Double Your Happiness and Productivity
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Double Your Happiness and Productivity

Tip: If you spend 30 minutes now to read this, you will save years later!

These 40 skills/techniques/tips will at least double your happiness and productivity with mastery, so try them today:

  • 5 Memorizations
  • 12 Executions
  • 3 Thinkings
  • 8 Trainings
  • 3 Leaderships
  • 9 Empowerments

Why & How

Once you learn these skills/techniques/tips, then you can be happier and more productive, which means you can do everything in less time, therefore more time for you to have fun and live your dreams!! 😄

To get started, open your mind and heart, read everything from top to bottom, optionally click on links to get more info, and finally apply them in your daily routines. If you don't try, nothing will change. If you do, you will be amazed on what you can do and your own transformation as your brain and body becomes smarter and stronger each day.

Please like or share this (http://double.guide) with your family and friends so they can double their happiness and productivity too!

Memorizations

Did you know that you can easily remember vast amounts of information quickly and easily? It's just a matter of knowing how to do it. Your age or how well you can naturally remember things don't matter. Everyone can do it. Once you know the techniques, you could easily learn a new language in a day.

The memory techniques here can be combined together to remember massive and different kind of information easily. All you have to do is open your mind and give it a try.

#1 How Memory Works

Memory works by associating what you already know. Visual memory is magnitudes better than other types of memory -- 90% of information processed in the brain are visuals and done at 60,000 times faster than text. All memory techniques work based on those two facts to enable you to remember unlimited amount of information easily.

#2 Memory Framework

MOM by Jim Qwik will get you started on your memory journey:

  • Motivation: To remember anything, there must be motivation. If you don't care, then it won't be remembered for long.
  • Observation: Be mindful and concentrate to fully see and understand what you want to remember. If you don't see and understand, then there is nothing to remember.
  • Methods: Use effective memorization techniques below as rote memorization is the least effective, but unfortunately, also the most widely used.

#3 Memorize In Order

Story/Link System is easy and effective for remembering ordered list of items by creating a story with vivid images for each item.

Let's say we want to remember this list:

concentration, mindfulness, loving-kindness, prioritization, Pomodoro, Flow, FASTER, Tiny Habits.

You can easily do that by visualizing the following story in your mind:

In your room, imagine a con (concentration) man walks in to put a land mine (mindfulness) in the middle of the room. You say to him "can you kindly (loving-kindness) leave please?" So he looks at his watch and says "oh snap, I forgot about a prior (prioritization) engagement," and leaves while taking your Pomodoro timer. You tried to follow (Flow) him, but he is Faster with his tiny hobbit feets (Tiny Habits).

Now, close your eyes, and replay the story in your mind, and say the words from the list out loud as you do. Try to do it in reverse too. Congrats, you have just mastered the technique! The story can be as long as you need to remember an unlimited # of items. The beauty of this is that you will be able to remember the story for a long time with just one iteration. To make it more memorable, re-iterate with more vivid and wild images and make sure there is a strong link from one word to the next.

To learn a new language or any one-to-one mappings, you can simply use the link part without the story. The French word for chair is chaise. You can easily remember that by imagining a chair chasing (chaise) you.

#4 Memorize In Random Order

Loci Method uses locations to associate ordered or unordered information that you want to remember. Locations can be things in your room, your office, your body, your neighborhood, or anything else that you know intimately. The idea is to put what you want to remember to each location by doing a one-to-one mapping.

Let's try to remember a list of top 10 brain foods:

avocado, egg, walnut, blueberries, broccoli, coconut oil, leafy greens, turmeric, chocolate, fish

Map each of those items to our body by visualizing them in your mind:

  • Avocado on top of your egg-like head
  • Crack your egg head to get walnuts inside
  • Coconut oil coming out of your ears
  • Blueberries coming out of your nose
  • Broccoli coming out of your mouth
  • Leafy greens around your neck
  • Your fingers look like turmerics
  • Chocolate coming out of your butt
  • Your feet smells like stinky fish

Now, you can go to any place on your body to find the item or go from top to bottom to get the full list.

#5 Memorize In Numeric Order

Peg System can be used to map items to numbers, which can be useful for ordered or random retrieval. The idea is to map numbers to a word/image and then map that word/image to what you want to remember.

First, we need to map numbers to a word/image, let's use these -- but you should use whatever comes natural to you when you think of each number:

  • Zero: Hero
  • One: Sun
  • Two: Twin
  • Three: Tree
  • Four: Door
  • Five: Hive
  • Six: Sticks
  • Seven: Heaven
  • Eight: Gate
  • Nine: Vine

Then, remember the list of top brain foods in order like this by visualizing them in your mind:

  • Hero eating avocado for breakfast
  • Sun cooking egg on pavement
  • Twin babies are climbing up walls and driving mom nuts (walnuts)
  • Tree has lots of coconuts [oil]
  • Door is made of blueberries
  • Hives are being stuffed with broccolis
  • Sticks have leafy green vegetables on it over a fire
  • Heaven is passing out free turmerics
  • Gate guard demands chocolate on entry
  • Vine is wrapped around a fish.

Now, you can think of a number, which would map to the word/image, and from that, you can get the brain food. Randomly select a number and you would get random access to any item. This method can be used to remember people's phone number as well by making a story using those words starting with the person whose phone number you want to remember.

Executions

These techniques will help you learn and do everything in half the time and double the enjoyment, so that you can have more time to do anything else you like.

#1 Learn Faster

FASTER by Jim Qwik will help you learn anything faster and more effectively:

  • Forget everything you know so they don't interfere with what you are about to learn.
  • Active learning by taking notes, memorizing important content using memorization techniques, share with others. By doing active reading, you will remember better and gain better understanding.
  • State of your mind, emotion, and body matters. Make sure you are excited and motivated about the topic. Understand why you need to know and how it will be useful to you in the future. You will forget what you don't care sooner or later, but will remember things that matter to you for a lifetime. Emotion for the content matters as your brain will remember things with strong emotional attachment, and not so much otherwise. Evoke emotions and your senses as you learn to add more dimensions and connections to your memory.
  • Teach others to further re-learn the content from another perspective.
  • Entry in your calendar as a reminder to block off time to learn often.
  • Recall what you know once awhile to re-enforce what you remembered.

Apply FASTER to your reading, studying, or whenever you are learning to learn faster!

#2 Read Faster

The average reading speed is about 200 words per minute (WPM). Good readers double that to about 400 WPM. Great readers double again to 800 WPM. The best readers surpass 1000 WPM. That's at least 5 times as fast as average readers, which is a saving of 4 hours when reading a book that takes 5 hours!

Here are a couple of different ways to improve your reading speed:

  1. Comprehension must come first before trying to increase your speed, otherwise there is no point going faster. To increase comprehension, it requires full concentration and use the FASTER and memory techniques to remember what you read. The last point to use memory techniques need to be stressed as there is no point reading faster or comprehend more if you don't remember the content long enough to use them!
  2. Stop the subvocalization in your head as it reduces the reading speed to your speaking speed, which is much slower than your comprehension speed.
  3. Use your finger as a pacer under the words you are reading, which can quickly increase your reading speed from 25% to 100%. Read where your finger is and move your finger faster and faster, and then you will naturally start to read faster and reduce subvocalization too. Once you become really fast, then this can be skipped.
  4. Read in multiple words (single cohesive idea) instead of one word at a time by grouping related words into a single idea or visual (e.g. super hero is strongest). When moving your eyes left to right, jump from one group of words to the next instead of moving smoothly. Try to use peripheral vision to read in more words -- this takes practice and time, but will let you reach 1000+ WPM.

If you are using a mobile app or electronic device, like Kindle, turn off smooth scrolling and flip to the next page instead so you can easily locate the next group of words to read.

#3 Prioritization

Prioritize work based on their value and work on the most valuable things first as time is limited, so you get the most bang for your time.

For projects, use TBD to enable prioritization to maximize business impact:

  • Timeline Expectation from stakeholders so projects are done on time.
  • Business Value that will be realized when the project is done. Work on the highest value over cost ratio first.
  • Deliverables are the key outputs of the project. It enables effort estimation and ensures expectations with stakeholders are met.

For meetings, attend only if you are providing/getting value and there is no way to do the same offline.

#4 Optimal Concentration

Pomodoro can be used to ensure concentration is at max when doing work. Your ability to concentrate wanes after 30 minutes, so the idea is to take a break after 25 minutes of concentrated work to reset using a timer. Instead of a timer, use mindfulness to check your concentration and mental/body energy once awhile and take a break/refuel when it is not 100%.

Be sure to drink plenty of water and snack on some brain foods. And walking during the break will do wonders to your butt, memory, and creativity.

#5 Optimal Experience

Flow can be used to fully immerse yourself in your work with absolute passion and concentration, the work becomes so fun that time simply flies as your productivity sky rockets to new heights!! This is the pinnacle of productivity and the final state that you want to achieve to get things done fast with high quality.

To get into the state, these conditions must be met (PCCC):

  • Positive Feedbacks: There should be immediate positive feedback to your brain from what you are doing to encourage continuation, which will eventually lead to flow state.
  • Clear Goal: There must be a clear goal in mind, otherwise the mind would wander. The more specific the better.
  • Challenging: The work should be challenging, but not too hard. Too easy, then there is no need for flow state. Too hard, then it won't flow. There is a sweet spot somewhere. If the challenge is too hard, break it down into something easier. If it is too easy, well, find something more challenging to do, LOL!
  • Concentration Time: It takes about 15 to 45 minutes of concentrated work to get into the flow state, so don't let yourself be distracted during that time. The use 

Listening to your favorite music can help too.

#6 Behavior Design

Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, PhD can be used to build good habits to automate your life, which can be used to improve your health and learning.

Easily create new habits using ABC:

  • Anchor: Find something that you already do
  • Behavior: Do something small that you want to turn into a habit
  • Celebrate: Generate a good feeling and praise yourself.

For example, to build a habit of doing exercise in the morning after you get a drink of water (something you already do), then immediately do something small towards your exercise goals (such as putting on shoes or taking one step), and finally make yourself feel good and praise yourself for completing the small step. Repeat the same process several times, and it will become a tiny habit. Repeat it to do more exercise each time, then it can become a big habit.

Use B=MAP (Behavior = Motivation * Ability * Prompt) to easily change an existing one. Want to reduce picking up your phone to check messages? Make it harder to access your phone (reduce ability).

Additional Resources: YouTube VideoKwik Brain Podcast

#7 Public Speaking

3 golden rules from Jeff Weiner:

  • Know your audience: Different audiences have different goals and the content needs to be relevant and valuable to them.
  • Know your material: The reason they are listening to you is because you know about the topic more than them, otherwise there is no reason for them to be there.
  • Know your passion: The most interesting topic presented without enthusiasm will put people to sleep. The most boring topic will come alive when presented and infused with passion as it is transferred to your audience.

Speak using HAIL (by Julian Treasure) so people will listen:

  • Honesty: The truth matters and lies don't.
  • Authenticity: Be yourself as they came to hear from you.
  • Integrity: Do what you say otherwise they will feel betrayed
  • Love: Show that you care and they will care about what you say

#8 Hacking Motivation

When you feel motivated, that is actually dopamine being released, which makes you feel really good and happy. In order to hack it to your advantage, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

  1. There must be a future reward that you are excited about. The amount of dopamine released when you receive the reward is significantly lower than before. This is the carrot. E.g. annual bonus, vacation, saving the world.
  2. Once you start doing work while thinking about the reward, that's when significant amount of dopamine is released, which gives you the motivation needed to get the work done. It will continue to do so until the work is done, and then dramatically decreases until the reward is received.
  3. To get an extra boost of dopamine, give yourself mini-rewards once awhile, but not always, which is less effective.
  4. Many factors could significantly impact dopamine release or its effect, such as stress, pain, lack of sleep.

Your brain naturally trains you to do things that it thinks will help you live a better life by releasing dopamine, such as making friends. But now you know how you can train your brain to do what you want!

#9 Effective Communication

The most effective communication should convey emotions.

I believe emotion is our first/native language before we learned to speak. Other languages / forms of communication need to be translated by our brains to native forms, such as emotions or memories, before we can understand and respond. Therefore, the best way to communicate is by using our first/native language as it is the most direct. Unfortunately, there is no way to do it directly, so we must use intermediate forms, such as speech, writing, or gesturing. However, the idea is to make sure emotions are being conveyed thru those means to improve the effectiveness of the communication. Logical reasoning, pretty words, and any other form of communications falter in the face of emotions.

Here are a few tips on how to convey emotions, and therefore communicate effectively (UMGGG):

  1. Use multiple forms: You do this naturally when speak in person as you use your voice, face, and body to convey additional information that gets translated to emotions. When communicating online via text, add extra dimensions using images, emojis, or a unique writing style. And humor goes a long way! 😄
  2. Mastery of forms: In order to translate your emotions fully and correctly, you need to have mastery of the forms of communication that you use, otherwise mistranslation and misinterpretation will happen.
  3. Good Visuals: Visual is a native form that can be easily understood and remembered, therefore it is more effective than words. A picture is worth a thousand words. In absence of real visuals, use words to describe them.
  4. Good Values: If something is not interesting, then we will naturally tune out. But if something is interesting (i.e. provides value), then we will listen closely. Hence, to ensure your audience is all ears, the content must provide value to them. The more valuable the content, the more they will listen.
  5. Good Intentions: If the audience detects malicious intent, then they will distrust you and disengage. People will listen if they know you are trying to help them and not just to take advantage of them.

If the goal is to get your audience to act, then apply behavior design using Tiny Habits's B=MAP: Behavior = Motivation * Ability * Prompt.

You must listen to others first with empathy if you want them to listen to you. Listen to their needs, values, desires, pains, joys, feedbacks, or anything else on their mind. After you have listened, acknowledged, then you can respond with content that is relevant and valuable to them.

#10 Teach Love, Not How

Most of the time, we focus on teaching others and kids on how to do something, or even worse, telling them exactly what to do -- sometimes, ending up yelling at them as they either are taking too long or don't want to do it. Neither is effective in the long run. To ensure they will thrive for a lifetime and learn by themselves, we must teach them to love what they do. It is harder and takes more time initially, but it will pay off in multitudes later -- you won't even need to lift a finger and they will just do everything by themselves driven by their passion.

When people love what they do, they will naturally explore and learn as much as they can without anyone telling them to -- that's a beautiful thing for everyone involved. When you tell people what to do, well, you will need to do the same thing over and over again as they haven't learned how. If you teach people how to do something, well, they don't need to bother you until they hit something new. Since they don't love it, they would just take the easiest route, which is to ask whoever is next to them, and if there is no one, they would just give up or Google it to figure out the cheapest way to finish it. That all results in the need to micromanage, poor results, negative emotions, and lots of time wasted on both sides. Now if they love what they do, they won't wait until there is a request. They will talk or do research to understand everything before that happens without being asked. Since they understand so much, when asked to do something (this might not even be necessary), the result is better output with higher quality, minimal time spent on both sides, and lots of positivity. That's win/win!

To teach love, here are a couple of suggestions, but generally it's about associating positive emotions to the work:

  1. Explain why they need to do it. What's the value to them? What's the purpose? If they know how it will help them in the future, they will be more motivated.
  2. Use the celebration step from Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, PhD where you praise them for each small thing they do. This will effectively turn what they do it into a habit. Always tell them how good they are doing. If they did something wrong, it's good to point it out and learn from it, but do it with humor if possible and take it easy -- no need to be too critical (negative emotion). See Behavior Design section for more details.
  3. Use motivation hacks like occasionally giving them a reward, but not all the time. See Hacking Motivation section for more details.

Here are some things to NOT do, as it will have the opposite effect (they will hate it and stop doing it when you are not there):

  1. Being angry and yelling at them. This is demotivating, even if it seems to get them to do what you want. It's only temporary, and they will associate negative feelings to the task, and hence not something they would do in the future if they don't have to.
  2. Telling them they are stupid, suck at it, and won't ever be good enough. More than demotivating, this will cause them to have self-esteem issues, and totally mess with their believe system. This is a death sentence for their future, so don't do it!

Once they learn to love what they do, your job is done -- forever! 😉

#11 Powerfully Serve Your Customers

While The Prosperous Coach is for teaching others to be successful coaches, it has a few key takeaways that would help you serve your customers so powerfully and transformatively that they would gladly pay a premium for your service. A customer can be internal/external, an employer/employee, a family/friend, or just anyone that you provide service to.

  1. Deeply understand your customers' history, needs, challenges, and dreams. Only when you have a full understanding of them, then you are ready to serve them, otherwise you are only serving yourself. Sometimes your customers may not know the full scope of they really need, so it's necessary to ask for the rationale behind the requests to better meet their needs.
  2. Push your customers to dream bigger. It's not enough to just service their requests, which is just the minimal bar. They wouldn't pay premium for that and likely will go to another provider that could do more if possible. Based on what they are trying to do, and the experiences you have, offer them bigger possibilities. E.g. Where else could they use your services to get more ROI? Not necessarily limited to the services that you provide, is there something else your customers could be doing to be more successful?
  3. Bigger the impact to your customers, higher the premium they will gladly pay. If your services are making a huge impact to your customers' success, then they will gladly share them with you. To make an impact, ensure your customers are committed to use your services. If they don't use them, they won't see the values even if your services are exceptional. If you aren't making your customers successful, then there is no reason for them to keep you. If you are able to completely transform them to be the most successful version of themselves, then they will keep you forever.

Powerfully serve and transform your customers to be the most successful, then you will too.

#12 Every Conflict is Negotiation

Conflict is natural and healthy as long as it is properly negotiated, therefore embrace it and master your negotiation skills to ensure successful outcomes for all parties involved. As long as you are well intentioned and see the situation as the problem, and not your counterpart, then everything is game and aim nothing less than the desired outcome for yourself.

In Chris Voss's book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, he provides the following tools to get the job done:

  1. smile goes a long way as everyone naturally likes someone that smiles. If people like you, then you are more likely to build good rapport and get more favorable deals.
  2. Say "I am sorry ..." to convey understanding and empathy for your counterpart to gain trust.
  3. Label emotions and understanding using "It seems ...", "It sounds like ...", or "I understand ..." to diffuse emotions and show empathy to gain trust.
  4. Use mirror questions to get more information. For example, if someone says "I can't do that," then you can simply respond with "can't?" to get details.
  5. Say no without saying no using "how" and "what" questions and let your counterpart solve your problems. E.g. How can I do that if ...? What are we trying to solve?
  6. Avoid "why" questions as they have an implicit accusation that triggers defensiveness. Avoid other questions too as they are easy to answer without much impact.
  7. Let the other party make the first offer as long as you are prepared to handle extreme anchors and you might get a better deal than expected.
  8. If your offer is bad, start by saying that what the counterpart might think to get it out of the way so they can't say it and use against you. It also builds trust.

To negotiate for a good price, the Ackerman bargaining method can't be beat:

  1. Set a target price.
  2. Make your initial offer at 65% of target. This is an extreme anchor to lower your counterpart's expectation.
  3. Then set another two offers at 85% and 95%.
  4. Use the no questions like "how" and "what" to get your counterpart to bid against himself before making a better offer. E.g. That's a generous offer, but how can I do that when the market price is ...?
  5. When you make your offers, make sure the number is exact, like $102.31, to show there are calculation and weight behind the number.
  6. For the last offer at your target price, add in a nonmonetary item to show there is nothing more that you can offer.

Here are some interesting facts about human psychology that can be leveraged:

  1. People has a tendency to avoid a loss than to have a bigger gain.
  2. People just want to be understood more than anything else.
  3. People are happy as long as they think they got the best deal even if they didn't.
  4. People don't like to be told what they should do or think.
  5. People are driven by their worldview (their beliefs or whys).
  6. People's expectations will change when presented with extremes.

With the above tools and knowledge, it is easy to abuse the power, so please do use them compassionately, especially to the uninitiated.

Thinkings

Schools teach logical thinking mostly and other forms indirectly and insignificantly, despite the fact that thinking is one of the most critical skills to be successful. Lateral thinking is a famous one for generating ideas. Another example is exploratory thinking for finding better solutions and dealing with conflicts together instead of arguments. Perceptional thinking can be used to better understand the values of what you see. And many more that are created by Edward de Bono

Many successful global companies, like IBM, have adopted Edward's thinking methods to improve innovation and collaboration. All schools in Venezuela are required to teach his thinking methods. Research has shown that students that use his thinking methods perform 30% to 100% better in all other subjects.

#1 Parallel Thinking

Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono will help you or your team solve problems using parallel thinking from six perspectives, thereby increasing the number of solutions and consensus in half the time or less:

  • White: Discuss using pure facts and information.
  • Red: Discuss using intuition and feelings, like anger. It's ok to be illogical.
  • Black: Discuss negatively with caution.
  • Yellow: Discuss positively with optimism like a ray of sunshine.
  • Green: Discuss using creativity, innovation, and new ideas with growth mindset.
  • Blue: Control the discussion and look at everything from the sky above. Start and end with blue.

For your team, each person should put on each hat in the same sequence to brainstorm so the collective brain power of the team can be used to solve the problem rather than arguing about who is right / better.

#2 Lateral Thinking

Thinking logically is called vertical thinking as you are focused in a single subject and is great for tactical work. For strategic and new ideas, it is better to think from diffused, eagle-in-the-sky, different, and untrod perspectives, and let your brain come up with a novel solution for you. That is called lateral thinking, which is defined and written in the book Lateral Thinking by Edward De Bono.

In the book, he described the following scenario to demonstrate lateral thinking:

A merchant owes a banker a lot of money and the banker fancies the merchant's daughter, and so the banker offered them a deal using a game of chance. The banker will put a black and white pebble into a box and if the daughter picks the white pebble, then the debt is cleared. If she picks the black one, then the daughter will be traded for the debt. And if they don't play the game, then the merchant will go to jail for not being able to pay the debt. After they decided to play, the sly banker puts in two black pebbles into the box instead of one each, and the daughter saw it.

Logically, she has 3 options:

  1. Don't play, but then her dad goes to jail.
  2. Confront the banker, but things probably won't go well.
  3. Play and exchange herself for the debt to save her dad.

None of them are good choices. Can you think of a better option? It will be hard using vertical thinking. Pause here and try to think about a solution before reading further so that you can better appreciate lateral thinking.

Edward suggests there are 4 things to improve lateral thinking:

  1. Avoid the dominance of vertical thinking. As most people are trained to think logically since grade school, it's easy to get into the old habit. The more that you are an expert and comfortable with the existing thinking, the less likely that you would see a new way. So it's important to forget what you know. Most smart people are stuck in vertical thinking and so can't come up with out-of-the-box ideas easily.
  2. Try abstracting the problem in different ways or more generically. What you see may not be what it seems. Something that looks like a square outline may be just 4 lines, and then the 4 lines may be just many dots, and so the square is actually made of many dots in the shape of a square outline. Once you find the base abstraction, then you can solve the problem different ways.
  3. Search from different perspectives and in untrod paths. While the existing solution may be good, but if you don't look around for other paths, then you will never know if there is a better one. So ignore the existing path and look for another one with fresh eyes, and you will be surprised. Or look at things backward or from another perspective.
  4. Chance is better than you think. Lastly, just leave things to chance. Many great discoveries of our time happened by chance. While you can't use it directly, but like card games, you can improve your odds. One way is by playing more and just explore. Another is to brainstorm crazy ideas even if it doesn't make sense logically.

Now that you know how to be a better lateral thinker, can you think of a solution? Hint: Try to think backward and what's left in the box rather than what to take and a solution might just come to you. 😉

To be the next Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, or the big ideas guy in your team, become a lateral thinker!

#3 Perceptional Thinking

Study has shown that 90% of errors in thinking are due to perception with the remaining due to logic. Perception, not logic, drives emotions, therefore it is utmost important that we are able to think well perceptually to better understand the truth, make sound decisions, and improve our persuasion. To gain complete perception, we need to look at things from all perspectives.

In Think! Before It's Too Late, Edward de Bono showed perception can be improved using:

  • PMI: Look at the Plus, Minus, and Interesting side of things.
  • CAF: Consider All Factors in the situation
  • C&S: Look at the Consequences and Sequels of actions in the short, medium, and long term.
  • FIP: Focus on the First Important Priorities as there could be many things to consider.
  • APC: Look at Alternatives, Possibilities, and Choices.
  • OPV: Consider Other People's View as well.

Trainings

Use these techniques/tips to improve your body, concentration, awareness, compassion, gratitude, and reduce negativities (e.g. stress, anger), which will greatly improve your physical/mental health, memorization, execution, relationships, leadership, happiness, and productivity!

Yep, meditation and exercise can do miracles for your body and mind! So don't underestimate their benefits and start doing them today.

#1 Concentration Meditation

Concentration Meditation will improve your concentration and reduce stress, therefore improving your memory, execution, and health.

Here's how to do it:

  1. Sit/lay down in a comfortable spot, and relax your body.
  2. Focus on your breath or anything else as long as it doesn't change.
  3. If any thoughts or other distractions comes up, just gently let them go and return to the object of focus -- this is natural and will always happen, so no need to fight it.
  4. Repeat until you feel fully relaxed and able to concentrate.

It takes time to master this skill so be patient.

#2 Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness Meditation will improve your awareness, concentration, and reduce stress, therefore improving your ability to perceive, understand, and enjoy life.

Here's how to do it:

  1. Either sit/lay down in a comfortable spot or while you do things during the day in any position, and relax yourself.
  2. Bring your focus to what you are doing to fully enjoy it and then diffuse the focus to everything around you to fully take them in and appreciate the beauty.
  3. Shift your focus to your different senses so you don't miss anything.
  4. For any emotion or thought that comes up, enjoy, accept, let them go and don't let them affect you.
  5. Scan your body from top to bottom once awhile to feel the sensations, relax, and put them into the correct posture.
  6. Repeat until you feel relaxed and aware of everything in and around you.

This can be done while you exercise, sitting in front of your desk while working, walking to the bathroom, etc. You will start to see the world anew and notice things that was once ignored.

#3 Loving-Kindness Meditation

Loving-Kindess Meditation will improve your compassion, gratitude, concentration, and reduce negativities, therefore improve your relationships, leadership, and happiness.

Here's how to do it:

  1. Sit/lay down in a comfortable spot, and relax your body
  2. Acknowledge that you are a person and you deserve to be happy just like everyone else, forgive yourself for any wrongdoing, praise yourself for the good things you have done, thank yourself for what you contribute to others, and finally extend love or well wishes to yourself.
  3. Now repeat the same steps for some people you love, some you had conflicts with, and some that you don't know that well.
  4. Repeat until you are relaxed and your heart is filled with warmth, love, gratitude, and happiness.

#4 Exercise Daily

Do cardio exercises for at least 30 minutes a day to boost your happiness, mental and physical health, improve brain functions and memory, sleep, energy levels, and many more, therefore productivity too. Just walking can improve working memory and increase creativity by 60%!

As you age, you naturally become less active and many parts of your body start to degrade, hence it becomes more critical to do exercise. When you exercise, it increases the amount of blood and oxygen to your brain to boost its energy and function, and at the same time, remove toxins that damages your body and brain. It can slow down and even reverse some effects of aging!

Don't like to exercise? No problem. Easily make it into a habit using Tiny Habits.

#5 Sleep Well

Sleeping well is the most important step to live a happy and productive life. Nothing works without it. It builds long-term memory, promotes health and growth of your body and mind, clears out toxins / stress, and many other important functions to keep you running at your optimal state.

In order to get the best sleep, do Emc²:

  1. Exercise your body and mind in the day, aside from many health benefits, is proven to promote higher quality of sleep. Full body exercises are most effective. Reading is good exercise for the mind. E.g. One time, I had to shovel dirt back to my yard for a few hours after my wife paid someone to remove too much, and I slept like a baby that night -- best sleep in my life, 😆.
  2. Meditate before bed to clear out distractions that keep you up.
  3. Comfortable in bed and make sure there isn't anything around you that would wake you up during the middle of the night. You should be nice and warm in your blanket. There shouldn't be any sporadic loud noises or bright light.
  4. Consistently sleep/wake up at the same time to get your body into a rhythmic sleep cycle, so it becomes a habit. Depending on your age, there is a different recommended number of hours to sleep, such as 8 hours for adults or 10+ hours for kids, to get the best results. If you don't need to, don't use an alarm clock, but listen to your body. Sometimes, you will need more sleep to fully rejuvenate, such as when you are sick.

#6 Daily Routine

It's good to have a routine to ensure all the important things are done regularly, nothing is dropped on the floor, and you are steadily getting closer to your goals.

Experiment to figure out what works best for you, but feel free to use mine as a starting point to get an idea:

  1. Wake up at 6am.
  2. Read book about 30 minutes to 1 hour while in bed. Learning is important for personal growth and the brain is in the best state to do that after waking up.
  3. Drink water and start to exercise for 30 minutes. Make/publish Daily Exercise & Talk video. Walk and eat freshly picked fruits in my backward.
  4. Eat nutritious breakfast and do other morning necessities.
  5. Publish happiness/productivity article from previous night and share on social medias.
  6. Check calendars, respond to emails and social medias to help others be happy/productive, and take a break.
  7. Start work at 9am. Use productivity techniques to get everything done with high quality in half the time! E.g. Ensure the body and mind are at 100% throughout the day by taking a 5 minute break about every 30 minutes to go for a walk, play with family/kids, or eat some brain food / drink water.
  8. During lunch break, respond to social medias and help others be happy/productive.
  9. Finish work at 6pm. Besides dinner and other necessities, play with family/kids, read book, help others to be happy and productive, write happiness/productivity article, and steadily build a company to enable everyone to be happy and productive.
  10. Sleep around 10pm.

What's your daily routine for success?

#7 Skill Development

The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle, breaks talent development into 3 components: ignition, master coaching, and deep practice. They apply to any skill that you want to develop, and not just for something that you are naturally good at.

Ignition is the motivation. This can be triggered by several factors, such as passion, the need to belong to a group, curiosity, reward. This must be strong and self-sustaining in order to endure the strenuous coaching and deep practice.

The quickest and best way to learn something is by learning from someone that has already done it with exceptional coaching skills, a master coach. It would take too long to re-learn everything from scratch and some things are not easily visible from your perspective. It might cost a pretty penny, but it's worth every cent as time is more precious.

With everything, practice is key. To learn fast, deep practice is necessary where you can iterate and fail fast so there is sufficient feedbacks to strengthen the skill. To become a world-class expert, it will take many hours of deep practice. Depending on the type of skill, a liberal or strict approach might be better. E.g. To reproduce a piano piece, strict is necessary.

With each deep practice, the brain wraps more myelin around relevant nerve cells to provide insulation for electrical signals that is sent, therefore improving the speed and quality of the transmission by hundreds of folds, which is essentially what expert skill is at a biological level. The more myelin wrapped around nerve cells used by a skill, the more skillful you are. Myelin wraps but never unwraps, that means once you have learned a skill, you will have it for life. A gap does start to form between myelin and the nerves at around age 50 and therefore skills will start to deteriorate.

#8 Brain Programming

Based on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), your brain stores information based on your five senses -- mostly visual, auditory, and kinesthetic where one of them dominates (modalities). As it is stored as a picture or movie, you can easily change them to re-program how you feel to empower you. E.g. You can use it to easily get over traumatic events, phobias, addictions, or become more motivated about doing chores.

To reduce the emotional effect of a memory, as you recall the memory, change it from a movie to a still picture, reduce the size, put yourself into it to disassociate, change it to black and white, erase it with an eraser, play it backward, make changes to empower you (e.g. make it funny by adding a clown nose to someone that makes you scared or change the voice to be cartoonish). Repeat it a few times to complete the re-programming or whenever you need to re-enforce the effect.

To boost the emotional effect, do the opposite of the previous step or recall a memory where you feel a certain way and try to copy the vividness and other submodalities onto something that you want to feel the same way. E.g. If you want to feel motivated to study, remember a moment when you are very motivated and then notice how the memory is stored and how you feel, and copy as much as you can from that memory to your study.

To take a one step further, you can simply recall or create the emotion that you want and then think of anything that you want to associate the emotion to. Repeat the process until the emotion is attached to the memory or action.

Use this to change how you feel about anything in the past, present, or future, so you are empowered to take actions to help you succeed rather than being held back due to bad programming.

Leaderships

There is only so much you can do by yourself. With leadership, you can easily multiple your impact by 10 to billions of times by inspiring others to join your mission.

#1 Transcendence

There are many leadership styles, but the best one is transcendent leadership where you instill meaning and purpose to your employees based on the company's mission with compassion so they will care about you, the company, the company's mission, and therefore do amazing things.

Fred Kofman's book The Meaning Revolution details how transcendent leadership can be used to manage these 4 key issues in an organization:

  1. Disengagement: 90% of the global workforce is disengaged, which means a lot of lost productivity, money being dropped on the floor, and no one is picking it up. Traditional leadership, like the carrots and sticks approach, just demotivates employees and makes things worst, but many leaders still use it. To really motivate employees, there must be purpose to provide meaning, principles to ensure integrity, people to build safe/good relationships, and autonomy to enable creative freedom.
  2. Disorganization: Different business units are fighting with others to win, but the organization is always loosing in that kind of situation. Local and global incentives can't solve the problems and sometimes can make things worst (i.e. only local incentives is ok but not enough).
  3. Disinformation: Different people / teams have different information and they are not always willing to share. Even if they do try, it is still easy to misinterpret. In short, it's just almost impossible to have all perfect information to make the best decision.
  4. Disillusion: If you talk and forget to walk, that can easily lead to disengagement. It's important to enable employees to provide honest feedbacks to leadership so improvement can be made. And power can be addictive and ruin you if it isn't put in check.

All organizations have those problems and there is no way to fix them completely, but you just need to manage them better than your competitors using a well designed culture, compassion, and transcendent leadership.

If you feel the need to micromanage, that means you haven't put transcendent leadership to good use yet!

This is practiced by Jeff Weiner, one of the world's best CEOs, leaders at LinkedIn and Google as Fred Kofman was the VP of Leadership Development at both companies.

#2 Network

Does a tree make a sound when it falls in the forest when no one is there? Technically, yes, but the idea is that if no one is there, then it doesn't matter. Same applies to your career or personal mission. If no one is there to see what you do, then nothing really happened from other people's perspective even if something did. Therefore, the more people that can see and help you, the larger your impact. So go out and build your professional and personal network! The bigger the better -- just make sure there's value on both sides for a long lasting relationship.

Your network can provide you with new opportunities -- my last 3 jobs were based on my connections' recommendations. It can provide you with professional/personal development and knowledge sharing -- this is highly under valued. As others are happy to share and there are no limits, it is the best and largest economy of value exchange where you can take as much as you want without a need to give back -- you should be thankful, of course. However, if you do want to give back, it is definitely appreciated. Everyone wins no matter what!

As LinkedIn's cofounder Reid Hoffman always say, relationships matter.

#3 Compassion for Everyone

All great leaders lead with compassion. It's not easy, but worth it.

Jeff Weiner, one of the world's best CEOs, taught me compassion in his article Managing Compassionately. My life was forever changed from that moment on. I began to feel the pains of others and truly feel connected to everyone. I was able to understand others better and truly want to help them whenever they need. And the relationships that I build have substance, endurance, and are mutually beneficial.

But that didn't happen overnight, but in three phases over a span of 3 years:

  1. Understanding compassion. Empathy and compassion are often defined differently depending on who you talk to. Prudy Gourguechon defines empathy as a neutral function where you understand what the other person is going through from their perspective, but may or may not help. Compassion builds on top of empathy where you feel what the other person is going through with the intention of helping them.
  2. Feeling what the other person is going through. This is the hard part because most people will naturally retract themselves when they start to feel other people's sufferings, hence most leaders tend to stop at empathy as it is easier. The first time I went through this, it lasted about a year before I retracted as I wasn't even able to handle my own sufferings, so how can I handle others too? Before doing this, ensure you have a strong self (i.e. solid happiness core). To improve myself, I started writing A Great Life Guide two years ago, which was finally complete last month. With it, I was able to achieve 100% happiness every day and handle my own sufferings along with everyone else's. With the guide, you should be able to do it in a matter of days instead of years.
  3. Helping others. When we show others that we care about them, then they will also care about you and therefore will listen and help you as well. Win/win for both. If you don't help others, then you don't really care about them. When people know that you don't care, they won't care either and will only do the minimal or nothing for you. Without caring, motivation wanes and the relationship won't last.

Therefore, to bring out the best of people, you must manage compassionately. The greater the number of people that you extend your compassion to, the greater your leadership. The greatest leadership extends compassion to everyone. ❤️

Listen with empathy. Act with compassion.

A word of caution, as Fred Kofman told Jeff once:

Compassion without wisdom is foolish. Wisdom without compassion is ruthless.

Empowerments

You can achieve your dreams -- the only requirement is that you have to believe in and apply yourself!

#1 Believe In Yourself

If you don't believe yourself, how do you expect others to do that? While it might seem insignificant, but it has massive impact on what you can accomplish as your brain will wire itself based on what you believe. If you believe it is not possible to remember massive amount of information or become a genius, then you won't. If you believe the world is flat, then it is. If you don't believe it is possible to fly into space, then you won't. But if you believe you can do anything by applying yourself using the right skills/techniques/tips, then you will! Believe is even scientifically proven to alter the effects of medication, diet, exercise, and even stress in your body and mind. So believe in yourself and positivity.

Limitless by Jim Qwik is the best book ever written and is also the mindset that you want to have when it comes to what you can do. There is essentially no limit to your brain's ability to abstract, process, and remember information. While your body has physical limits, but it is amazingly adaptive. Both your body and mind can be trained and it will adapt to all your needs, known as neutroplasticity.

The only differences between an average person and a genius are:

  • Growth: You must have a growth and limitless mindset where you are motivated to learn and become better each day. The techniques in this article will get you started.
  • Giving: Teach others what you have learned so everyone becomes better. Someone taught you, remember?
  • Gratitude: Be thankful for everything you have got and everyone that have helped you be the awesome person you are today. It takes a village to raise a child.
  • Grit: The power of passion and perseverance is the #1 factor to success. It's not a matter of knowing, but you must do it passionately and never stop. Perseverance is key and things do get easier, especially if you use the techniques in this article.

Steve Jobs started out as an ordinary guy, but he believed in and applied himself, then he became a genius. So you can too!

To ensure that you keep believing in yourself, never do any negative self-talk, even if you are joking, and enchant positivity daily. Once you say anything negative, it will affect you subconsciously. When others do it, it's easy to let go, but not so when you do. To further protect yourself, enchant daily by saying this internally with excitement:

Today is going to be a great day! I am awesome, smart, and fun. I can do anything when I apply myself. I will realize my dreams!

It's a great way to start your day as it will make you feel good and enforce your beliefs and dreams, so they won't ever get lost.

#2 Happiness Intelligence

Happiness intelligence is the ability to be happy. With mastery, you will have unlimited energy to be productive. If you are not happy at all, productivity goes to zero, therefore it is the single most significant factor to productivity. To achieve 100% happiness intelligence and productivity, follow the steps in A Great Life Guide.

Happiness enables productivity. Productivity elevates happiness.

#3 Biggest Impact & Growth

Don't take the easiest job, nor the hardest, as neither is good for you. Too easy, and you won't grow. Too hard, there is no chance to grow. Pick one that is challenging with the highest impact and growth potential, but still doable, and you will be rewarded handsomely in both monetary and non-monetary rewards. And don't be afraid to fail -- that's one of the best ways to grow!!

#4 Be a Player, Not a Victim

The idea comes from Fred Kofman's book The Meaning Revolution where he states that a victim mindset always blame others and external forces for his misfortune, on a contrary, a player places himself as part of the problem and puts everything under his control so he decides what to do and outcome.

For example, if you are late for a meeting, do you say "sorry, the meeting ran over?" Well, that's a victim's mindset as you are blaming the meeting for making you late. A player would say "sorry, I need to stay longer in the meeting, so I will be late" before he's late or "sorry, I missed the meeting alert, but won't happen again." as he will make changes needed to ensure he doesn't miss the alert again. Do you see the stark differences the approaches that were taken between the two mindsets? A victim simply blames others without fixing the problem, however a player always takes responsibility and fixes the problem so it doesn't happen again as everything is under his control.

Problems have a negative connotation and generally people steer away from them, but it's actually better to think of them as challenges that reward us. For each challenge, while it might not be fun sometimes, the key outcome is that you become stronger at the end -- either you learned something new or become more resilient, so you can take on bigger challenges in the future. Therefore, don't run away from them, but accept and complete them with excitement and be thankful for the experience and the reward!

A player's mindset is what you want to be have for your life -- everything is always under your control and it is always your responsibility and never others. Blaming others is just an excuse for poor planning and gives up responsibility and control of your life to others. You don't want to do that. It's your life, so be the player and accept all the challenges that will make you stronger and take full responsibility and control of the outcome -- your outcome!

#5 Leverage What Others Have Learned

If you try to figure out everything yourself, it would take you millions of years as that's how much knowledge has accumulated since the dawn of humanity. And that continues to grow each day as human knowledge is doubling every year. How do you obtain millions of years of wisdom while it doubles every year? Easy, as you may have guessed, that's by reading what they have written and listening to what they say using all the techniques that you have learned in this guide. By doing that, you can leverage all they have learned and use that to do your bidding -- that's smart, not hard!

Bill Gates and many other successful CEOs read daily and often. Bill reads 50 books a year. Elon Musk learned to build rockets by reading books. Warren Buffet reads 500 pages every day. In the book Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, which has strategies that transformed 177 average people into self-made millionaires, it found that 88% of financially successful people read at least 30 mins per day.

Of course, it's impossible to read everything and listen to everyone, so you do need to focus on some based on your interests. If you are short on time, try out Blinkist where they provide a summary of key points in many books. I prefer to read the original as it provides more context. In Amazon's Kindle app, the Send a Free Sample option is a great way to preview before you buy!

#6 Love Yourself

Love your fears, flaws, and failures as they are a part of you! Most people have strong negative feelings toward them and hence shy away and do everything they can to avoid them. But the right approach to overcome them is actually by loving them just like your own kids, then you will become stronger and they will naturally disappear.

But how do you love them, you ask? Easy, whenever you feel, see, or experience them, instead of feeling bad about it, replace it with love immediately:

  • Instead of feeling afraid, tell yourself "I love this feeling of fear" and actually create the feeling of love for it and be excited. Do that a few times, and bam, you would overcome the fear!
  • Instead of thinking how much you don't like the scar on your face and how much others won't either, tell yourself that you love it because that is who you are right now and everyone should respect and love you as-is -- if not, they can keep their shallow love as it doesn't help you in the long run. Same for any mental scars.
  • Instead of trying to succeed by avoiding failures, love your failures as it is one of the best ways to learn and become stronger, therefore making you successful at the end. Every failure is an opportunity, take it with grace and be thankful!

But does it really work? Yes! This is based on personal experience. I used to shy away from public speaking, but after replacing the fear with love a few times, right now I am excited about it and do it whenever I can -- watch me show you or see testimonial. 😁 This is also based on behavior design from Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, PhD.

70% of people experience impostor syndrome at least once in their lives, so it's not something that you should worry about. That basically means almost everyone feels like he/she is an impostor, 😂, hence it's better to just drop the facade, love yourself, and your imposter will naturally disappear.

Just love everything about yourself, and all the negativity inside and outside of you will naturally disappear, and you will be stronger and become unstoppable!

#7 Die Before You Die

I hope you "die before you die" is a concept from Fred Kofman's book The Meaning Revolution that is similar in spirit as "live your life to the fullest" or "live today like it is your last day." Steve Jobs lived by a similar principle where if he answers "no" a few days in a row to the question "Is this what I want to do on my last day?" then he would stop and find something else to do. You never know, today may be your last day.

That's the mentality that you need to have in order to live your life to the fullest. I am doing that right now by executing on my personal mission of enabling everyone to be happy and productive -- even though no one seems to want it and it feels like I am going against everyone in the world to help them become truly happy and productive, 😆.

If you don't do that, then you might end up with regrets on your deathbed. You are definitely not enjoying everything that life has to offer by limiting yourself. Most people work about 40 hours a week, often unwillingly and performing at minimal as they don't enjoy the work, so they can use the income to do what they want to do. And that will continue until they retire. That's a significant portion of their lives doing something that they might not enjoy and it is one reason that I lost motivation to live 10 years ago. It's a waste of life and intelligence. We shouldn't do that. It might seem hard to do better sometimes, especially if you need the income for your family to live, but if you push yourself a little bit each day, then it's just a matter of when and not if. And you will be amazed at what you can accomplish later as you start to get everything you want in life, realize your dreams, and fully enjoy everything that life has to offer. You are just as amazing as everyone and can have everything you want -- nothing less. Don't sell yourself short!

But why bother if we are all just going to die anyway and turn into worm food? From a technical perspective, you are right. But you are living right now and still here, and so you should make the most of it. Reality doesn't really matter when it comes to meaning and purpose in life, but you do. As you are intelligent, you get the privilege of defining your own meaning and purpose, and as long as you believe it deeply, then that becomes reality.

If today is your last day, will you still be doing what you plan to do? If not, you should consider doing something else.

#8 Embrace Neurodiversity

Judy Singer coined the word neurodiversity, which means everyone's brain is just different in mental functions, to more correctly describe development disorders like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. It should be embraced as it expands our collective capabilities rather than treated as a disorder that must be "fixed" and frowned upon by others.

Many great minds of our time, such as Albert Einstein, Mozart, had neurodiverse symptoms. Many international companies, such as SAP, Microsoft, have started to recognize the talents of neurodiverse employees as studies have shown they outperform their neurotypical peers in specialized fields using their neurodivergent skills, therefore neurodiversity is becoming a competitor advantage.

Neurodivergent people see the world differently than neurotypical, so it is important that we be more mindful and supportive towards them. They may see the world in a scary way and simply don't know how to deal with it. Always listen with empathy and act with compassion so they can be happier and thrive instead of go into withdrawal.

If you are neurodivergent, believe in yourself as you are simply differently abled, and not disabled. While you may have some deficits, it comes with some exceptional skills that others don't have, so take advantage of them to excel and be proud. To ensure negative feelings don't hold you back, simply love your flaws, fears, and failures. With love, they will naturally disappear quickly, and then you will only be left with exceptional skills. 😄

Embrace diversity to obtain prosperity!

#9 Live Your Dream Life

A dream is a reality that you want where you have everything that you desire. It's not necessary, but so much better with it. 😄

If you don't have a dream (life goal), chances are you won't ever get there.

It's sad, but most people don't think about living their dream life. Some did when they were little, but they get crushed by various current reality of life, and then eventually gave up. Some simply don't have the opportunities due to a lack of resources, either naturally or artificially. I didn't think about it until recently because I didn't care. We can do better.

I believe everyone can live their dream life -- no matter their current environment, resources, etc. It can be accomplished in two steps. First, it is critical to achieve 100% happiness inside of you by following the happiness steps in A Great Life Guide, otherwise you can be easily crushed by the harsh reality outside. Once you have attained true happiness, you will be fine no matter what you have, what happens to you, or what others do, and then you will have unlimited energy to realize your dream by changing reality to your needs -- not the other way around.

Your dream can be anything you want -- something that moves your heart and you would gladly do for free. Want a big family? Travel the world? Build a multi-national corporation? Go to Mars? Build a planet? Travel to the end of the universe? There is no limits to what you can do if you believe in and apply yourself by following this guide, so don't sell yourself short, and dream big! My dream is human prosperity by enabling everyone to be happy and productive.

What is your biggest dream?

The latest published version is available at http://double.guide for easy sharing and liking. This is v7.5 release of https://github.com/maxzheng/great-life-guide.

Anna Schlicht

Zuverlässige Mitarbeiter für Dentallabore

3y

I'm amazed at how detailed this article is! Very useful content. Thank you!

Rod Kenneth Lubong, MPM, MBA

I am an advocate of continuous learning and development

3y

Thank you Mr. Max Zheng for this inspirational article. What a wonderful article I read at the forefront of this new year. Keep inspiring. You are one of a kind person for the young generation, like me, to emulate.

God bless you.  I'm so sorry.  Because you've been through a crisis. But thank God.  To get your good deedback.

Danielle Asah Mantho

Empower Business Leaders & Pros with Next-Level Branding for Amazing Global Opportunities |Founder @DiDreams ☆Author ★Personal Branding Maven ★ Business Consultant 🔥300+Brands| Recruitment & Placement | Ready to Grow?📈

3y

Powerful

Yash Choudhari

Masters in Science in International Hospitality Business at Glion Institute of Higher Education

3y

Truly inspired....

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