Benjamin P. Hardy Quotes

Longitudinal research highlights that a person’s personality can often be explained by the social roles they espoused and relinquished throughout their life stages. Thus, social role is an oft-studied and tangible predictor of personality.

You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different.

Humility, gratitude, and recognition of your blessings keeps your success in proper perspective. You couldn’t do what you’ve without the help of countless other people. You are extremely lucky to be able to contribute in the way you have.

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

Repetition until Your Learning Becomes Unconscious (Outsourced to Environment) While I implemented what I learned, my teacher would watch me from a distance. He let me struggle as I tried to remember what he had just shown me. The first time, applying what he taught took a lot of time and effort. So we did it again, and again, and again. Over time, I became competent and thus confident. Learning something new is all about memory and how you use it. At first, your prefrontal cortex — which stores your working (or short-term) memory — is really busy figuring out how the task is done. But once you’re proficient, the prefrontal cortex gets a break. In fact, it’s freed up by as much as 90 percent. Once this happens, you can perform that skill automatically, leaving your conscious mind to focus on other things. This level of performance is called automaticity, and reaching it depends on what psychologists call overlearning or overtraining. The process of getting a skill to automaticity involves four steps, or stages: Repeated learning of a small set of information. If you’re playing basketball, for instance, that might mean shooting the same shot over and over. The key here is to go beyond the initial point of mastery. Make your training progressively more difficult. You want to make the task harder and harder until it’s too hard. Then you bring the difficulty back down slightly, in order to stay near the upper limit of your current ability. Add time constraints. For example, some math teachers ask students to work on difficult problems with increasingly shortened timelines. Adding the component of time challenges you in two ways. First, it forces you to work quickly, and second, it saps a portion of your working memory by forcing it to remain conscious of the ticking clock. Practice with increasing memory load — that is, trying to do a mental task with other things on your mind. Put simply, it’s purposefully adding distractions to your training regimen.

The famous 20th-century writer and theologian C. S. Lewis was an ardent believer and advocate of the theosis perspective of God and humanity. As he said: It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which you would be strongly tempted to worship . . . There are no ordinary people.

Your life is like a garden. If you’re not intentional, your garden will be overrun with weeds and randomness.

Ultimately, there is deeper meaning in the wormholes we experience than appears on the surface. Don’t let what may appear to be a setback become a missed wormhole of opportunity.

The reason the hedonic treadmill exists is because people aren’t taught how to be happy.

Truth #4 is that the more measurable and detailed your Future Self, the faster you’ll progress toward your goals. Effective progress comes with a combination of measurable metrics, a vivid vision of your Future Self, and clear mile markers. Without these elements, people wander.

As management author and legend Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” Effectiveness

Thankfully, in the real world we don’t literally lose the thing we go into the GAP about. But we do damage it. We damage our own experience. And when it comes to other people, we damage them as well.

To quote Adam Grant in Think Again: To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity . . . My past self was Mr. Facts — I was too fixated on knowing. Now I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. As Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the past year.”36

Momentary pleasure and true happiness are two very different experiences. As scientist and spiritual leader James Talmage wrote, “Happiness leaves no bad after-taste, it is followed by no depressing reaction; it brings no regret, entails no remorse. True happiness is lived over and over again in memory, always with a renewal of the original good; a moment of pleasure may leave a barbed sting, [as] an ever-present source of anguish.” Ancient philosophies such as stoicism and spiritual beliefs such as Buddhism and Christianity fundamentally oppose a hedonistic approach to life. Embracing challenges, pain, and difficulty are among the primary paths to meaning and growth according to these perspectives. Rather than a hedonistic worldview, ancient philosophy and most spiritual perspectives embrace a eudemonic worldview, which advocates seeking a virtuous and meaningful life of growth and contribution.

In our world with limitless options, limitless books to read, limitless clothes to wear, limitless paths to take, it is extremely important to be picky. Excess is a suppressant to abundance. Excess represents the broad path which most people travel. With too many clothes in their closets and too many competing priorities, paralysis by analysis is at an extreme.