Ideas that improve agency
If you have ever loathed being an entrepreneur, see the movie, Up in the Air.
It will straighten many assumptions you have held about job security, loyalty and the legacy you want to leave behind.
Understand that working for someone else, all through your career life is as difficult as starting your own business, only the former choice often delays the difficulty till when one is old and grey.
You might not always agree but who you watch, listen to or spend time with is incredibly indicative of your performance.
If you can’t find inspiration from the people you hang around, ditch them and look for podcasts, films and books that can help you raise your game.
In life, it’s how much of what you know that gets embodied that really matters. This is the power that regulating who or what you let into your social orbit gives.
Very often, we may have to remind ourselves to listen. And I am not talking about hearing.
You hear with your ears but you only listen with your entire being. It’s not just the gift of your presence but of your essence and time.
If you multitask, you don’t listen. Listening is not for multitaskers. Listening requires you put the phone and every other distraction away. It requires being still, lips sealed with your eyes looking at the one speaking.
People are the greatest resource in the world. But people are always in flux, needing constant evolution, even with the way we solve problems.
If you want to solve a problem by building a company, writing a book or creating a perennial selling product, you must find a way to connect your work to answering a social change question.
Answering questions posed by racism, ableism, colonialism, climate change, financial non-inclusion, and many others social issues should undergird how you craft everything. Otherwise, why craft at all?
When relationships end for any reason, people only miss you if they find you to be irreplaceable.
In many ways, the influence that making yourself invaluable to any person or group wields is one of the financial secrets of the age.
If you want to deepen the bond with people, with whom you share a relationship, personal or professional, work on becoming so valuable they find it hard to replace you.
If you live in a part of the world where lockdowns were used to manage the Coronavirus pandemic, you received a gift.
The pandemic put you in a position to learn a lot about yourself. For some, the codependent nature of their relationships became manifest as a result of the forced isolation. They realized they were addicted to someone, not from love but from the need for ‘normalcy.’
But codependency isn’t always about having to depend on someone else unhealthily. Rather, it’s about something in your psyche—maybe an emotional trauma—that needs to heal. This self-awareness that you need help is a gift.
Right decisions. Wrong decisions. Making decisions is more about who you are, than about your concept of right and wrong, or the environment you habituate.
In a nutshell, if work on your self-concept, ‘the ideal you,’ through a daily meditative process that helps you stay true to that ideal, you will almost never make a wrong decision.
Someone, once said, “the only way to make good decisions is by making bad ones.” Wrong. That’s the second best way. If you find congruence within yourself, good decision-making will be effortless. Find congruence.
If you do everything normal, where’s the excitement in that?
If you let the expectations of others define you, where’s the ‘you’ in that?
If you act like everything is okay on the way to your dreams, you are delusional. You have to act like the anomaly to reach your dreams, to make your team better…to rise to the demands of what’s required.
No matter how best you learn, videos, books or podcasts, always seek actionable information.
This is why you have to be proactive with your learning goals. Decide what you want to accomplish and what you need to learn to accomplish that goal, and get to work.
If you can’t take massive action to improve your life from what you are learning, look for something else to learn that’s actionable.
There is no benefit in staying in one place and overthinking or over-planning. You have got to keep striving towards your goals.
Accept that there’s always going to be something to do. There’s always a going to be blind spots you are missing and there’s always the x-factor that you don’t yet know.
If you allow lethargy or discouragement to set in, you would have lost a lot before you realize it. Keep moving forward.
