn from them. (Why I read a lot of blogs and books, and share some of my learn­ings on this blog. But I should imple­ment a few more of the ideas I learn.)

59. Your cur­rent habits are a sneak peek of your desired future. (I am both afraid and excit­ed that this is true.)

65. Com­pare upwards and feel envy, com­pare down­wards and feel grate­ful. (I don’t dis­cuss this to not offend the less priv­i­leged peo­ple than I am, but I believe in this idea. I com­pare with my past self to feel grate­ful.)

71. Being great is just being con­sis­tent­ly good. (I see this all the time with suc­cess­ful peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions.)

99. No one owes you any­thing. (This helps me feel grate­ful for what I have and deal with dis­ap­point­ments by low­er­ing my expec­ta­tions.)