I first read The Alchemist on January 19th 2007. I was at a friends house when I noticed the book on his table. The cover looked interesting so I picked it up and started reading the synopsis.

“The charming tale of Santiago, a shepherd boy, who dreams of seeing the world, is compelling in its own right, but gains resonance through the many lessons Santiago learns during his adventures. He journeys from Spain to Morocco in search of worldly success, and eventually to Egypt, where a fateful encounter with an alchemist brings him at last to self-understanding and spiritual enlightenment. “

I was intrigued because I was on my own European adventure at the time (in Zurich at the time). My friends went out dancing later that night but I was so engrossed in the book that I stayed in to finish it.

It’s an incredibly powerful book that I highly recommend to anyone that hasn’t read it. Below are my notes.

The Alchemist

Maktub – it’s written

If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. And, if you improve on the present, what comes later will also be better.

When you search for your own personal treasure, you’ll discover things along the way that you never would have seen had you not had the courage to try things that seemed difficult, crazy or even impossible.

People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or they fear that they’ll be unable to achieve them.

Your eyes show the strength of your soul.

There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.

Why is it that through death, we become more aware of life?

When we strive to become better than we are, everything around use becomes better, too.

Life is the moment we’re living right now.

In the depth of your eyes, my own beauty is reflected.

What may seem like a burden now may be a godsend later.

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting. Are people afraid that once their dream is realized, they will have no reason for living?

Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives but none about his or her own.

The world’s greatest lie: “That at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” Are people so afraid of disappointment that they don’t follow their dreams?

To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation.

What most people never realize is that they are capable, at any time in their lives, to do what they dream of.

Don’t allow what other people think about you to become more important than finding your destinies.

In life you often have to choose between what you’re become accustomed to and something you want to have.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

Sometimes when you make decision, you are diving into a strong current that will carry you to places you never dreamed of.

This incredibly insightful book details the findings of “The China Study”, the most comprehensive study of diet, lifestyle and disease ever done with humans in the history of biomedical research. It was a extremely provocative book that has profoundly impacted how I view health & nutrition. While it’s clear the author advocates for a vegan diet, the books was written to inform, not preach.

My notes are really light because massive book can be boiled down to one key concept – eat a whole-food plant based diet. This diet is very different than the “junk food” vegetarian diet that so many vegetarians embrace (this is why you still see so many overweight vegetarians). The rest of the book is supporting evidence and extremely interesting commentary and observations on the authors 40+ years as a scientific researcher and healthcare industry insider .

It was an especially interesting read because of the current healthcare reform debate in the U.S. (which I’ve consciously decided to not follow). I realize that a lot of people will dismiss the book and its findings as too radical. This is extremely unfortunate as I think readers would be shocked and moved to action if read with an open mind. I know I was.

After reading this book, I plan to complete a 30 day vegan trial. Look for more on that in the near future.

Notes

A Failing System-  from three perspectives-1) prevalence, 2) medical care efficacy and 3) economics.

Two thirds of Americans are overweight, and over 15 million Americans have diabetes”.

Our health care system costs too much, it excludes far too many people and it does not promote health and prevent disease.

Americans are confused because how health information is generated and communicated and who controls such activities (it’s not who you might think).

The distinctions between government, industry, science and medicine have become blurred. The distinctions between making a profit and promoting health have become blurred. The problems with the system do not come in the form of Hollywood-style corruption. The problems are much more subtle, and yet much more dangerous.

Challenging Assumptions – The Groundbreaking Findings

Some assumptions are so integrated into our life that we take them for granted. Be prepared to have them shattered. A few of the more groundbreaking findings include:

1.people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease
2.Protein promotes cancer. What type of protein did not promote cancer, even at high levels
of intake? The safe proteins were from plants, including wheat and soy.

A Toxic Food Environment
No doubt about it, we live in a toxic food environment.

Illuminating the landscape and the realities of diet and health so clearly, so fully, that you need never again fall prey to those who profit from keeping you misinformed, confused and obediently eating the foods they sell.

I knew very little about the book other than it was extremely popular (a Oprah Book Club book and #1 NYT bestseller). Intrigued, I flipped it open and started reading. Before I knew it, I was on page 95. Two hours later I was already in the second chapter. I finished the 333 page book in 2 days.

Even though I had little to relate to (I’m not married/divorced, not a women, don’t have control issues or an over active mind), I found the memoir extremely compelling. The honesty of the author was admirable.

I especially enjoyed the pray chapter that discusses her spiritual journey during while in India. There were several times I could have puked during the love portion set in Indonesian.

Below are my key takeaways and excerpts that caught my interest while reading.

Eat Love Pray Book Notes

Exhausted by the cumulative consequences of a lifetime of hasty choices & chaotic passions.

Devotion is diligence without assurance

Awareness of our own mortality. Gift or Curse?

True or False: Only the young and stupid are confident about sex and romance.

Object of dependency

The two questions that make human being fight: “how much do you love me?” and “who’s in charge?”

People abandon the comfort and familiar for the hope that something greater will be offered in return for what they’ve given up.

Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

Eye so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth.

Numbed, dubbed & stunned.

On Prayer & Meditation

Monkey mind: your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts and you are a slave to your emotions.

Forward / Backward whirling

It was pressing down on my like an invisible anvil.

Ashram Takeaways

Antevasin – “one who lives at the boarder”

Gurugita – A 182 verses, with each being ~ 1 paragraph in length. (takes about 1.5 hours). Excerpt from the Skanda Purana (don’t quote me on the the # of verses because the author says 182, while Wikipedia says 216)

Kundalini Shakti – Dangerous force you play around in if not supervised.

Shaktipat – moment of release – the time your journey begins

Seva – the spiritual practice of self-service

It’s a short essay that should not take more than 20 minutes to read. Below were my key takeaways.

P.S. It’s written by one of the founders of Real Social Dynamics, the world’s largest dating coaching company. I have no direct interest in dating coaching nor the “pick-up” community, but find a lot of the psychology focused articles extremely interesting.

P.P.S. His essays use the masculine gender because they are geared towards men, yet all the tips are equally applicable for men and women.

Attention & Value

When you’ll make noise about just anything, it reveals you as being the guy who has little to offer other than the role of the “sceptical voice of wisdom”. It’s not that your criticism isn’t valid. It’s just that the amount you focus on it shows you have nothing else going on.

A man has to have a sort of “standard” of what issues are worth his attention. The types of issues you ““make an issue out of” are a reflection of how you value yourself and your time.

The real players in this world are rarely critics. They’re the people who do what they do, and who create the energy that other people latch onto, including the critics.

On Trash Talking

The problem is that trash talking has a tendency to be addictive, and it becomes your “default mode” for relating to people and creating a bond. After a while it gets embedded into your psychology. You can barely go a day without using it as a “conversational crutch”.

Think of negativity as like a dirty energy that gives people an erratic buzz for a short period of time, but then leaves them feeling drained and sick of it in the long term.

That’s because as a rule of thumb, people tend to gravitate towards conversation topics that reflect their inner state.

Ironically it’s often the people who live very unsuccessful lives, and don’t respect themselves enough to care, who come across as being the most happy (the lack of personal standards allows them to be naturally “care free”).

sometimes people will try to “side step” the need to feel status by just looking down on everyone, so they can feel good about themselves by comparison.

Usually it’s people who are unclear in their sense of reality who feel the need to dwell on the negative. They do this with a positive intention, because they’re in a zone where they feel like if they didn’t, they’d inadvertently lose themselves.

I was hesitant to read this book because of the title. I’m always skeptical  when I read books or articles that promise dramatic change in XX steps, or promise “secrets” to success, happiness, love, etc.

Still, over 15 million copies have been sold so I bought a copy and brought it to the beach (side note: beach + interesting book = great afternoon).

Thankfully, the book proved to be extremely interesting. So interesting that I took 8 pages of notes – all of which you’ll find below.  This book will defiantly change the way I see things.

Notes

Our Paradigms are the way we “see” the world or circumstances — not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, and interpreting.

The power of a Paradigm Shift is the essential power of quantum change, whether that shift is an instantaneous or a slow and deliberate process.

Paradigm Shifts, instantaneous or developmental, move us from one way of seeing the world to another. And those shifts create powerful change. Our paradigms, correct or incorrect, are the sources of our attitudes and behaviors, and ultimately our relationships with others.

Sometimes the conditioning of a lifetime can’t be reversed, regardless of what occurs

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are — or, as we are conditioned to see it.

Amazing how two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right.

What paradigm shift have occured your life? What caused them? Was it a unexpected death or illness? Was it 9/11? Maybe the recent economic downturn made you relaize life is too short.

Albert Einstein observed, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

As we look around us and within us and recognize the problems created as we live and interact within the personality ethic, we begin to realize that these are deep, fundamental problems that cannot be solved on the superficial level on which they were created.

Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.

For our purposes, we will define a habit as the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.

Dependent people need others to get what they want. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.

Basically, there are three kinds of assets: physical, financial, and human.

In our quest for short-term returns, or results, we often ruin a prized physical asset — a car, a computer, a washer or dryer, even our body or our environment.

When two people in a marriage are more concerned about getting the golden eggs, the benefits, than they are in preserving the relationship that makes them possible, they often become insensitive and inconsiderate, neglecting the little kindnesses and courtesies so important to a deep relationship. They begin to use control levers to manipulate each other, to focus on their own needs, to justify their own position and look for evidence to show the wrongness of the other person. The love, the richness, the softness, and spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day.

To maintain the P/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (Production) and the health and welfare of the goose (Production Capability) is often a difficult judgment call. But I suggest it is the very essence of effectiveness. It balances short term with long term. It balances going for the grade and paying the price to get an education.

It’s a principle you can see validated in your own life when you burn the candle at both ends to get more golden eggs and wind up sick or exhausted, unable to produce any at all; or when you get a good night’s sleep and wake up ready to produce throughout the day.

You can see it when you press to get your own way with someone and somehow feel an emptiness in the relationship; or when you really take time to invest in a relationship and you find the desire and ability to work together, to communicate, takes a quantum leap.

There are actually three social maps — three theories of determinism widely accepted, independently or in combination, to explain the nature of man.
1.Genetic determinism basically says your grandparents did it to you.
2.Psychic determinism basically says your parents did it to you.
3.Environmental determinism basically says your boss is doing to you

Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.

Look at the word responsibility — “response-ability” — the ability to choose your response. Highly proactive people recognize that responsibility. They do not blame circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. Their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on values, rather than a product of their conditions, based on feeling.

It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.
What matters most is how we respond to what we experience in life. Reactive people are affected by their social environment, by the “social weather.” When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values — carefully thought about, selected and internalized values. (Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.)

Taking the Initiative: recognizing our responsibility to make things happen.

People who end up with the good life are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary, consistent with correct principles, to get the job done.

The difference between positive thinking and proactivity is with proactivity you face reality. We faced the reality of the current circumstance and of future projections. But we also faced the reality that we had the power to choose a positive response to those circumstances and projections. Not facing reality would have been to accept the idea that what’s happening in our environment had to determine us.

They can combine the creativity and resourcefulness of proactive individuals to create a proactive culture within the organization. The organization does not have to be at the mercy of the environment; it can take the initiative to accomplish the shared values and purposes of the individuals involved.
Listening to our Language
Because our attitudes and behaviors flow out of our paradigms, if we use our self-awareness to examine them, we can often see in them the nature of our underlying maps. Our language, for example, is a very real indicator of the degree to which we see ourselves as proactive people.

The language of reactive people absolves them of responsibility.
“That’s me. That’s just the way I am.” I am determined. There’s nothing I can do about it.
“He makes me so mad!” I’m not responsible. My emotional life is governed by something outside my control.
“I can’t do that. I just don’t have the time.” Something outside me — limited time — is controlling me.
“If only my wife were more patient.” Someone else’s behavior is limiting my effectiveness.
“I have to do it.” Circumstances or other people are forcing me to do what I do. I’m not free to choose my own actions.

Reactive Language: There’s nothing I can do. That’s just the way I am. He makes me so mad. They won’t allow that. I have to do that. I can’t. I must. If only.

Proactive Language: Let’s look at our alternatives. I can choose a different approach. I control my own feelings. I can

Love is something you do, not something you have.

Circle of Concert // Circle of Influence: when we work in our Circle of Influence, when we focused on our own paradigms, that we began to create a positive energy.

The problems we face fall in one of three areas: direct control (problems involving our own behavior); indirect control (problems involving other people’s behavior); or no control (problems we can do nothing about, such as our past or situational realities). The proactive approach puts the first step in the solution of all three kinds of problems within our present Circle of Influence.

Have the End in Mind

Each part of your life — today’s behavior, tomorrow’s behavior, next week’s behavior, next month’s behavior — can be examined in the context of the whole, of what really matters most to you. By keeping that end clearly in mind, you can make certain that whatever you do on any particular day does not violate the criteria you have defined as supremely important, and that each day of your life contributes in a meaningful way to the vision you have of your life as a whole. To Begin with the End in Mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.

Climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall. People often find themselves achieving victories that are empty, successes that have come at the expense of things they suddenly realize were far more valuable to them.

Design by Default: It’s a principle that all things are created twice, but not all first creations are by conscious design. In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower other people and circumstances outside our Circle or Influence to shape much of our lives by default. We reactively live the scripts handed to us by family, associates, other people’s agendas, the pressures of circumstance — scripts from our earlier years, from our training, our conditioning

A good affirmation has five basic ingredients: it’s personal, it’s positive, it’s present tense, it’s visual, and it’s emotional.

One of the major problems that arises when people work to become more effective in life is that they don’t think broadly enough. They lose the sense of proportion, the balance, the natural ecology necessary to effective living. They may get consumed by work and neglect personal health. In the name of professional success, they may neglect the most precious relationships in their lives.

You’re the creator. You are in charge.

It’s based on the four unique human endowments of imagination, conscience, independent will, and particularly, self-awareness.

If you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

Whatever is at the center of our life will be the source of our security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.
Guidance means your source of direction in life. Encompassed by your map, your internal frame of reference that interprets for you what is happening out there, are standards or principles or implicit criteria that govern moment-by-moment decision-making and doing.
Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, an integrated wholeness.
Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.
The location of these factors on the continuum, the resulting degree of their integration, harmony, and balance, and their positive impact on every aspect of your life is a function of your center, the basic paradigms at your very core.

The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human-relations techniques (the personality ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the character ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.

The Emotional Bank Account TM

We all know what a financial bank account is. We make deposits into it and build up a reserve from which we can make withdrawals when we need to. An Emotional Bank Account is a metaphor that describes the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship. It’s the feeling of safeness you have with another human being.

If I make deposits into an Emotional Bank Account with you through courtesy, kindness, honesty, and keeping my commitments to you, I build up a reserve. Your trust toward me becomes higher, and I can call upon that trust many times if I need to. I can even make mistakes and that trust level, that emotional reserve, will compensate for it. My communication may not be clear, but you’ll get my meaning anyway. You won’t make me “an offender for a word.” When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.

But if I have a habit of showing discourtesy, disrespect, cutting you off, overreacting, ignoring you, becoming arbitrary, betraying your trust, threatening you, or playing little tin god in your life, eventually my Emotional Bank Account is overdrawn. The trust level gets very low. Then what flexibility do I have?

Our most constant relationships, like marriage, require our most constant deposits. With continuing expectations, old deposits evaporate. If you suddenly run into an old high school friend you haven’t seen for years, you can pick up right where you left off because the earlier deposits are still there. But your accounts with the people you interact with on a regular basis require more constant investment. There are sometimes automatic withdrawals in your daily interactions or in their perception of you that you don’t even know about.

It takes character to be proactive, to focus on your Circle of Influence, to nurture growing things, and not to “pull up the flowers to see how the roots are coming.”

Six Major Deposits
1.Attend to the “Little” Things: The little kindnesses and courtesies are so important. Small discourtesies, little unkindnesses, little forms of disrespect make large withdrawals. In relationships, the little things are the big things.
2.Seek to understand the Individual: Really seeking to understand another person is probably one of the most important deposits you can make, and it is the key to every other deposit. You simply don’t know what constitutes a deposit to another person until you understand that individual.
3.Keep your committment: Keeping a commitment or a promise is a major deposit; breaking one is a major withdrawal. In fact, there’s probably not a more massive withdrawal than to make a promise that’s important to someone and then not to come through.
4.Clarifying Expectations: The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations around roles and goals.
5.Showing Personal Integrity: Personal integrity generates trust and is the basis of many different kinds of deposits. Lack of integrity can undermine almost any other effort to create high trust accounts. People can seek to understand, remember the little things, keep their promises, clarify and fulfill expectations, and still fail to build reserves of trust if they are inwardly duplicitous.
6.Apologizing Sincerely When You Make a Withdrawal: It takes a great deal of character strength to apologize quickly out of one’s heart rather than out of pity. A person must possess himself and have a deep sense of security in fundamental principles and values in order to genuinely apologize. People with little internal security can’t do it. It makes them too vulnerable. They feel it makes them appear soft and weak, and they fear that others will take advantage of their weakness. Their security is based on the opinions of other people, and they worry about what others might think. In addition, they usually feel justified in what they did. They rationalize their own wrong in the name of the other person’s wrong, and if they apologize at all, it’s superficial. “Gentleness can only be expected from the strong. ”

The Laws of Love and the Laws of Life
When we make deposits of unconditional love, when we live the primary laws of love, we encourage others to live the primary laws of life. In other words, when we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity. Their natural growth process is encouraged. We make it easier for them to live the laws of life — cooperation, contribution, self-discipline, integrity — and to discover and live true to the highest and best within them.

The key is to make deposits — constant deposits of unconditional love.

When people see others problems as opportunities to build the relationship instead of as negative, burdensome irritations, it totally changes the nature of relationship. Become more willing, even excited, about deeply understanding and helping others. When someone comes to you with a problem, instead of thinking, “Oh, no! Not another problem!” their paradigm is, “Here is a great opportunity for me to really help and to invest in our relationship.” Many interactions change from transactional to transformational, and strong bonds of love and trust are created.

As with many, many problems between people in business, family, and other relationships, the problem in this company was the result of a flawed paradigm. The president was trying to get the fruits of cooperation from a paradigm of competition. And when it didn’t work, he wanted a technique, a program, a quick-fix antidote to make his people cooperate.
But you can’t change the fruit without changing the root. Working on the attitudes and behaviors would have been hacking at the leaves. So we focused instead on producing personal and organizational excellence in an entirely different way by developing information and reward systems which reinforced the value of cooperation.

They are graded in relation to other people. And grades are carriers of social value; they open doors of opportunity or they close them. Competition, not cooperation, lies at the core of the educational process. Cooperation, in fact, is usually associated with cheating.

Another powerful programming agent is athletics, particularly for young men in their high school or college years. Often they develop the basic paradigm that life is a big game, a zero sum game where some win and some lose. “Winning” is “beating” in the athletic arena.

Another agent is law. We live in a litigious society. The first thing many people think about when they get into trouble is suing someone, taking him to court, “winning” at someone else’s expense. But defensive minds are neither creative nor cooperative.

Certainly we need law or else society will deteriorate. It provides survival, but it doesn’t create synergy. At best it results in compromise. Law is based on an adversarial concept.

Win-win is not a personality technique. It’s a total paradigm of human interaction. It comes from a character of integrity, maturity, and the Abundance Mentality.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

“Seek first to understand” involves a very deep shift in paradigm. We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.

Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is a form of agreement, a form of judgment. And it is sometimes the more appropriate emotion and response. But people often feed on sympathy. It makes them dependent. The essence of empathic listening is not that you agree with someone; it’s that you fully, deeply, understand that person, emotionally as well as intellectually.

Empathic listening involves much more than registering, reflecting, or even understanding the words that are said. Communications experts estimate, in fact, that only 10 percent of our communication is represented by the words we say. Another 30 percent is represented by our sounds, and 60 percent by our body language. In empathic listening, you listen with your ears, but you also, and more importantly, listen with your eyes and with your heart.

Ine of the greatest insights in the field of human motivations: Satisfied needs do not motivate. It’s only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival — to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated

Maturity: the balance between courage and consideration.

The more authentic you become, the more genuine in your expression, particularly regarding personal experiences and even self-doubts, the more people can relate to your expression and the safer it makes them feel to express themselves. That expression in turn feeds back on the other person’s spirit, and genuine creative empathy takes place, producing new insights and learnings and a sense of excitement and adventure that keeps the process going.

Insecure people think that all reality should be amenable to their paradigms. They have a high need to clone others, to mold them over into their own thinking. They don’t realize that the very strength of the relationship is in having another point of view. Sameness is not oneness; uniformity is not unity. Unity, or oneness, is complementariness, not sameness. Sameness is uncreative…and boring. The essence of synergy is to value the differences.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

Four Dimensions of Renewal: Although different words are used, most philosophies of life deal either explicitly or implicitly with these four dimensions. Philosopher Herb Shepherd describes the healthy balanced life around four values: perspective (spiritual), autonomy (mental), connectedness (social), and tone (physical).

I believe that a life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self-esteem is primarily a matter of mindset, of attitude — that you can psyche yourself into peace of mind.
Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.

There is also the intrinsic security that comes as a result of effective interdependent living. There is security in knowing that win-win solutions do exist, that life is not always “either/or,” that there are almost always mutually beneficial Third Alternatives. There is security in knowing that you can step out of your own frame of reference without giving it up, that you can really, deeply understand another human being. There is security that comes when you authentically, creatively, and cooperatively interact with other people and really experience these interdependent habits.

There is intrinsic security that comes from service, from helping other people in a meaningful way. One important source is your work, when you see yourself in a contributive and creative mode, really making a difference. Another source is anonymous service — no one knows it and no one necessarily ever will. And that’s not the concern; the concern is blessing the lives of other people. Influence, not recognition, becomes the motive.

Viktor Frankl focused on the need for meaning and purpose in our lives, something that transcends our own lives and taps the best energies within us.

In an organization, the physical dimension is expressed in economic terms. The mental or psychological dimension deals with the recognition, development, and use of talent. The social/emotional dimension has to do with human relations, with finding meaning through purpose or contribution and through organizational integrity.

Achieving unity — oneness — with ourselves, with our loved ones, with our friends and working associates, is the highest and best and most delicious fruit of the Seven Habits. Most of us have tasted this fruit of true unity from time to time in the past, as we have also tasted the bitter, lonely fruit of disunity — and we know how precious and fragile unity is.
Obviously building character of total integrity and living the life of love and service that creates such unity isn’t easy. It isn’t quick fix. But it’s possible. It begins with the desire to center our lives on correct principles, to break out of the paradigms created by other centers and the comfort zones of unworthy habits.

Sometimes we make mistakes, we feel awkward. But if we start with the Daily Private Victory and work from the Inside-Out, the results will surely come. As we plant the seed and patiently weed and nourish it, we begin to feel the excitement of real growth and eventually taste the incomparably delicious fruits of a congruent, effective life.

My Book Notes & Scribbles

Ask: What are my assumptions? What wrong assumptions could I be making? What change could I have to make?

Couldn’t be satisified with one place until I’d grown tired at looking at many others.

Idea Killers – endless discussion, idle chatter, empty speculation.

Be clear about goals, yet flexible in the process of achieving s them. Each step toward an objective modified and influences the next step.

Unexamined assumptions life at the root of most problems in life.

Everyone has a Sahara to cross

Cast of all mental limitations

Take the first step.

Driving into the dark.

Need not die to have a tasted of hell

Bursts  of enlightenment

Call of the unknown

Lure of the little voices

Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first.

Integrated knowledge

“What goes on under the surface?”

Never wish for things to be easier. Instead, wish you were stronger or better.

Never seek the easy the way out. Instead look for the hard way through.

Don’t Quit Poem
by anonymous
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all up hill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest! if you must; but don’t you quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out;
Don’t give up, though the pace seems slow;
You might succeed with another blow.
Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up
When he might have captured the victor’s cup.
And he learned too late, when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown.
Success is failure turned inside out;
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt;
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar;
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit;
It’s when things seem worst that you mustn’t quit.