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Showing posts from September, 2019

What is pride?

I recently gave a speech about my vision for my own life. More specifically, the plan on how I was going to achieve it.  In preparing the speech I gained clarity on a couple of things. If I was that to live the life I wish to live, I would need to make money from writing.   Now, this was a revelation to me. Throughout my life, I would never have thought of myself as a writer. I am good at mathematics and science, not English.   After the speech, a good friend told me he could see me writing a book called ‘living a life you can be proud of’.  You know what, I may just do that.  But the main thing that got me thinking was this idea of pride or being proud. And I asked myself the question, ‘what is pride?’ and ‘what does it mean to be proud?’.  When you look at the different definitions of pride and being proud, there are more than one. Things then get confusing.   But let’s dig into the different types and decide which one we are talking about.  Self-pride   Self-pride is concerned with

Earning a persons ears

Have you ever wanted to help someone? you offer advice but they don’t pay any attention. They don’t listen. You don’t have their ears.  You wonder why that is.   You want to help them. You know you can help them but they don’t seem to be interested. Maybe they don’t want any help.  In my martial arts training, I have a training partner like this.   We have sparred and come out relatively equal a lot of the time. I probably have more experience and knowledge but I lack the assertiveness. I am not a natural fighter.  He, on the other hand, may have less knowledge and experience but has more assertiveness. A greater desire to win.  I suggested to our coach that we change the way we spar to help my training partner. To help him implement what we are practising. The help him drill the techniques into his actual sparring (fighting).   He said no.  Pardon?  Then he said, the problem isn’t his sparring. The problem is, he isn’t listening to the advice you are giving him. You need to earn his r

To not lose or to win?

“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”  Dwight D.Eisenhower  Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) is a grappling Martial Art. It’s a relatively new martial art that has descended from Judo. Which in turn descended from Japanese Jiu-Jitsu.  The aim is to get your opponent to submit. They submit by tapping. They literally tap the other opponent to say I give up, you got me. The types of submissions could be a joint lock that is painful but you are also worried that the joint may break. You can apply so much pressure and so much pain on parts of the body that people submit. You can choke someone, they can’t breathe, so they tap before they pass out. You can strangle someone, cutting off the blood supply to their brain, so again they tap before they pass out.  Sometimes people try to fight out of it and don’t tap in time.  Oops. I have been training once a week in Japanese Jiu-Jitsu for the past four years. My friend and Martial Arts

The science of business achievement

Tai Lopez is an investor, author and entrepreneur. He is on a mission to find ‘the good life’. He also runs the second biggest book club (second to Oprah’s) in the world.  He was being interviewed by Tom Bilyeu on one of his Impact Theory talk show interviews.  I have heard the quote that ‘hard work’ is a bigger predictor of business success than intelligence.   In the interview, Lopez had something different to say. He stated that conscientiousness was the biggest predictor of business success. Hard work was only 25% of the equation. Conscientiousness was made up of four parts of which diligence (or ‘hard work’) was only one.  Lopez states the science comes from a personality test called HEXACO. He states it is more reliable than the big 5 or Myers Briggs. And conscientiousness and it’s four components are part of this test.  Perfectionism   Second of the four parts was perfectionism.   Do you double-check your work? If you were producing a report or a table of figures for someone, do