The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) Timothy Ferriss
Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?
This is barely a book, but still has some great tips on time management, your meanings for life, abandoning me-first ways of thinking, conformity, and how it is that, basically, many people don’t care to be bothered with actually trying to live. Some pretty laughable suggestions on how to outsource everything and how the average Joe is going to figure out how to start successful businesses left and right. If you follow some of the tricks on time management and pursuing your interest, though, maybe you will get better at the how to make money piece.
“[Corporate attorney] Hans didn’t know exactly what he wanted… he did know what bored him to tears, and he was done with it. No more passing days as the living dead, no more dinners where his colleagues compared cards, riding on the sugar high of a new BMW purchase until someone bought a more expensive Mercedes. It was over.” The living dead do not practice awareness (Deepak Chopra will tell you so).
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” - Benjamin Disraeli, British P.M. 1870’s
People need to ask, “What would excite me in life?” This is the same as Peterson saying to follow your interest. You can then try to reconcile what would excite you as a person with how to earn a living; these may not be the same thing. Your what would excite you can be a why for your work.
“This is how most people work until death: “I’ll just work until I have X dollars and then do what I want.” If you don’t define the “what I want” alternate activities, the X figure will increase indefinitely to avoid the fear-inducing uncertainty of this void.”
“Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. The options are almost limitless for creating “busyness”: You could call a few hundred unqualified sales leads, reorganize your Outlook contacts, walk across the office to request documents you don’t really need...” or spend half an hour each day ironing your clothes. You should be trying to do less, not trying to better manage your time to do more.
“It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Take time to stop and smell the roses...”
"If you’re an employee, spending time on nonsense is, to some extent, not your fault. There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission. The world has agreed to shuffle papers between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM, and since you’re trapped in the office for that period of servitude, you are compelled to create activities to fill that time. Time is wasted because there is so much time available.” Not so now with the post Coronavirus quitting spree going on.
“Lifestyle design is based on massive action—output. Increased output necessitates decreased input. Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four.”
“Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?”
“Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.” Robert J. Sawyer Calculating God. You cannot change the person who dawdles in the middle of the road obstructing your automobile through outrage.
“One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mind-set, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.” “In the experience of those I’ve interviewed, it takes two to three months just to unplug from obsolete routines and become aware of just how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.” People need to step back to re-evaluate what they are doing.
“To be free, to be happy and fruitful, can only be attained through sacrifice of many common but overestimated things.” -Robert Henri, painter.
“To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird.
“These doubts invade the mind when nothing else fills it. Think of a time when you felt 100% alive and undistracted—in the zone. Chances are that it was when you were completely focused in the moment on something external: someone or something else... Lacking an external focus, the mind turns inward on itself and creates problems to solve, even if the problems are undefined or unimportant. If you find a focus, an ambitious goal that seems impossible and forces you to grow, these doubts disappear.” If your external focus is another person, you become dependent.