Contrary to the first article in the series which focused on simple things that can be implemented, here I deal with concepts that seem to me to be profound and interesting, and that require, for the most part, reflection and time to learn more and then use them. Often, these are the foundational concepts in the books from which I drew them – even though there are some that don’t come directly from the ten books in the category – and I think that they all have the potential to change our view of the world with regard to their subject matter. Here they are without further ado:

1 – We are all more efficient when our mind is free of parasitic thoughts that endlessly invade it. When we reach a state of absolute concentration, where we are completely focused on the task at hand, we are capable of miracles, that is to say, of doing things more quickly and efficiently that we could have imagined. It is a state in which we can choose to dedicate ourselves completely to our tasks, without the slightest interruption, parasitic thought, daydream or other source of distraction, while remaining absorbed and in full possession of our faculties. A dream, is it not? It is what practitioners of martial arts call “mind like water” (Mizu-no-kokoro), and athletes call “being in the zone,” or psychologists the flow. Moments like this have no doubt occurred in your life. Were you performing, more satisfied with yourself and your accomplishments? No doubt you were.

It is possible to cultivate habits that allow you to reach this state frequently, to develop a system. GTD recommends a system completely based on writing in order to free our mind from all the thoughts that endlessly interrupt our concentration. Matthieu Ricard, in The Art of Meditation, tells us this is the best way to develop a more attentive mind, conscious of the present moment, free of all emotions and negative thoughts. There are no doubt many other ways to reach this state of mind, and the fact that it is described in multiple disciplines shows clearly that it is an important universal concept and that we will benefit by learning more about it.

To learn more:

• Review of The Art of Meditation
• Review of GTD
• And thousands of other internet resources …

2 – It takes years and years to completely master an art, a discipline, or a subject. To become a true master in a field, if that’s your goal, is a bottomless well that you never truly reach.

It was only 58 years ago that Twyla Tharp, famous American choreographer, and author of The Creative Habit, finally felt like a “master of choreography.” For the first time in her career, on the occasion of her 128^th ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations, she felt like a perfect master of all the components that make up the dance – the music, the steps, the symbolism, the use of people on the set, and clarity of the objective. She finally had the skills to fill the void between what she saw in her mind and what actually happened on the set. The achievement of mastery takes time. Be patient. Never give up. But how will you know when you have achieved mastery in something? Is it the total realization of your objectives, a feeling of inner completeness, the unequivocal respect of others? Why do you seek total mastery?

To learn more:

• Review of The Creative Habit

3 – On the other hand, understand that very often it is useless to seek perfection and that you can be happy with good results by carrying out 20% of the actions that lead to 80% of the result.

Effectively, perfectionism leads us on an endless quest and makes us concentrate on details that aren’t important, and that can be a means of procrastination – putting the most important things off until tomorrow. Now, Pareto’s Law tells us that in general, 20% of the objectives produce 80% of the results. The 80/20 percentage is of course not exact to last the decimal point in most situations, but it describes effectively the enormous imbalance which takes place in an incalculable number of fields; 20% of clients in a company make up 80% of its revenue (that’s the case in mine), 20% of countries in the world share 80% of the wealth, in these same countries, 20% of the population share 80% of the wealth, 80% of our work is finished in 20% of the time we allocate for it, 20% of blog posts are visited by 80% of the visitors, 80% of our annoyances come from 20% of our relationships (customers, friends, acquaintances, etc), 20% of our relationships bring us 80% of the love we need, etc. This concept may seem completely alien the first time that we are confronted with it, but its universality has been proven in many fields.

Imagine what would happen if you got rid of a maximum of 80% of the things you do and that only bring you 20% of your results, so that you could concentrate on what is really important? And why is it that this law is so universal? Does that mean something? Are there ways to concretely apply it in our lives? The wealth of questions and possibilities that this concept opens up is absolutely fascinating. It is worth learning more about it, from a practical and theoretical point of view, and I think that it is completely susceptible to changing our lives if we can find a way to apply it intelligently.

To learn more:

• Pareto’s Law
• The long tail, or how to get the remaining 20%, but with only 1% effort using new technologies
• Read Living the 80/20 Principal, less work and stress for more success and pleasure, which will explain the practice and theory in simple terms.
• Read The 4-Hour Work Week, an absolutely concrete and enthusiastic application of Pareto’s Law!
• And thousands of other internet resources…

4 – Our freedom in life is, like our freedom of movement in a building, in part defined by its structure. Effectively, everything has an underlying structure, whether it is physically like a bridge or a skyscraper or as immaterial as the plot of a novel or the form of a symphony. Our life is a structure, it is composed of multiple elements interacting with each other and with itself.

The structure determines the movements and behavior of the objects that comprise it, and:

1. We advance in life by taking the path of least resistance, the one which is easier to travel within our structure – just as it is easier to enter a room by the door rather than a window.
2. The underlying structure of our lives determines the path of least resistance.
3. The actual structure of our lives is in large part determined by the paths of least resistance in our past, at present almost completely forgotten.

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Thus:

5 – In order to live our dreams, it is preferable to change the structure of our lives rather than resolve our problems. Effectively, we can learn to recognize the structures that play a role in our life and change them so that we can create what we really want to create. But how do you change a structure? By creating. Often we think in terms of solving problems, but this approach only allows us to change some of the elements here or there without changing the structure, and this initial structure can only lead then to elements in their initial state.

When we try to solve a problem we are acting to remove something: the problem. When we create, we are acting to make something happen: creation. Therefore by thinking structurally, rather than saying “How shall I make this unwanted situation go away?” we say to ourselves “What structure should I adopt to create the results that I want to create?”

It is a radically different approach. And much more efficient. And which is best, once we have mastered it, for giving us the key to create the life we want rather than put up with a state of affairs that we don’t appreciate, to be proactive rather than reactive, in short to create out of our desires and our imagination rather than responding to the constraints and stimuli. Personally I find the concept of structure and the path of least resistance absolutely fascinating, because it is a sort of theory of individual freedom, the freedom of every human being to live the life he wishes for. It is a concept so rich and loaded that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read The Path of Least Resistance, the book that explains all this, and it is really beneficial to learn more about it. Is the actual structure of your life what you wish for? How was it created? Did you choose it or did it arise from elements beyond your control? Are you more focused right now on solving problems without seeking to change the underlying structure?

To learn more:

• Structuralism
• Systems
• Review of The Path of Least Resistance

6 – To renew your energy and that of your co-workers, concentrate on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Efficient people renew their energy. They know they you can’t build on weakness. Their first task consists of gathering strength. They assign roles and promotions according to what men can do, by taking their good qualities more into considerations than their defects. Trying to staff an organization with men who have no weaknesses or “good subjects” leads to mediocrity, even incompetence. Strong men always have weaknesses: wherever there are mountains there have to be valleys.

Efficient people don’t ask themselves “How will he get along with me?” instead they ask “What can he bring to the table?” They don’t ask themselves “What is he capable of doing” but “What does he do especially well?” When they interview, they look for exceptional qualities in an important area rather than general skills. Finally, by concentrating on strengths rather than problems, you must inflate the possibilities and deflate the problems. This is a strong concept because it is actually applied very little. And for your own part, do you concentrate more on your strengths or your weaknesses? And what do you do with other people? Why do you think it is more important to focus on strengths? What is the ego’s role in self esteem deep down? Do you prefer doing things in an area in which you are gifted or where nature has given you no particular talent? Is the pleasure of doing something tied in some degree to the perfection with which we do it?

To learn more:

• Review of The Effective Executive
• Review of Strengths Finder 2.0: Now, discover your strengths

7 – Knowing how to manage computers – the skills of the 80s consisting of clicking buttons, making menu selections, opening or closing files – are no longer enough in the Information Age. The Information Age is characterized by the omnipresent, skyrocketing volume of bits that we deal with. Bits are everywhere today, traveling at the speed of light from one end our planet to the other and transport a quantity of information that is increasingly more significant, increasingly more different, and on a significantly increasing quantity of peripherals – computers, telephones, PDAs, MP3 players, vehicles and even refrigerators. The number of emails is exploding, new acronyms and new technologies appear every day and millions of people from students to doctors, from teachers to CEOs, from graphic designers to computer technicians, are overwhelmed by the amount of information that they receive every day and have to deal with.

For this worldwide problem there is a solution: learn to manage this mass of information by using good practices and good tools, in a process similar to learning how to read and write allows us manipulate symbols which form the written language. This talent is so important in this era of streaming information and communication that whoever has this skill can overcome the hurdle of overload, climb to the top of their profession, and enjoy a life with less stress, better health and more time for their family and friends.

Bits are heavy, you either consume them or ignore them. The fact that they are predominant today is due to their unique properties making them so desirable: they are very small, very fast, easy to acquire and created, copied and shared in almost infinite amounts, protected by the ravages of times and free from limitations of distance and space. Bits are however paradoxical: they don’t weigh anything yet they seem to weigh us down, they don’t take up any space, but they seem to always accumulate, they are created in an instant but they can remain indefinitely, they move at the speed of light, but they make us waste a lot of time.

Avoiding or ignoring these paradoxes only lead to being engulfed by the avalanche, fortunately, information management training teaches us how to avoid that.

Finally, learning to manage information is summarized by applying GTD and and the 20/80 rule to sort the information, while using good tools. This concept is fundamental for learning more and achiveing mastery in our era, and will become more so given the omnipresence of digital information tools leading to information all around us. Knowing how to manage information is for me as important today as it must have been to learn how to read and write in the 19^th century: it gives you a considerable advantage over those who have not mastered it.

To learn more:

• Review of Bit Literacy

8 – It is better to fail while trying to fulfill our dreams than not trying to fulfill them. A dream is transformed into an objective when it is assigned a time limit – and actions to get there. You should not be afraid of failure; it’s even very important. Failure is cool. It is an enormous source of learning, and can cause us to make progress in an area more quickly than years of apprenticeship with no setbacks.

What is also great about failing? In many ways, the creative act is a question of refinement. You suppress or modify bad ideas that didn’t work. That exercises our judgment. There are many ways to fail:

• Failure of skill. You have an idea in your head but you don’t have the required skill to implement it.
• Failure of concept. You have an idea that is poorly formed and doesn’t fit properly in your life.
• Failure of judgment. You leave something in your idea or your project which should have been taken out – and that results in imbalance in the total creation.
• Failure of nerves. The worst. You have everything you need except the necessary guts to follow through with your idea and explore it to its fullest potential.
• Failure of repetition. Despite having overcome one or more similar failures, you repeat the same mistakes.
• Failure of denial. The deepest. Creating something new and fresh is an act of daring, of presumption. You think that the world cares because you have something to say. And they don’t really care, you shut yourself up in denial feeling misunderstood and cursing a world that doesn’t understand your genius. Do you consider the fulfillment of your dreams as nothing but possible? Do you think that the mere act of trying to reach your dreams, the path, is more important than the fact of reaching them? – the destination? Do you experience or would you experience more pleasure by trudging along the path that leads to your dreams even if you are not sure of reaching your destination, than meandering along a sure path but one that you are not sure is taking you anywhere?

To learn more:

• Review of The Creative Habit
• Review of The Path of Least Resistance
• Review of Lead the Field

9 – In the end we are all powerful human beings who have a mountain of jewels inside us ready to be harvested, and we can learn to surpass ourselves to create the life we want. Learning, understanding, acting, creating, making mistakes and learning from these mistakes, trying and succeeding to constantly overcome our limitations, these I think are the ingredients for a life that is worth being lived, an exciting life full of challenges which we can turn to at the end and say “yes, I have lived well and that’s just as well”

translated by www.DeansResource.com

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One-Sentence Summary : To succeed in life you can’t just count on luck and circumstances; you must find hidden nuggets inside yourself rather than trapsing around the world in vain looking for them, have goals and desires and define them clearly, have an attitude that sets you up for success and love yourself, use your brain as a resource for reflection every day, understand that our rewards in life always correspond to the services we deliver, learn without ceasing and continue to grow, develop your vocabulary and mastery of language, leave the flock to act on your own, understand your value and the value of several tens of millions of euros, clearly define the amount of money you want to earn, economize or invest and save for your retirement, have a personal library that is rich and relevant, do your best every day and, one by one, accomplish the tasks that will lead you to be successful in your goals, specialize in something; then you will be in the top 5% of humanity who find themselves at the top of the success pyramid — whatever that is.

By Earl Nightingale, 102 pages, published in 2007 (book) and in 1986 (audio cassette)

Summary and Book Report:

I am not going to write a biography – even a short one – for all the authors in my PMBA challenge, but Earl Nightingale seems to be a rather interesting personality, and atypical enough to warrant an exception:

Earl Nightingale is a famous orator in the United States, and an example of what self education can do for someone who starts out with plenty of things going against him. Born in 1921, raised by his mother who was left alone with his two brothers, he grew up in a poor Los Angeles suburb in the middle of the depression. Wishing to understand why some people are poor and miserable and others are not, and not finding anyone in his acquaintance who could answer, he began his quest for answers and knowledge in the local library, which would lead him particularly to a study of philosophy, psychology and the great religions for decades. After the war, during which he survived, with 12 marines, an attack on the battleship USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor (1103 dead out of 1511 crew members), he worked in radio and created one of the first audio books, The Strangest Secret, which is a best seller and sold more than a million copies. He went on to found, with Lloyd Conant, the Nightingale-Conant Corporation, the first company to offer audio cassettes about personal development. He died in 1989.

Lead the field is a collection of advice about personal development, originally only offered in audio format. Fortunately, a book offering an exact transcription was recently published, which allowed me to read it and to offer you a review of it today – it is a lot harder for me to understand spoken English than written, and while audio books have undeniable advantages, such as being able to do other things while you read them, and use the time in transit or traveling for self improvement, I much prefer a good book when it comes to soaking up knowledge, reflecting and taking notes. I love to write post-it notes which I stick on the paragraphs that speak to me – difficult to do that with an audio CD.

In this book, which is enthusiastic and brimming with energy, Earl Nightingale insists on the fact that success in life is not due to luck and circumstances, but to principles based on good sense and habits that are easy to acquire on the condition that you practice them every day. I will paint you a panoramic, chapter by chapter:

• Introduction

Our daily environment is a merciless reflection of ourselves. Everyone we meet and come into contact with every day will always react in response to our attitude. And we can control this attitude, every morning when we start our day. If we are cheerful, happy and enjoy the miracle of life, others will return this cheerfulness and good humor. We will be the kind of person that others like to have around them. Test it: treat each person that you come in contact with as the most important person on earth. You will quickly see the difference that it creates.

• Acres of Diamonds

In the 19th century, an African farmer heard stories about the success of other farmers who had made millions by discovering diamond mines. Excited by the prospect, he sold his farm and took off in search of diamonds, a long and fruitless search that left him alone and penniless in the end. He threw himself into a river and drowned. The man who bought the farm noticed a blue and red shiny stone one day at the bottom of a brook, he picked it up and, finding it very pretty, he placed it on the mantle. Some days later, a visitor picked it up, went pale and told the farmer that the stone he had picked up was an enormous diamond. The farmer, astounded, told the visitor that his brook was full of stones like that. The farm that the first farmer had sold to go in search of diamonds, turned out to be one of the most productive diamond mines on the African continent. He had sold it for a mouthful of bread to search elsewhere for something that was in front of his nose. He would have known that had he taken the time to prepare himself and to learn what a diamond in the rough looks like.

What does that tell you? That we all have diamond fields, we only have to recognize them and exploit them. All you need is the patience and wisdom to explore intelligently and effectively the work you are already doing. Everything we do is rich with opportunity. But the opportunities don’t glow in the dark, are are not written on neon signs. In order to spot them you have to look with new eyes. All too often we don’t question what already exists because if millions of people are doing it, it must be the best way to do it. But it’s not the best way; its the average, ordinary way.

To put it into practice: Begin by taking an hour a day with a notebook to sketch out your work. Try to see with new eyes and examine all the ingredients. Opportunities are there – fields of diamonds.

• A Worthy Destination

The United states is overflowing with immigrants who come here to escape appalling conditions in their countries, who all started over from nothing with everything against them – without wealth, without knowing the language, without material possessions – and who have succeeded in a remarkably short amount of time. And this was a wonderful experience for them filled with happiness. Why? Because freedom is the most precious thing – and the most rare – on earth. By coming to the United States, they have been able to taste it and intoxicate themselves on something that is taken for granted by most Americans.

So it is with all our desires: once we have realized them, enjoying them on a daily basis becomes something we take for granted, and they lose a great deal of their interest and their magic. It is desire, more than realizing desire, that makes us happy. Children are happiest on Christmas morning when the wrapped presents await them under the tree than once the surprise and the suspense is over; we are happier going to the restaurant than coming home; happier when we are leaving on vacation than when we return. And we are happier when we are pursuing our goals relentlessly than when we have reached them.

Success is the progressive accomplishment of an objective that is worth the effort. Success lies in the journey towards the objective – the desire – rather than the objective itself – the accomplishment.

Don’t let’s waste our resources and our precious and limited time on useless objectives. Let’s define worthwhile objectives. According to Earl Nightingale, only 5% of the population succeed in attaining success that is out of the ordinary. For the rest, average is a good thing.

Therefore it is important to set worthwhile goals, and to set more once you reach them. Every day of our lives we should be engaged, advancing, and learning and looking out for higher heights from which to set out again. But in order to do so you must know what you want.

You will become whatever you think of yourself.

• Miracles of Your Mind

We are the only species on earth to be endowed with the power to shape our lives in accordance with images we see in our mind. Everything that has been done by humans is the result of following goals and objectives.

On a more individual level, everything we have – our work, our relationships with our family and others, our philosophy of life – is the result of the use we have put our mind to.

Now, scientists think that we use on average only 10% of our brain’s capacity. If everything you have accomplished up until now is thanks to only 10% of your brain, what do you think we could achieve if we were to use 20%?

Note: I am not in agreement with this statement by the author:  the fact that we are using 10% or less of our brain is a rehash of an old idea first presented by American psychologist William James in 1908 and does not really reflect what we know today about how the brain works. Look here and there for more information. I do, however, agree with the general idea: "we do not think enough."

Now, unfortunately, schools do not teach us to think, and it is by thinking that we will find creative solutions for how to make better use of our brain and its awesome power.

There is a simple way to make better use of our brain: every day, take a piece of paper, write at the top our primary objective, then write underneath all the ideas that come into our head to help up reach this goal. Do this for an hour. We can easily come up with about 20 ideas a day on paper. Some of these ideas won’t be feasible, or practical, but even if we only do this 5 days a week, 40 weeks a year, we will have 4,000 ideas at our disposal to help us reach our goals. And this will only have taken us 200 hours, out of 8,760. If we subtract about 2,920 hours for sleep, and about 1,645 hours for work, that leaves us 3,995 leisure hours. Never in the history of humanity have we had so much time to devote to things other than work. Using 5% of our supplemental free time to think could completely change our lives: a single big idea could revolutionize our work or our entire lives. One out of 4,000. Or 40,000 – one big idea every 10 years would be more than enough!

• Destiny in the Balance

Our rewards in life are always in accordance with the services we perform. It is a universal and general law, the law of cause and effect. Services include our thoughts, our work, our actions, our words.

Before looking for rewards, we must reflect upon our services and improve them. This law appears simple and yet it is, for the most part, misunderstood and ignored by all. There are so many people who lean against a mantle where the fire has gone out in a freezing room and say "Give me a light and I will put wood on the fire." People whine because they receive bad service or bad treatment – when the problem comes from their service to themselves, which is not worthy of the rewards they expect.

Rather than worrying about what the future will bring, we would be better off using our wasted energy to find and improve our services – to improve ourselves – by thinking of the best ways to do so. But so many people will do I don’t know what in this world, even resorting to crime, before they will THINK.

• Seed for Achievement

The seed for achievement is integrity. Integrity is honesty and truth, with others and with yourself. If we are at peace with ourselves, we cannot be false towards others. If our words carry integrity, our sleep will not be troubled and we will respected everywhere we go.

There is nothing we cannot accomplish if we live by this principle from the inside out. To be honest with oneself implies taking responsibility to use what we have to the utmost. And what we have, our under-utilized mind, our abilities, our talents and our time. These are our possessions, which we carry with us everywhere, which represent a huge fortune. It is the investment of this fortune which determines our return on investment. It is what makes us autonomous human beings, even though most people are not aware of this.

In order to respect our integrity, and be honest and true to ourselves, we must do our best in every circumstance, therefore. Life is  a piece of fertile land which is waiting for us to sow our seeds in it. It cannot return anything if you don’t plant it. 

• It’s Easier to Win

Only 5% of people succeed in reaching an unusual goal. These are the people that earn the highest salaries, who live in the best part of town, the most comfortable houses, have the best education, the good things of life, and make the greatest contribution to their communities. 

The average man, or average woman, grows up imitating their environment. They think like all their friends think. They  take the life they live for granted. Everyone they like is in the same group. They are in this group as well, and as long as they are not unusually motivated to leave it, they will become an indistinguishable member of it. They do this because it is natural to do it. The group’s objectives, or lack of objectives, become their own. It requires their minimum ability all the years of their life. It is not necessary, because all the industrialized countries are so rich and dynamic that the majority of people don’t need to shift into second or third gear to reach a decent standard of living.

No-one has ever told this young man or this young woman: "Look. There are two very different groups in our society. There are different layers in the socio-economic pyramid. Here is the 5% at the top of the pyramid. Now, this is what we call the middle class, and it is divided into two main groups. And at the bottom you find the lower class, those who, for innumerable reasons, need help from everyone else. Now, look: we are living here, at this level of the pyramid. It is neither the highest, nor the lowest in society. That is where I wanted to be, and your mother and I are perfectly happy here. And where do you want to be?"

Where do you want to be?

People who succeed follow an independent path. At some moment in their life they decide to leave the cocoon of their social group and set out on their own path. And it is easier to win there. There is less competition higher up.

Note : this description of the levels of society seems to me simplistic and relevant at the same time. It is clear that Earl Nightingale is interested in sociology. To learn more, I invite you to begin by researching the Wikipedia article on social classes.

• How Much Are You Worth

Every human life is priceless, but the tangible and intangible payments that we receive in life vary a great deal. We are all unique, but what are the services that we offer?

Think of yourself as a company. You are the president of the company, and you are responsible for its success or failure. You and the members of your family are shareholders in the company, and it is your responsibility to increase the value of the shares year after year. Your family has faith in you and invests a great deal in you, and it’s up to you to prove that their faith is justified.

A complicated company can be divided into four departments: 1) financial; 2) production; 2) sales; and 4) research. Take away one of these ingredients and the company is destined more or less to failure in the long run. Don’t neglect these four parameters for ourselves.

Research is the most commonly ignored operation. You would be surprised by the enormous number of people who stop learning once school is over. Other than company manuals and technical documentation, they read only a very small number of books of any real value. Well, knowledge is power.

• Let’s Talk About Money

Someone who has specialized skills in our society is worth more money than a person with basic skills that can be easily replaced. That doesn’t mean that he is more important from a strictly humanistic point of view, just that his services are better paid. A janitor is just as important from a human point of view as a neurosurgeon, but he is more easily replaced – anyone can be trained to clean floors in a few days or weeks – while a neurosurgeon has spent many years learning his profession, often at the price of great personal sacrifice and at great expense, and he cannot be easily replaced. Thus the neurosurgeon can earn more in a day that the janitor makes in a year.

Therefore, what we earn is related to what we can give and what is asked. But how much do you want to earn?

There are two steps to reach the level of income that we want:

1. Decide how much money we really want, the exact amount.
2. Once you have made the decision, you must forget about money and concentrate on improving what we are doing and the services we offer.

• One Thing You Can’t Hide

Knowledge intelligently applied is power, and everyone needs knowledge – and in this information age, to an unprecedented degree  in the history of humanity. A person’s degree of ignorance will determine his place in the world. Everyone is born ignorant, and must, for a moment, live in ignorance, but all those who remain ignorant can only blame themselves.

People who are the top 5% of the pyramid are those who know the most. They have a better command of the language and send their children to the best schools than most of the population. This might seem surprising, but a correlation exists between the quality of your spoken language, and the number of words you know, with your social and economic success. Actually a good command of the language is an asset in every aspect of your life; language immediately reveals certain things about us, and notably our socio-cultural level and where we belong on the social pyramid. Language indicates the social status to which we belong.

 Reader’s Digest published an article by Blake Clarke entitleld "Words can work wonders for you," in which he reports on a scientific study of 350,000 people showing a surprising correlation between vocabulary levels and richness of language and economic and social success. So it is important to develop your vocabulary and to use language that is varied, accurate and relevant.

Note : I was not able to find this article, but it seems that Reader’s Digest has published numerous versions – at least 8 – of this book (which is not actually an article) from 1972 to 1985. It seems that the book has been re-edited since the 80s. Look here and there for more information.

In any case, it seems obvious to me that the choice of words and their richness are important to effective communication. I am getting a lot out of batting around this old idea, taught in various courses around world – often by NLP practitioners who look no further than the end of their nose – according to which words only account for 7% of a conversation (followed by 38% for your voice, and 55% for gestures and facial expressions.) These figures come from a study in the 70s by Albert Mehrabian, an American psychologist. He explains, in one sentence on his web page touting the merits of his book "Silent Messages — A Wealth of Information About Nonverbal Communication (Body Language)", that "Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable." What seems to be more important, in fact, is the coherence between words, voice and gestures. To learn more, I invite you to read this PDF "Impact of non verbal communication on commercial relationships" (French) I will quote the most interesting passage on this subject:

However Mehrabian’s numbers have been called "exaggerated and suspect," by non verbal language specialists such as Judee Burgoon, David Buller and Gill Woodall. The saying: "it’s not what you say that counts; it’s the way that you say it" is a half truth, according to these specialists. Their analysis of over 100 studies showed that Mehrabian’s research minimizes the importance of words. The relative impact of non verbal and verbal language depends on the context of the meeting. In reality, the degree of persuasion necessary considerably influences the impact of the two different types of language in one’s delivery. For example, when it is an important presentation (argument, conference..) the distribution of impact sources is reversed. Body language goes from 55% to 32%, tone of voice from 38% to 15% and the message (words) goes from 7% to 53% of the impact.

Therefore, it is important to develop your knowledge in the general area that naturally interests us. We are all interested in something. Read books to learn more about that subject area, but also for fun. Begin a systematic study in your field of interest.

Finally, a personal quality library is essential for success.

• Today’s Greatest Adventure

A life is made up of days which become weeks, months, and years. Let’s reduce that to the least common denominator: one day, and finally one task in that day.

This day is a brick which you use to build your house. Sometimes we see a builder start to build a wall, brick by brick, and we think of the amount of work left for him to do. And then one day, some weeks or some months later,  a whole house is standing in the place where the builder was working.

Thus it is in our lives: if we place each of our stones successfully, we will be able to build a magnificent tower. To get in the habit of success, the only thing to do is succeed in the little tasks that we assign ourselves each day.

Try out this idea that was purchased for $25.00: "Every day, write down on a piece of paper 6 important tasks for that day. Then rate them in order of importance. Then do them, one by one. If you don’t get to the last ones, let it be because you would not have been able to do it at all."

This method will allow you to stop worrying about tomorrow. You can relax happy in the knowledge that successful tasks means successful days and that makes a successful life.

• The Person on the White Horse

It is important that we are the leaders in our own lives, and also that our services are so important and irreplaceable that others come to us for them. For that, we must specialize and become believable in a specific area of our work. Become a vital part of the organization which we are in.

Book Critique:

Lead the field is a collection of  extremely relevant advice for succeeding in life, as you can see from this summary. It lacks the spirited system of a Personal Development for Smart People, but I think you can say that of all books since the release of Steve Pavlina’s little book. 

The majority of the advice is practical, easy to apply and has the potential to change our lives. I think that I will start with the main advice in chapter Miracles of Your Mind and put my ideas down on paper, every day of the week. Several years ago, I learned to play the guitar by getting up half an hour earlier every day, I think that I will do the same thing now, to think and have ideas.

Finally, this book is absolutely excellent, with very few weak points – Earl Nightingale touts his other audio products a bit too much for my taste, and he makes one mistake about the level of brain function – but an enormous number of strong points. A must read.

Strong Points:

• A lot of practical, relevant and easy to use advice.
• "Written" very simply

Weak Points::

• A little too much advertising on the company’s audio products.

My rating :

Have you read the book? How do you rate it?

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The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth 

One Sentence Summary: Being happy means being in perfect harmony with the universal principals of Truth, Love and Power, and their derivatives, Unity, Authority, Courage and Intelligence; this book guides us to be better versions of ourselves by showing us the theory and practice of each of these principles.

By Steve Pavlina, 250 pages, published in 2008.

Summary and Book Report:

(Note : This book is not part of the  PMBA challenge)

Do you know Steve Pavlina? Video game programmer who was somewhat successful in the shareware domain – these are programs that you can try for 30 days before you purchase them – in 2004 he launched his  blog about personal development with the ambition of becoming an important player in this sector, even though he had no references, no related degree, and had not written any books on the subject. But for 10 years he had read about 50 books a year on personal development and, feeding off this gigantic body of accumulated knowledge, he began to make connections between seemingly disparate concepts, and to innovate by testing and making mistakes. After two years, his blog was bringing in about $1,000 a day in advertising and affiliation revenue without him having ever spent a single penny on publicity or marketing!

I am myself a fan of Steve Pavlina and have read most of his blogs, which recommend hundreds of articles on a wide variety of subjects, of which some are pure jewels sparkling in the middle of a pile of gold nuggets – don’t miss his best-ofs in the left-hand column, which are all must-read (they are really worth their weight in peanuts – as we say in France).

So Steve Pavlina published his first book about personal development, which is named after his blog Personal Development for Smart People. I am one of 400 happy bloggers who received a free advance copy, and I read it as quickly as possible, slipping it between the books for my challenge.

First of all, even though there are numerous passages from his blog, this book is clearly not a compilation of his best articles: Steve goes much further by recommending a personal development system, which I would go so far as to call a philosophical system, in as much as it is coherent, profound and universal, and, at the same time, practical and progressive. I will paint you a picture.

For Steve, the laws of physics are universal and apply to everything in the same way; why should the area of personal development be any different? Shouldn’t laws of the universal conscience also exist? These questions struck him as he turned the pages one by one of the hundreds of books that he was reading, all of them about personal development, but all full of contradictions to each other, and also contradicting themselves.

So he set about thinking and, as a result of his research, came up with these fundamental rules which must satisfy numerous criteria, of which the most important are:

1. Universality. These principles must be applied to everyone, everywhere in any kind of situation, and must function well in any area of your life: health, friendships,  lovelife, professional career, spiritual development, etc. They are also expected to still work 1000 years from now, and they should have worked 1000 years ago. They are culture independent and they apply both individually and collectively.
2. System. These principles must be complete and coherent, and provide for every essential element without missing anything. It should be possible to link all the effective universal laws of personal development to its foundations, and ideally these principles must themselves create a structure which is both simple and elegant.
3. Fundamentals. These principles must be irreducible, like prime numbers in mathematics. They must serve as fundamental atomic units of human development. Thus, it must be possible to combine two or more fundamental principles to create secondary ones, and the resulting combinations must also be universal and coherent.
4. Coherence. These principles must not contradict each other. They must interconnect logically and intuitively.
5. Practice. These principles must be able to generate concrete and intelligent results  in the real world. You must be able to use them to diagnose problematic situations and think up practical and achievable solutions.

As you can see, Steve Pavlina set the bar high, by setting the goal of discovering principles that would satisfy all these criteria. After two and a half years of research, he is letting us have them; there are three fundamental principles:

• Truth: The ability to stay in reality in the most exact manner possible, defined as:
  • Perception: The ability to see reality with clarity.
  • Prediction: The ability to efficiently predict the possible consequences of one’s actions.
  • Accuracy: The ability to represent reality internally as closely as possible to actual reality.
  • Acceptance: The ability to accept the Truth even in its saddest aspects.
  • Self Awareness: The ability to be fully aware of yourself and your environment.
• Love: The ability to love living beings and to connect with them is defined by:
  • Connection: The ability to connect with others and the world.
  • Communication: The ability to communicate effectively and honestly with others.
  • Communion: The ability to perceive, and create deep ties of camaraderie, friendship and love, together with the delicious sense of completeness which comes from sharing your true self.
• Power: The ability to fulfill your needs and desires, which is defined as:
  • Responsibility: The ability to accept full responsibility for your life.
  • Desire: The ability to understand and accept your deepest desires.
  • Self-Determination: The ability to understand what you want in life and to make decisions that get you there.
  • Focus: The ability to focus on the essential and not to waste time on futile things.
  • Effort: The ability to work and put effort into the pursuit of your goals.
  • Self Discipline: The ability to stick to what you have have decided and the work needed to achieve your goals.

Some of these ideas may seem like common sense to you. However, the principle of Truth is understood intuitively by scientists, the principle of Love is common to all the major religions, and the principle of Power is ever present in companies and governments. But these principles have a tendency to be separate, which weakens them and is a great mistake in our society, according to the author.

These three fundamental concepts combine together to form:

• Oneness (Love, Truth): The most mystical, to my mind, and the one that meant the least to me: the ability to feel the connection between all living beings and which is defined by:
  • Empathy: the ability to perceive and understand the emotions of others, to see their emotional states.
  • Compassion: The ability to feel an affinity for everyone and want to help them.
  • Honesty: The ability to establish honest and true relationships.
  • Equality: The ability to treat  everyone in an honorable way and for the good of all.
  • Contribution : The ability to optimize and enlarge your contribution to humanity and the world.
  • Oneness: The global conscience. Complete responsibility, at an individual level and a broader level. If you think that the planet needs help, it is your responsibility to help it rather than to turn inward.
• Authority (Truth, Power) : The ability to totally take command of your life and to reach your goals, which is defined by:
  • Leadership: The ability to make decisions with respect to yourself and with respect to an external authority, guru, leader or teacher.
  • Efficiency: The real measure of authority. The ability to make enlightened decisions intelligently and to predict results with a small margin of error.
  • Persistence: The ability to stick to your objectives and invest a considerable amount of time for a long time – often many years.
  • Confidence: Real confidence is not the famous "fake it until you make it," in appearance rather than in essence, the outer-game rather than the inner-game. It’s the deep, emotional  recognition of a certain truth, the truth that you are a powerful human being.
  • Importance: The ability to use one’s power for meaningful things rather than frivolous, unimportant things.
• Courage (Love, Power) : The ability to act and overcome an obstacle in order to reach an objective in the long term, to act when you foresee a sort term negative in order to attain a long term positive, which is defined by:
  • Heart: A connection to your deeper self. The ability to choose the way of the heart, that which resonates with you internally. Always ask yourself "is my heart in this?"
  • Initiative: The ability to take the first step, to keep things moving, not to let anticipation eat away at you.
  • Franchise: The ability to go directly towards the goal rather than going all around the houses to minimize your risks of failure and rejection.
  • Honor: The ability to live by honoring your principles, and making them  central to your life.
• Intelligence (Truth, Love and Power) : The graceful union of the three principles, which define us as being aware. Our greatest strength, our greatest ally, our most noble goal, which is defined by:
  • Authenticity: The ability to express yourself in a coherent manner. The image that you send to the outside world reflects your internal image, whether you are talking to a close friend or a perfect stranger.
  • Development: The ability to improve yourself, to grow, to mature, to become more intelligent.
  • Flexibility: The ability to go with the flow rather than fight against it. Your efforts will not be easy, they are directed at producing the desired results.
  • Beauty: The ability to understand the underlying laws of reality, which make life unbelievably fascinating.

Thanks to Keith on Steve Pavlina’s forum for this Venn diagram!

The author gives us an entire chapter on each of these principles to outline and elaborate on every point that could block us in accomplishing each of the principles, and concrete exercises in order to develop them..

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The second part of the book is dedicated to the practical implementation of the principles. While the first part is fundamentally original, the second is less so for anyone who has read most of Steve Pavlina’s blogs; you will rediscover most of his best articles, but articulated along with the 7 principles, so with new advice all the same. Subjects dealt with are:

• Habits

Sow a thought and you reap an act; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny

 
Stephen R. Covey, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" (1989)

This Covey phrase summed up the importance of habits well: put your regular actions on automatic pilot. Suppressing bad habits as much as possible and cultivating as many good ones as possible can create an enormous difference in your whole life: what if instead of smoking several cigarettes a day you were to take up a sport? What if instead of watching TV you read a good book on an interesting subject? What if instead of casually surfing the web you wrote something – a blog, a short story, a book, or even a diary? One hour a day dedicated to a project after a year could lead to remarkable achievements: a site that generates income, a finished book, a better, more defined physical form, a crazy challenge met …

Steve explores the idea of habits passed through the prism of the 7 principles, and recommends testing 66 things, in 30 days for example, like:

• Pyramid: Spend 15 to 30 minutes doing some easy tasks to warm yourself up. Then undertake your most difficult part of the project for several hours. Finally, finish with 15 to 30 minutes on easy tasks to transition to finishing up the job.
• Tempo: Deliberately increase the rhythm and try to go faster than usual. Walk faster. Read faster. Type faster… Go home sooner.
• Punctuality: Always arrive early at your appointment. Punctuality reinforces authority.
• No: Just say no to non-critical requests. If it upsets people, so be it.
• Miracle Worker: Estimate how long it will be before a task is finished. Then start a timer, and force yourself to finish in half the allotted time.

• Career

The primary outlet of your creative expression. At the simplest level, what you do with your time. Steve recommends that you ask yourself numerous questions about your career, like those inspired by Maslow and his famous hierarchy of needs :

• Body (Need): What do I have to do?
• Mind (Ability): What can I do?
• Heart (Desire): What do I want to do?
• Spirit (Contribution): What must I do?

According to Steve, a real career is one that satisfies these four questions.

• Money

In this chapter, in addition to his practical suggestions, Steve even explores the concept of money. Society conditions us with so many contradictory views on this subject that it is not surprising to see so many people who are disoriented with regard to money.

Thus, Steve, like so many others, expands and develops these inconsistent beliefs about money: on the one hand, he sees very well that having money is good and important. Money can buy food, clothing, shelter, transport, education, technology tools, leisure, healthcare, etc. If you have money you have solutions. On the other hand, Steve doesn’t find it right that money buys privilege, like the best healthcare, healthy food, a decent education, nor that some people behave like thieves to get it, to the detriment of others.

For him, there are two basic ways to make money:

1. Make a significant contribution to society, and receive payment with respect to the social value of this contribution.
2. Take advantage of market failures to extract money without bringing any value to society.

He summed this up as:

1. Contributor
2. Parasite

• Health

It is hard nowadays to have to have a firm idea of what is good for our bodies or not, so many specialists often disagree on these issue: it is not hard to find a book that says exactly the opposite of what you currently reading on this subject.

Steve recommends a way to try and find your way through this jungle, essentially based on common sense and the application of the 7 principles to get a grip on your health.

• Relationships

Human relationships are a wonderful source of learning and growth, as well as a necessity for our happiness together. Steve explores then, in particular on the level of intimate relations, always through the prism of the 7 principles.

• Spirituality

Steve recommends a way that might seem strange to some of you to explore your spirituality: explore different points of view. He was raised as a practicing Catholic, but freed himself from this religion to explore other points of view on spirituality. For him, adhering to one religion, thinking it is the only possible point of view on spirituality, is worse than the Truth, it is as if we were stating that the 2D representation of a three dimensional cube is the only one possible, rather than that it can be represented in a multitude of different perspectives. He challenges our beliefs in this way, whether we are Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Raëliens, Atheists, Agnostics, etc, and recommends that we experiment with different points of view before believing that we are adhering to the Truth that we perceive, by all accounts, in a very narrow way.

Book Critique:

This book is undoubtedly extremely interesting and extremely rich: it is one of those books you read and re-read over and over, partially or completely, and find something new to ponder and act upon every time.

The complete system that Steve Pavlina has developed seems coherent and relevant and very, very profound. To be honest, this is why I don’t hesistate in calling it a philosophical system: Steve Pavlina recommends more or less a complete guide for thinking and succeeding in life – on all levels – while leaving everyone a huge margin for freedom. Further, even though he could have overused the university or techno-scientific jargon that has unfortunately become the rule in university circles – Steve uses a remarkably clear and simple language that gets right to the essentials.

The corollary of this system, is that it could be a little too universal and directed. But the richness of the book is such that everyone will be able to get out of it something of interest that fits their needs and desires in that moment, and then stop and come back to it later. I think that everyone will find at least one idea and one action to perform that will be worth the price of the book and the time to read it.

To continue with its downside, however, I would say that Steve sometimes falls into a naïveté which would have led to me sub-title the book Steve Pavlina in Disneyland if I was feeling lie a smart-alec. But I’m not a smart-alec.  I will just say that the system must be applied in an imperfect world with imperfect people, and there are some cases that seem to me hard to make use of, case in point, competing companies that you need to oust in order to dominate the market. Also the matter of seduction, which Steve broaches in a very touching but also very naïve manner, and especially the real practical application of this system in everyday life, month after month, year after year for the majority of us? I think that this book unfortunately gives you lots of ideas of the sort that you think about and then forget. Yes, I know, that’s life, that’s life.

Finally, if you have already read most of his blog, the second part, the how-to part, will be familiar to you, since Steve reiterates some of his best techniques, like trying something for 30 days or the way to discover your purpose in life.

In conclusion, this book is a must-read. It is rich, complete, varied and extremely easy to understand. It would me a mistake miss out.

Bonus

Since you have got this far, I think that you are interested in this book. Steve offers the introduction and first chapter, that you can download here in PDF format.

Strong Points:

• Solid and coherent system as a foundation for personal development
• Universal principles
• Rich, varied: something for everyone
• Practical and theoretical
• Written in an extremely simple way: accessible to everyone without hurting your head
• Numerous passages will surprise you, make you think and make you say "Ah ha!"

Weak Points:

• Sometimes naïve (Steve Pavlina in Disneyland), as is also The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Numerous practical techniques are from his blog

My score : (if you don’t know Steve Pavlina or did’nt read most of his blog)

(if you read most of his blog)

Have you read this book? How do you rate it?

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Influences:

Steve was influenced by numerous sources. Among those that seemed most obvious were:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• Lead the field by Earl Nightingale
• Old video gamers will recognize perhaps the influence of a role game of the 80s of unparalleled depth, Ultima IV, in which the player pursued the Quest of Avatar, which consisted of  8 Virtues – Honesty, Compassion, Value, Justice, Sacrifice, Honor, Spirituality, Humility- to find the ultimate wisdom and develop a new philosophy of life. One of the rare games of its genre where it is not necessary to kill an evil villain.

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