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I remember My grandma’s favorite story was about
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how everything cost two cents when she was young.
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But now, everything constantly got more expensive. And it was all because of the government.
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These uneducated pigs didn’t know how to control prices.
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And when I was privileged enough to hear this story,
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her complaining would last for hours and hours.
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And that's exactly what reactive people do. They always focus on the things that they
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cannot control. It’s not possible that a concept like inflation
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would exist. And if it did, it’s impossible that they
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wouldn’t know about it!
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On the other hand, proactive people realize, Look, even if my complaining were completely
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objective, it doesn't help me. So I'm going to focus
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on what I can control.
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If a proactive person owns a business where he sells a product,
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instead of focusing on how people these days don’t appreciate good products anymore,
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and how the government has horrible regulations, he focuses on,
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“How can I improve my product, so my customers can’t live without it?”
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Do you realize how much responsibility, how much dedication,
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how much hard work comes along with asking that question?
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And what do you think our effort-minimizing brain is going to pick as default?
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And that is exactly why most people focus on the things that they cannot control,
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rather than focusing on the things that they can.
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Habit number 1 is: be proactive.
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Now imagine you’re at a funeral, but this one’s different from all the funerals
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you've ever been to. You’re standing over the casket and you
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see yourself. What do you have to say about yourself?
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This is one of the most powerful questions you could ask.
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Are you doing the things in your life, which are aligned with what you want to be
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able to say? Do you want to say that you were a good spouse?
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If that’s the case, how does coming home and instantly being negative
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towards your spouse affect that? Do you want to be remembered as a person who
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added value to society? If that’s the case,
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are you doing the things that will allow you to say that,
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or are you scared of failure and choose comfortable mediocrity instead?
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Almost every one of us will have to readjust how we live when we ask that question.
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Habit number 2 is: begin with the end in mind.
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Now if I were to ask you, “What are the most important things to you?”
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The most common answers I would get would be
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either your wellbeing, or your relationships—your family, your
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spouse, your children. You would never ever say, “Organizing papers
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or watching TV…” But how many of us spend more time organizing
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papers and watching TV, than planning our nutrition and going to the
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gym, or cultivating a healthy family environment?
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There’s a horrible disconnect between what we say
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and how we actually allocate our time.
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Habit number 3 is: put first things first.
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Now imagine you’re an author, and I’m an author.
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And We both write interesting books, and we both have access to an audience of
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about a 100,000 people. I read your book and I love it.
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So I decide to share it with my audience. And as a result,
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you now have 1,000s of people buying your book and reading your ideas.
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You see this and think, “Who is this guy? Let me take a look at his book.”
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You start reading my book and think I have ideas that are valuable.
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So you decide to share it with your audience. And as a result,
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I now have 1,000s of people buying my book and reading my ideas.
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Notice how different this is from my creating a little creepy Amazon account,
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finding your book and leaving a bad review, hoping that this will deter a few people from
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buying your book, which will in turn somehow get them to buy
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my book.
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Habit number 4 is: think win-win. Stop thinking of everything as a zero-sum
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game. For you to win, another person does not have
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to lose.
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Something I want my viewers to do is to subscribe to my channel,
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but you will never hear me say, “Well, I worked really hard guys.
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I dedicated so many hours to this. Please subscribe.”
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Look, who cares if I worked hard? Who cares if I’ve spent days creating this
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video? The real questions are,
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does it offer value to you? And Why should you dedicate your time to subscribing,
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when you could be doing anything else that you want?
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Habit number 5 is something that I try to use every single day,
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with every interaction that I have, and with every comment that I reply to,
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and it is this: seek first to understand, then to be understood.
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Now imagine there are two people, and a tree with five apples on it.
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They are both too short to reach the apples, but if one of them sits on the other’s shoulders,
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he can reach all five of the apples. This is called synergy.
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The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Now I’ll be the first to admit that you can’t achieve this with everyone,
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but you should always be looking for opportunities to create synergy.
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With every synergistic opportunity you create, you can gather many more apples than you otherwise
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would by yourself.
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Habit number 6 is: Synergize.
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A man has been trying to cut down a tree for hours.
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And after a while his neighbor can’t take it anymore,
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goes over and says, “You know, if you sharpen the saw, you’ll
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be able to cut it down faster.” And the man replies,
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“But, sharpening the saw is going to take time.”
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Now we might laugh at this story, but we do the same thing all the time.
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We can’t find 30 minutes a day, 4 times a week to go to the gym.
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Our health deteriorates to a point, where we’re physically incapable of being
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effective. We can’t read a book for 15 minutes a day
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and mentally stimulate ourselves. No! These things take too much time!
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And then we have the audacity to ask for little tips and tricks on how to be effective.
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It’s like telling your engineer, “Don’t worry about the foundation,
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where can we get the magic bricks that will float in the air?”
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Habit number 7 is: sharpen the saw.
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And these are the 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey.