On Key Habits

There are several key habits that successful people portray in their daily lives:

1) Write daily. Keep a journal, a blog, a whatever. Slowly write a book by writing a page per day. Write poetry as a hobby. Writing is extremely powerful. It allows you to organize your thoughts which prepares you for your day.

2) Read daily. If you are not reading, you are not growing. All it takes is ten minutes per day to read a few pages. Read with the intent to grow yourself!

3) Eat healthy and exercise. I have to admit that I falter here. I eat poorly and hardly exercise but it is a point of focus for me. Energy is not coffee, energy drinks, or soda. Energy comes from being healthy. Sustained energy that is.

4) Visualize your future. Picture where you will be in the future and it will help you realize it.

These are just a few basic things successful people practice. That, and waking up instead of pressing "snooze."

On Creativity

Creativity is essential in creating the life of your dreams. If you go through life following instructions, conforming to the status quo, and stifling your creative instincts in favor of safety, then you will lead a mediocre life, at best. If you really want to accomplish your dreams, then you must be creative in your pursuit of them.

Don't tell me, "Tim, I am not creative at all." That is because you don't PRACTICE it! Creativity is a skill! You must practice creativity to become creative. Robert Frost did not write "The Road Not Taken" the first time he ever decided to write a poem. He likely has hundreds of poems that he created which he finds terrible -and are terrible.

I am not saying you must write poetry, paint canvasses, or create ice sculptures. There are plenty of opportunities in your daily life to express creativity! What is your work place like? How can you make it different? What can you do creatively in your room? Your garden? Your voicemail?

Times have changed. It is no longer better to be safe than sorry. Allow your creativity to flow. Every person is naturally creative. I cannot tell you one kid who doesn't enjoy drawing. Let it flow. When you are creative, you are yourself.

On A Powerful Sentence

I recently lost some motivation and struggled to get up in the morning for a job that I know I love to do. However, everybody has days where they feel like quitting. Everybody has days where they feel like they are not making progress. Finding an office was one of the most frustrating times in my life.

However, I have since turned it around this week. The way I turned it around was really rooted from my demotivation and asking "why?" Why wasn't everything working properly? Why aren't people coming into training? Why have a couple of my reps gone missing? It came down to the question, "Am I helping others?" My answer was no. I thought I was not truly helping anybody. I even felt like I lost the respect of my friends and family. And I spent hours searching for the answers at night with no ability to fall asleep.

Finally, it came down to this: "If I were to die tonight, what would people remember me for tomorrow?" This is pretty powerful. It induced me into extremely deep feelings as far as who I truly felt I could become and how I should get there, and get there as soon as possible. I started reading again after this question, writing, and continuing this blog now.

I began to tell people my thoughts about life again and what I feel motivates people. I am giving speeches to nobody as I walk around alone at times just envisioning myself preaching to a full arena. Now I realize the sentence that truly motivates me when I feel down.

"Live life as if every day is your last day and influencing people is your purpose."

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I laid out my thought process behind this sentence in the hopes that maybe one of you can utilize that process and find your purpose and incite action today.

Make a sentence:

"Live life as if every day is your last day and __________________________ is your purpose."
Read it out loud WITH PASSION every morning.

On Culture

I want to briefly go over the steps I follow to building a culture in my office. This can be applied in other situations such as raising a family, teaching a class, etc.

Step 1:
Define who you are in 7-10 words.
I am the perfect blend of weirdness and intellectualism.

Step 2:
Define your culture by replacing "I am"with "It is" in the previous sentence.
It is the perfect blend of weirdness and intellectualism.

Your culture should be who you are. Do not try to establish somebody else's culture because it probably will not match your personality. Make sure your culture is authentic for you!

Now to build the culture, you need to determine how you will portray this. I have a room dedicated to being remarkable and different in the heart of my office. It will be filled with intellectual things such as self-help books and leadership quotes, accompanied with Dr. Seuss books and cat memes.

Now that you have your why (I believe in the perfect blend of weirdness and intellectualism) and your what (manager, teacher, mother, etc.), you need your how to connect the two. How will you portray why you live through what you do? This answer is the answer to unlocking your culture.

On Emotions

During my reading binge over the past few years, I started to realize the subtle message they delivered about emotions, but it really hammered home when I read about Yoga philosophies. First, I want to establish that we choose our emotions. Nobody makes us angry, sad, happy, etc. It is your CHOICE to be angry, sad, happy, etc. 

When I was reading about yoga, one of the things that struck me most about the emotional aspect is the control of your emotions. This arose while I read the Samurai Code as well. You have to control your emotions to drive you to better results. You must be angry when you are supposed to be, sad when you are supposed to be, along with happy when you are supposed to be.

This is an important distinction. It is human nature to let your results drive your emotions. When things go wrong, our emotions go wrong. This will send us in a downward spiral. Also if things go right, we become content... and then things go wrong. 

Also, this means suppressing one's emotions is ineffective as well. You still let results drive your emotions but just because you don't tell anybody about it, does not mean you are not in an emotionally fragile state.

So use emotions to drive results! For example, Jesus used anger in the temple to show it was a place of respect and worship. Gandhi used sorrow to try to unite Hindus and Muslims in a newly free nation. Steve Jobs used excitement to realize his visionary products.

Similarly, you must grieve when you need to grieve and be joyous when you need to be joyous. Just remember, you need to use these emotions to drive results. Choose what emotion you want and utilize it to become REMARKABLE!

On Advice

I want to steal one out of Newton's book of physics and say "For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction." This is true when giving advice. For every negative advice, there is an equal but opposite positive advice. A negative advice is something that uses words like "don't" or "can't." Something positive does not have the word not anywhere in it.

The reason I am starting with establishing this basic rule is because negative forms of advice are not effective and may actually be counterproductive. What people tend to focus on is what tends to happen. So when we say "Don't drink and drive," it may be possible that just saying drink and drive in there will produce more drunk drivers. Rather, we should say the equal but opposite positive form "Ride Sober." This has a much more positive connotation to it and people are more likely to follow it's advice.

If you think about it for everything, you can always find the equal, but opposite form of advice.

"Anti-war" becomes "Pro-peace"
"No sexual harassment" becomes "respect others' space"
"No littering" becomes "Recycle/Throw your trash in the trash can"

These are just things that are present in culture. We focus on "no war" and "no sexual harassment," yet we live in a time where these have become more present and are becoming more present over the years.  We need a peace campaign or a respect campaign.

This applies in personal applications as well.
"Don't raise your voice" becomes "Let's calm down and talk"
"Don't buy Pepsi" becomes "Buy Coke" (Coke is better)
"Don't lie to me" becomes "Be honest with me"
"Don't leave dirty dishes in the sink" becomes "Put the dishes in the dishwasher"

It is best to sit and think for a second about how you can spin it in a positive direction and use that form of advice. It is proven that people are more likely to do what you focus on (whether you tell them to do it or not). So focus on the opposite of what you don't want them to do. They are more likely to follow your advice.

On Leaders In Movies

First, I just want to establish that Simba is the lion version of Batman. Think about it.

Ever since I began my quest on studying leadership, I began watching movies in a new light. We can learn very important leadership lessons by characters such as Simba and Batman (and Mufasa). I encourage you to watch movies in the light of finding what leaders do to bring the most benefit to their people and lead them in the right direction. Mufasa mentions in Lion King that there is more to being king than getting everything you want. You must sacrifice. You must sacrifice more than anybody else in your kingdom sacrifices. You have to understand all the different sources, listen to your advisors, even if they are as annoying as Zazu. You have to be brave only when you need to be brave. And you need to use emotions such as fear, anger, and joy the right way.

I have learned much from leaders in movies. Many of them portray the precise attributes you want as a leader. This is why we idolize them in movies. If we can learn from them, it can be nearly as effective as learning from real-life leaders that many times you do not have the ability to analyze.