snippets from books

Take a look at the people around you—the people you choose to spend your time with. Are the conversations with them positive or negative?

Do you spread gossip and relish in the crumbling lives of others? Or do you support each other and encourage success and positive results? Do your friends constantly engage in activities that drain your pocketbook? Or are your friends truly happy with an afternoon just hanging out at each others’ homes?

It is your coworkers and your peers who have the power to make you successful—or ensure that you don’t succeed, either through negligence or through

“This isn’t life, it’s just stuff. And it’s become more important to you than living.” The typical American lifestyle—buying an expensive home that pushes what you can afford, constantly striving to keep up with the affluence of others, working a job that you can’t even consider leaving because the pay is just too good

Once we get the thing we want, we always find that there is something else to want.
Our self-importance makes us think that we need to receive to justify giving. This is the same part of you that seeks to be right instead of happy. Is it worth it?

When you can give without expecting anything in return, you have mastered the art of living.”

Every single one of us is a warehouse of information and skills, both useful and otherwise. Although we aresometimes tempted to preserve these things for ourselves, it is only when we share these attributes that they have value.

Your solution is self-evident—make it harder to watch television by doing something like getting rid of the remote (or storing it in the opposite end of the house), and you’ll bump against a passive barrier, freeing you to spend your time on other activities. You can still actively choose to turn on the television, but it now requires much more action than before, which is often more than enough to direct you down a different path

gtd
“[G]et a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. [...] [F]or each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. After a few days, you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”3