Steve Pavlina (quotes) - Wisdom Trove

Replace “Have to” with “Want to.”
‘Someday’ is the day after you die.
You are too free and untamable to be labeled.
Negative feelings mean you`re going the wrong way
For good or ill, your habits will make or break you.
Curiosity is more flexible and practical than belief.
The more disciplined you become, the easier life gets.
Curiosity is more flexible and practical than belief.
Your environment will eat your goals and plans for breakfast.
Planning allows you to mentally create a model of your future.
Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself.
Security is worthless if you have to sacrifice growth to get it
If you try to impress an alarm clock, it will simply tell you the time.
Turn off the TV, especially the news, and recapture many usable hours.
The most intelligent thing you can possibly do with your life is to grow.
Courage is summoning the inner strength to take action in spite of fear.
Don’t die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be.
Tell others of your commitments, since they’ll help hold you accountable.
Courage is the dividing line between weakness and strength of character.
One of the secrets to success is recognizing that motivation follows action.
When in doubt, act boldly, as if it were impossible to fail. In essence it is.
Courageous people are still afraid, but they don’t let the fear paralyze them.
Courageous people are still afraid, but they don’t let the fear paralyze them.
If you dislike the answers you’re getting from life, try asking better questions.
If you aren’t working on your goals, you aren’t working. You’re just wasting time.
Abundance is much easier to create once you get clear about what you’ll do with it.
When you live for a strong purpose, then hard work isn’t an option. It’s a necessity.
To abandon a comfortable lifestyle that isn’t deeply fulfilling is to abandon nothing.
The stuff that?s most important to me in life can?t be bought ? it can only be earned.
Tackling challenges that are too big for you is what makes you grow as a human being.
When you reach the point of becoming independent of external events, you’re truly free.
Achieving meaningful goals requires that you commit your entire ass, not just one cheek.
Fear is not your enemy. It is a compass pointing you to the areas where you need to grow.
By all means listen to other people’s advice, but when in doubt go with your gut instinct.
The momentum of continuous action fuels motivation, while procrastination kills motivation.
We primarily grow as human beings by discovering new truths about ourselves and our reality.
One of the fundamental choices you face in every encounter is the choice to approach or avoid.
One of my core beliefs is that belief itself is a choice that can be made of our own free will.
There is nothing wrong or shameful in failing. The only regret lies in never making the attempt.
The universe cannot show you anything which you’ve intentionally chosen to block from your reality.
Willpower is a concentration of force. You gather up all your energy and make a massive thrust forward.
Break complex projects into smaller, well-defined tasks. Focus on completing just one of those tasks.
You can move beyond the ego’s perspective and see reality from the perspective of a higher consciousness.
Fuzzy thinking leads to hesitancy in acting. Clear thinking makes it easier to act boldly and consistently.
Your values are your current estimations of truth. They represent your answer to the question of how to live.
Batch similar tasks like phone calls or errands into a single chunk, and knock them off in a single session.
Courage is a learned mental skill that you must condition, just as weight training strengthens your muscles.
You’ll be happiest working in a career that allows you to take advantage of your strengths on a daily basis.
If you want to achieve some really big and interesting goals, you have to learn to fall in love with hard work.
Your values are your current estimations of truth. They represent your answer to the question of how to live.
Risk the stuff. It’s worthless anyway. But don’t make the insane choice of sacrificing your happiness for stuff.
Thought and action can be perceived as two different dimensions of who you are: the mental you and the physical you
No one on earth has lived through the exact same experiences you have, and no one thinks the exact same thoughts you do.
The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.
Side effect of over-emphasizing the importance of personal security in your life is that it can cause you to live reactively.
Use reading to fill in those odd periods like waiting for an appointment, standing in line, or while the coffee is brewing.
Productivity = creating value and delivering it to people. All other busywork is unproductive fluff and should be minimized.
I believe the ultimate goal of living and refining your values is to identify and achieve congruence with universal principles.
Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.
Passion requires focused direction, and that direction must come from three other areas: your purpose, your talents, and your needs.
People often overestimate what they can reasonably achieve in a year. But they vastly underestimate what they can achieve in 5 years.
Using passion as your only fuel will no more assure you of success than being in love will ensure a successful long-term relationship.
I believe we can proactively choose to believe whatever we want instead of merely letting our beliefs coalesce as reactions to events.
By courage I mean the ability to face down those imaginary fears and reclaim the far more powerful life that you’ve denied yourself.
Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.
Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it.
According to 3 different 10-year studies, emotional stress is a stronger predictor of death from cancer and heart disease than smoking.
Without a clear focus, it’s too easy to succumb to distractions. Set targets for each day in advance. Decide what you’ll do; then do it.
Stop asking What should I do now?” That question only brings up what others expect of you. Free people don’t have shoulds. They have choices.”
Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about.
Realize that you earn income by providing value – not time – so find a way to provide your best value to others, and charge a fair price for it.
Our beliefs act as lenses. These lenses can help us see things we can’t otherwise see, but they can also block us from seeing parts of reality.
Our brains are fairly powerful, but our conscious minds are still extremely limited in their ability to hold onto multiple simultaneous thoughts
If someone offers you a gift, and you decline to accept it, the other person still owns that gift. The same is true of insults and verbal attacks.
Identify your peak cycles of productivity, and schedule your most important tasks for those times. Work on minor tasks during your non- peak times.
During one of these sacred time blocks, do nothing but the activity that’s right in front of you. Don’t check email or online forums or do web surfing.
I learned that accepting others and accepting myself are two sides of the same coin; you can’t love and accept yourself without doing the same for others.
Use timeboxing. Give yourself a fixed time period, like 30 minutes, to make a dent in a task. Don’t worry about how far you get. Just put in the time.
Thoughts are like seeds. If you want different results in life, you have to figure out which thoughts are capable of growing those results and which aren’t.
Believing that you must do something perfectly is a recipe for stress, and you’ll associate that stress with the task and thus condition yourself to avoid it
Provide clear written agendas to meeting participants in advance. This greatly improves meeting focus and efficiency. You can use it for phone calls too.
Identify a new habit you’d like to form, and commit to sticking with it for just 30 days. A temporary commitment is much easier to keep than a permanent one.
I think the best friendships are those that can stand the test of time, where the friendship is based more on who you are than on what you do or what you have.
Any relationships that would reject you for being true to yourself are – by definition – abusive relationships. You’ll be much better off when you let them go.
Believing that you must do something perfectly is a recipe for stress, and you’ll associate that stress with the task and thus condition yourself to avoid it.
Visualize your goal as already accomplished. Put yourself into a state of actually being there. Make it real in your mind, and you’ll soon see it in your reality.
I want my life to have had more value than just acquiring stuff and living comfortably. I may die rich, or I may die broke. But I won’t die with my music still in me.
If you experience chronic difficulties in a particular area of your life, there’s a strong chance that the root of the problem is a failure to accept reality as it is.
Visualize your goal as already accomplished. Put yourself into a state of actually being there. Make it real in your mind, and you’ll soon see it in your reality.
I realized that my bliss and my heartbreak both point in the same direction. I follow my joy and my heartbreak simultaneously because they’re two sides of the same coin.
To work effectively you need uninterrupted blocks of time in which you can complete meaningful work… I’ve found that a minimum of 90 minutes is ideal for a single block.
Regardless of others’ reactions, do your best to stay true to yourself. Make the choices that allow you to look in the mirror and feel good about the person gazing back at you.
If you want to express your creativity, then don’t choose a path where someone else tells you what to do and how to do it. Choose a path where creativity is rewarded, not punished.
If you don’t take the time to get really clear about exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish, then you’re forever doomed to spend your life achieving the goals of those who do.
Hard work is painful when life is devoid of purpose. But when you live for something greater than yourself and the gratification of your own ego, then hard work becomes a labor of love.
I got screwed over in some bad business deals, but as long as I focused on those past problems, I couldn’t move forward. I had to let all of that go and forgive everyone and everything first.
Spend time cultivating your deepest desires, no matter how impractical or impossible they seem. It’s perfectly OK to want the impossible. It’s not OK to pretend that your desires don’t matter.
Begin with a desire to explore and experience something new. This is a bit different than the advice to do what you love. How do you know you’ll love something if you’ve never done it before?
It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog – you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.
The Pareto principle is the 80-20 rule, which states that 80% of the value of a task comes from 20% of the effort. Focus your energy on that critical 20%, and don’t overengineer the non-critical 80%.
The only thing stopping you is fear, and the only thing that will get you past it is courage. What you do with your life isn’t up to your parents, your boss, or your spouse. It’s up to you and you alone.
To defeat procrastination learn to tackle your most unpleasant task first thing in the morning instead of delaying it until later in the day. This small victory will set the tone for a very productive day.
Are you one of those people who notices the problems of the world and says … somebody ought to do something about that? Why not you? If you feel a strong urge to see a problem fixed, then why not act on it?
Treat your business relationships like friendships (or potential friendships). Formality puts up walls, and walls don’t foster good business relationships. No one is loyal to a wall… except the one in China.
Go after what really inspires you. Don’t chase money. Chase your passion. If you aren’t enthusiastic about your work, then you’re wasting your life. Switch to something else. Consider a new career altogether.
Take a laptop with no network or WiFi access, and go to a place where you can work flat out without distractions, such as a library, park, coffee house, or your own backyard. Leave your comm gadgets behind.
A man doesn’t require the approval of others. He’s willing to follow his heart wherever it leads him. When a man is following his heart-centered path, it’s of little consequence if the entire world is against him.
When you discipline yourself to do what is hard, you gain access to a realm of results that are denied everyone else. The willingness to do what is difficult is like having a key to a special private treasure room.
Values act as our compass to put us back on course every single day, so that day after day, we’re moving in the direction that takes us closer and closer to our definition of the “best” life we could possibly live.
Waiting for clarity is like being a sculptor staring at a piece of marble, waiting for the statue within to cast off the unneeded pieces. Do not wait for clarity to spontaneously materialize-gra b a chisel and get busy!
If you want to experience abundance, then don’t choose a path that ensures scarcity or limitation. Choose a path that has a shot of leading to prosperity. Say no to non-prosperous choices like a job with a fixed paycheck.
It’s important to note that you don’t have to earn money from all of your interests. If you just dive in and pursue what you enjoy, you may be surprised to find out which interests help you generate income and which don’t.
It’s funny that when people reach a certain age, such as after graduating college, they assume it’s time to go out and get a job. But like many things the masses do, just because everyone does it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
When you begin a task, identify the target you must reach before you can stop working. For example, when working on a book, you could decide not to get up until you’ve written at least 1000 words. Hit your target no matter what.
It’s been said that the first hour is the rudder of the day. I’ve found this to be very true in my own life. If I’m lazy or haphazard in my actions during the first hour after I wake up, I tend to have a fairly lazy and unfocused day.
You must assume 100% responsibility for your financial life. If you’re going to improve your situation, you have to put the full burden of doing so squarely on your own shoulders. First and foremost, you must hold yourself responsible.
Saying no isn’t easy, but it’s a required skill if you wish to have any degree of focus in your life. If you say yes too often, you’ll likely fall into the common trap of saying yes to the good while simultaneously saying no to the best.
If you don’t make a conscious choice… someone else will decide for you. It may be your boss, a family member, an advertiser, a collective social influence, or someone or something else, but it won’t be something of your deliberate choosing.
Everyone you meet in your life – even total strangers – are already intimately connected to you. The idea that we are all separate and distinct beings is nothing but an illusion. We are all parts of a larger whole, like individual cells in a body.
Financial scarcity is what you attract when you focus on me, me, me — my needs, my problems, my wants. Financial abundance is what you attract when you focus on we, we, we — our needs, our challenges, our potential. The ego is too small a container for wealth.
Whatever happens to me during the course of my life – physically, socially, or financially – I can always choose to focus on giving. When I’m in that state, nothing else matters. I cease to exist as a separate being and merge into an expression of divine oneness.
Courage is a learned mental skill that you must condition, just as weight training strengthens your muscles. You wouldn’t go into a gym for the first time and try to lift 300 pounds, so don’t think that to be courageous you must tackle your most paralyzing fear right away.
Hard work pays off. When someone tells you otherwise, beware the sales pitch for something “fast and easy” that’s about to come next. The greater your capacity for hard work, the more rewards fall within your grasp. The deeper you can dig, the more treasure you can potentially find.
If you really believe something, you will act in accordance with that belief – always. If you believe in gravity, you will never attempt to defy it. If you claim to hold a belief but act incongruently, then you don’t actually believe it. You’re only kidding yourself. Casual faith isn’t.
In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results.
I believe the main goal of time management is to give you the power to make your life as juicy as you want it to be. By getting clear about what you want and then developing a collection of habits that allow you to efficiently achieve your goals, you’ll enjoy a much richer, more fulfilling life.
Embrace opportunities with limited downside, unlimited upside. The best deals are those where your risk of loss is predictable and fixed if things go wrong, while your potential gains are enormous if things go right. Take such deals whenever you can get them if the odds of success are halfway decent.
Tackling challenges that are too big for you is what makes you grow as a human being. Why do you think this problem keeps coming up in your life, staring you in the face? Do you think you’re supposed to ignore it and hide from it and wait for someone else to solve it for you? If you notice it, you own it.
Real courage is a mental skill, not an emotional one. Neurologically it means using the thinking neocortex part of your brain to override the emotional limbic impulses. In other words, you use your human intelligence, logic, and independent will to overcome the limitations you’ve inherited as an emotional mammal.
Fail your way forward. Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim. Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating. If you’re afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job. Failure’s lessons are essential to success.
‘Network selectively…’ You never know when someone might say yes’ is marketing for dummies. Take the time to build a profile of your ideal customers, and target your networking activities to reach them. Speak to those who are already predisposed to want what you offer. Almost any profile is better than ‘anyone with a pulse’.
Understand that relationships are more important than contracts. Business deals are relationships between people. The signed piece of paper is important, but it’s merely the result of the relationship, not the cause. If the relationship crumbles, the contract won’t save you, although it could be very lucrative for your lawyer.
The universe is waiting on you, not the other way around, and it’s going to keep waiting until you finally make up your mind. Waiting for clarity is like being a sculptor staring at a piece of marble, waiting for the statue within to cast off the unneeded pieces. Do not wait for clarity to spontaneously materialize — grab a chisel and get busy!
Spiritual development requires the freedom to connect with different parts of reality in order to understand them more fully. The more you’re able to explore, the more connections you can form, and the greater your spiritual growth will be. When you feel a strong desire to connect with something in your reality, listen to your intuitive guidance, and make the connection.
Pour the bulk of your time into action, not deciding. The state of indecision is a major time waster. Don’t spend more than 60 seconds in that state if you can avoid it. Make a firm, immediate decision, and move from uncertainty to certainty to action. Let the world tell you when you’re wrong, and you’ll soon build enough experience to make accurate, intelligent decisions.
Network selectively. Nothing says “business newbie” like shotgun networking. “You never know when someone might say yes” is marketing for dummies. Take the time to build a profile of your ideal customers, and target your networking activities to reach them. Speak to those who are already predisposed to want what you offer. Almost any profile is better than “anyone with a pulse.”
To work effectively you need uninterrupted blocks of time in which you can complete meaningful work. When you know for certain that you won’t be interrupted, your productivity is much, much higher. When you sit down to work on a particularly intense task, dedicate blocks of time to the task during which you will not do anything else. I’ve found that a minimum of 90 minutes is ideal for a single block.
To work effectively you need uninterrupted blocks of time in which you can complete meaningful work. When you know for certain that you won’t be interrupted, your productivity is much, much higher. When you sit down to work on a particularly intense task, dedicate blocks of time to the task during which you will not do anything else. I’ve found that a minimum of 90 minutes is ideal for a single block.
If something is important enough to you that you feel the urge to donate your money or time to it, I think it’s best to try to express that form of giving through your career, not just as something you do on the side. If you enjoy your volunteering and charitable activities more than your career, it means your career is in serious need of an upgrade. In my opinion your career should be your best outlet for giving.
Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable. If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail. If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it. If you can’t do what you love and make it profitable, you’ve either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business. Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit.
Imaginary testing is unreliable, and in many cases, it’s a huge waste of time and energy. In truth you just don’t know what will happen until you try. You may start a business, and it could take off in ways no one could predict. Or it could be a complete failure. You could ask for a date and end up with the partner of your dreams. Or you could be rejected cold. It’s great to visualize what you want, but you never really know what’s going to happen until you act.
Think for yourself. Unplug yourself from follow-the-follower groupthink, and virtually ignore what everyone else in your industry is saying (except the ones everyone agrees is crazy). Do your own research, draw your own conclusions, set your own course, and stick to your guns. When you’re just starting out, people will tell you you’re wrong. After you’ve blown past them, they’ll tell you you’re crazy. A few years after that, they’ll (privately) ask you to mentor them.
It’s a serious character weakness to think you can get something of value for little or nothing, to believe that life will flood you with abundance when you won’t commit yourself to delivering your best contribution in exchange. In fact, it’s a safe bet that you’ll subconsciously sabotage yourself from being in such a place for long. You won’t allow yourself to receive what you don’t feel you’ve earned. To receive life’s bounty, you must know without a doubt that you deserve it.
Don’t die without embracing the daring adventure your life is meant to be. You may go broke. You may experience failure and rejection repeatedly. You may endure multiple dysfunctional relationships. But these are all milestones along the path of a life lived courageously. They are your private victories, carving a deeper space within you to be filled with an abundance of joy, happiness, and fulfillment. So go ahead and feel the fear. Then summon the courage to follow your dreams anyway.
The exact process you use to build courage isn’t important. What’s important is that you consciously do it. Just as your muscles will atrophy if you don’t regularly stress them, your courage will atrophy if you don’t consistently challenge yourself to face down your fears. In the absence of this kind of conscious conditioning, you’ll automatically become weak in both body and mind. If you aren’t regularly exercising your courage, then you are strengthening your fear by default; there is no middle ground.
Separate yourself from your ideas and your work and see them as something separate from yourself, you’ll feel you truly have the right to be wrong. If an idea fails, why not let it be the idea’s fault instead of your own? Allow your ideas to fail without turning them into personal defeat. When you fail you discover your boundaries. You map out the edges of your capabilities. And this allows you to eventually move beyond them. Being wrong eventually leads to being right. And even where it doesn’t, it’s still a more interesting path than being nothing.
Courage is a way of thinking Real courage is a mental skill, not an emotional one. Neurologically it means using the thinking neocortex part of your brain to override the emotional limbic impulses. In other words, you use your human intelligence, logic, and independent will to overcome the limitations you’ve inherited as an emotional mammal. Hope is a way of thinking Hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process. Brené Brown Hopeful thinking can get you out of your fear zone and into your appreciation zone. Martha Beck
Instead of asking questions like, “What should I do?” or “What’s the right decision?” consider asking, “What do I want to experience now?” Life is an ever-unfolding experience, not a collection of right and wrong (or optimal and suboptimal) decisions. When you focus on the experience a decision will bring you, you’ll stop seeing life as either- or and begin seeing it as and. For example, if you’re considering starting your own business, realize you don’t have to commit to it for the rest of your life. You can run a business or work a certain job for a while just for the experience, and you’re free to switch to something else whenever you want.

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About Steve Pavlina

Quotes by Steve Pavlina