The Balanced Life – Alan Loy McGinnis

When asked, ‘what do you think is the first requisite for success in your field?’ Thomas Edison replied, ‘the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.’

Feelings are an imperfect guide to conduct. Disciplined people practice habits even when they do not feel like it.

The human organism is at its best not when we indulge it but when we stretch it. We were created with remarkable elasticity.

Discipline leads to freedom.

When you decide to learn self-discipline, you decide to become unified. You are saying no to the self-indulgent and self-coddling tendencies, and yes to the desire for accomplishment and self-mastery.

6 Strategies for improving your self-discipline:

1.Set positive goals with attainable subsets and intermediate rewards
2.Carefully track your progress
3.Build up a tolerance for pain
4.Engage in a lifelong battle with procrastination
5.Beware the dangers of luxury
6.Cultivate a strong sense of integrity and rigorously keep your promises

"The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun." JD Rockefeller Sr.

Delegation is half of success. People who can’t delegate will find themselves fatally handicapped. Pick the right people and then trust them.

Susanna Wesley, the mother of Charles and John Wesley, was also the mother of seventeen other children. How could she do right by all those kids? One of the ways she solved it was by doing this: she made certain she had an hour alone with each child every week.

The good leader is always a person who sees the big picture, and keeps focusing his organization on those major objectives, refusing to allow them to get bogged down with insignificant details.

Build into your agreement with people an understanding that mutual, constructive criticism will be the norm, not the exception. Some men and women have limited success because they are afraid to criticize and have too great a need to be liked by everyone.

Praise in public and criticize in private.

It is not the weak and strong, nor the talented and the not-so-talented, rather I divide the world into learners and non-learners.

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You ask questions of the person with whom you are talking. You genuinely like learning the details of their work, understanding the shaping of their lives, listening as they lay out the crucial issues with which they grapple.

Do you want to know how to spot the men and women who are headed for advancement? They will be the ones who capture the bits and pieces of the day that other people waste. Each morning these people on the way up will tear out a few pages of some paperback book, and then you will see them reading those loose pages at the bus stop while everyone else is impatiently looking down the street to be sure to see how the bus pulls up to the curb. They always have the cassette of some book or lecture in their car. They read in airports. And they will be the ones who, upon discovering a word they don’t know, look it up in the dictionary, write the definition on a 3x5 card, put it in their pockets and pull the card out frequently to review the definition. Then they try to reinforce their new knowledge by using the word in conversation or in a letter that day. They grab the minutes in order to get more out of the day than others.

On of the characteristics of creative people is that they maintain a childlike curiosity. "I have no particular talent" Einstein once said. "I am merely extremely inquisitive." High achieving, adaptive individuals have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.