Five More Things I Am Thinking About Now

1. Managing your energy level is every bit as important as managing your time. Your energy dictates your state, and it has a massive impact on the results you produce. You should sleep more, eat better, and exercise more if you want to have the energy you need to reach your goals.
2. There is no longer any such thing as a sustainable competitive advantage. Your competitive advantage is a temporary condition, most probably not one of your own making. You should work like the devil to figure out how you might have another temporary competitive advantage as quickly as you can.
3. The attitude that you carry into an interaction with another human being has more to do with the result than almost any other factor. If you believe that the conversation is going to be adversarial and prepare for battle, you will end up finding the skirmish for which you prepared. If you go in with the attitude to charm the socks of the person with whom you are meeting, there is an excellent chance you will succeed.
4. Your limits are set by your self-limiting beliefs. So are mine. The reason people produce such wildly different results is that they believe they have different limits. Someone once said to me, “I could never write every day like you do.” I said, “I know.” He quipped back, “Well, I could if I wanted to.” Framing your limiting beliefs as a negative is better: “I don’t believe I could not write every day.” I am starting to believe I can’t not run every day.
5. The world is spinning out of control. Less. It started spinning out of control about 5 billion years ago, and every age has thought their world has been spinning more out of control than at any other time. The total number of deaths during World War II totaled just over 48 million. Regardless of how it appears to you now, the world is actually more under control than it ever has been (which is not to say that it is not out of control, but have some perspective).