The Starbucks Experience by Joseph Michelli | Book Summary
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The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary Into Extraordinary by Joseph Michelli
More than Free Refills
Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice opened in 1971. It was different from other coffee shops because it offered customers high-quality beans, careful preparation of drinks, nice stores and good design. Since then the company has grown to have 11000 stores in 37 countries with 35 million customers visiting Starbucks weekly. Today they buy about 4% of all the coffee sold worldwide.
Starbucks went public in 1992 and is now worth $650,000 if you invested $10,000 then. It opens a new store somewhere in the world every day of the year and has 500 stores in Japan including the busiest Starbucks in the world. In some places it has opened stores across from one another.
Starbucks has been a successful company because it focuses on its employees, products, customers’ experience and relationship with the community.
The Starbucks Experience
Starbucks has become a top global brand by adhering to five key principles. First, customize the experience for your customers. Second, focus on every aspect of the job and never lose sight of what’s important: your customer’s point of view. Third, do unexpected things to keep people coming back (surprise and delight). Fourth, learn from mistakes; don’t be afraid to make them. Fifth and finally, leave a lasting impression with your work so that people remember you long after they’ve left the store.
The Partner Ethos
Starbucks’ success is largely due to two of its corporate values:
Employees are partners, and they’re encouraged to contribute ideas for improving the company. They also help develop new products, which is a huge part of Starbucks’ success.
Starbucks executives believe in profit sharing. Employees receive company stock and medical insurance because of their belief that employees should be rewarded for the profits they help generate. The chain also gives bonuses to hourly workers who perform well above expectations.
Starbucks spends the most money on employee training and has one of the lowest turnover rates in its industry. They also have a high job satisfaction rate compared to other fast-food chains, which is likely due to their extensive worker training program.
Starbucks pays great attention to their employees and makes important changes quickly. When an employee group wanted to extend paid parental leave for adoption, it was changed within 2 weeks.
Principle One: “Make It Your Own”
Starbucks founder Howard Schultz has said that he is not in the coffee business but rather a people business. He believes it’s important to connect with customers and their communities. In order to do this, Starbucks teaches its employees five principles: 1) Be welcoming; 2) Engage in conversation; 3) Listen actively; 4) Anticipate needs; 5) Be empathetic.
“Be genuine” – Partners must be active listeners and good observers. Noticing that a new customer looked as though she was about to cry, a barista offered her a toffee nut latte. She thanked the barista for his kindness by sending him flowers.
In the business world, it’s important to be considerate of others and the environment. For example, we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by using wind energy and planting trees in communities.
Nespresso partners are trained in coffee. They learn about tasting, handling and service through internal publications and classes. It ensures that they use the product they sell as well as motivating them to share their passion for coffee with others! Additionally, some Nespresso partners become “Coffee Masters” by enlisting in a three-month program consisting of lectures and exercises.
“Be involved.” Staff at one store realized that they had many deaf customers. To help them, the staff took lessons in American Sign Language and adjusted their work flow to accommodate those customers. Other stores have done similar things as well.
Principle Two: “Everything Matters”
Retail businesses either do well or fail because of their details. Therefore, Starbucks focuses on every detail of its business, such as image, employee concerns and product quality.
Starbucks has an in-house architecture group that designs its stores. The company uses store design to build its brand. One enthusiastic customer claims, “Starbucks could very well operate without even selling coffee. They could charge an entrance fee and offer nothing else but a room and mellow Bob Marley music softly playing in the background, and people would still come.”
Cleanliness is important for customers. Starbucks has a checklist that all stores are required to follow, and workers must come out from behind the counter at least every 10 minutes to check their work environment. One barista said she liked this requirement because it gave her the chance to interact with customers and clean up their area more often.
Starbucks customers are particularly appreciative of the clean restrooms. One customer said: “The music, drinks and wireless aren’t that important. What I really appreciate is the cleanliness and availability of their toilets.”
Starbucks is aware of the importance of packaging. In fact, it spent two years developing a sleeve for its cups out of recycled paper so that customers can carry their coffee without burning themselves. It also introduced a takeout cup made from recycled materials.
Starbucks found a way to keep coffee fresh for up to six weeks by reducing waste.
Principle Three: “Surprise and Delight”
People like surprises. The Rueckheim brothers introduced Cracker Jacks at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and sales grew when they advertised a surprise prize inside every box. Psychologists say that people need security and safety, but unexpected things keep them from getting bored. Many companies try to avoid surprising their customers, but Starbucks uses surprises to build customer and employee loyalty.
Starbucks has given away ice cream in the past. For example, they shipped it to 6,000 locations by Federal Express to celebrate National Ice Cream Month. They also gave away books and displayed artwork at stores depending on what customers wanted.
Principle Four: “Embrace Resistance”
It’s impossible to please everyone. Starbucks addresses mistakes and problems by taking responsibility for them, preventing them from happening again, and changing when necessary. The company works closely with some of its critics to develop coffee-buying guidelines that call for good working conditions for farmers and minimize pollution because it buys so much coffee worldwide.
Store managers are the first to hear criticism, because they’re on the front lines. For example, in Beijing, China, a Starbucks store was criticized by government officials for having too many customers stand up and not enough seating. The manager changed that so people could sit down and drink their coffee rather than take it with them. In order to emphasize its community involvement, Starbucks donated $5 million to a Chinese educational fund.
Principle Five: “Leave Your Mark”
Starbucks is a company that aims to be socially responsible and community-oriented. It requires its managers to communicate well with vendors, have high standards for product providers, and to be environmentally conscious. The company’s mission statement says it will develop innovative solutions to problems, treat its employees well, and meet fiscal responsibilities.
Starbucks is a socially responsible company that uses a triple bottom line to measure its success. The senior vice president of corporate social responsibility works with the board and the Starbucks Foundation to find ways to contribute to communities where stores are located.
Starbucks also has a low turnover rate. Studies have found that companies with high levels of community involvement experience lower turnover rates. When employees work together on charitable projects, they build team spirit and deepen their connections to the community, each other and Starbucks.
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel Levitin | Summary
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The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J Levitin
In the best-selling The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, neuroscientist Daniel Levitin argues that the problem with the proliferation of information isn’t as much about the storage of the information as it is about organizing and retrieving that information. The human brain is incredible at storing data; the challenge is summoning up the right stuff at the right time, while not being distracted by the rest.
To be efficacious, we not only need to limit the information we consume (by simplifying, limiting our sources, quitting social media, taking digital Sabbaths, etc.) but also need to develop systems to take the strain off our befuddled brains. To do this, Levitin says, we must organize our personal environments to better channel our brains’ unique approach to doing things.
According to The Organized Mind, the trick to efficiently organize and manage information is to “shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.” Levitin uses the latest brain science to propose “organization principles”—methods and disciplines to regain a sense of mastery over the way we can organize our time, home, and office.
Organization Principle #1: Conquer information overload
The information age is drowning us with an exceptional deluge of data. Simultaneously, we’re expected to make more decisions quickly than ever before. To survive information overload, Levitin suggests:
Be much more discerning at what you allow in. Not all input is worthy of being let in. Exercise control and discipline regarding your input choices. Don’t keep what you can’t use.
Develop and put into practice an organization system that works for you: to-do lists, 3×5 cards, etc. Whatever that system is, it needs to offload, classify, and be easy to retrieve. A mislabeled item or misplaced location is worse than an unlabeled item.
Organize in all areas and facets of your life. “Too much stuff” is fatiguing, no matter which part of your life has the “too much stuff” problem.
Organization Principle #2: Quit multi-tasking and become fanatical about focused work
Levitin’s pet hate is multitasking, which he describes as “the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy.” Our brains are not designed for multitasking; he writes, “When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.”
Allow no distractions when you are in “focused work mode.”
Limit the interruption caused by email, text messages, visitors, and callers.
Organization Principle #3: Rest more, work less
In our chronically sleep-deprived society, sleep deficit is a performance killer. The general effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance are well-known: scientists have documented that when we are sleep-deprived our immune system suffers, our thinking and judgments are impaired, and our fuse becomes very short.
Studies have found that productivity goes up when the number of hours per week of work goes down, strongly suggesting that adequate leisure and refueling time pays off for employers and for workers. Overwork—and its companion, sleep deprivation—have been shown to lead to mistakes and errors that take longer to fix than the overtime hours worked. A sixty-hour work week, although 50% longer than a forty-hour work week, reduces productivity by 25%, so it takes two hours of overtime to accomplish one hour of work. A ten-minute nap can be equivalent to an extra hour and a half of sleep at night.
A calm, well-rested mind is a fruitful mind. Don’t overlook sleep, rest, and vacation as stress busters.
Organization Principle #4: Organize your physical environment into categories so it helps your mind
One principle that Levitin emphasizes repeatedly is “offloading the information from your brain and into the environment” so you can “use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.” One appealing example he offers is, “If you’re afraid you’ll forget to buy milk on the way home, put an empty milk carton on the seat next to you in the car or in the backpack you carry to work on the subway (a note would do, of course, but the carton is more unusual and so more apt to grab your attention).”
Levitin also emphasizes the importance of putting things away in their designated places, because there’s a special part of our brain dedicated to remembering the spatial location of things.
Neuroscientists have proved that the human brain is good at creating and thinking in categories. “The fact that our brains are inherently good at creating categories is a powerful lever for organizing our lives.” Further, “productivity and efficiency depend on systems that help us organize through categorization.”
Organization Principle #5: Spend only as much time on decisions, tasks, and actions as they are worth.
Most decisions can be reduced to a choice of four simple actions: drop it, do it, delegate it, or defer it.
If something can be done in two minutes or less, just do it.
Significantly, Levitin suggests the practice of satisficing—a decision-making approach that aims for acceptable or “good enough” results, rather than the optimal solutions:
Satisficing [is] a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don’t matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient. You don’t really know if your dry cleaner is the best—you only know that they’re good enough. And that’s what helps you get by. You don’t have time to sample all the dry cleaners within a twenty-four-block radius of your home. … Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction. … Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it.
Organization Principle #6: A Zen mind is an organized mind
Beyond the productivity hacks and the tweaks, Levitin suggests a spiritual composure in favor of mental organization. He advocates practicing Zen-like mindfulness not only to relieve the anxiety that comes with worries over undone tasks and unease over future uncertainties, but also to allot more of your limited attention to the present moment.
Instead of seeking to cope with information overload and travel at warp speed, focus on the things you can do to put yourself on the right path to better wellbeing—one thought, one bite, one task, one project, and one breath at a time.
Seedtime and Harvest by Neville Goddard | Book Summary
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Discover the timeless spiritual principles in Seedtime and Harvest by Neville Goddard — one of his most profound teachings on imagination, faith, and the creative power within. This book summary explores how your thoughts are the seeds that shape your reality, and how conscious imagination leads to a fruitful “harvest” in life.
🌱 In this summary, you’ll learn: The law of cause and effect through imagination How belief determines what manifests in your world The secret to planting mental “seeds” for success and abundance How to align your inner world with your desired outer results If you’re interested in manifestation, spiritual growth, or Neville’s teachings, this summary will give you clear insights to apply in your daily life.
🎧 Watch till the end to understand how imagination truly creates reality!
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Seedtime and Harvest by Neville Goddard
- The Bible is written in the language of symbolism and is a revelation of the laws and functions of the mind.
- The purpose of the book is to show how to succeed in realizing one’s desires through the conscious, voluntary exercise of imagination in accordance with the laws of the mind.
- The “Four Mighty Ones” in a person are four different aspects of their mind that can be equated with the Tetragrammaton symbol of the creative power in man – “I AM.”
- The “Four Mighty Ones” can be compared to the four most important characters in the production of a play: the producer, the author, the director, and the actor.
- The producer suggests the theme of a play in the form of a wish, the author writes the script, the director rehearses and coordinates the actors, and the actor brings the script to life.
- To realize one’s desires, they must first be clearly defined, then the script must be written, and then the desire must be rehearsed and acted out with conviction.
- The secret to success is to be the actor and not the spectator, to believe in one’s script and act it out with enthusiasm and conviction.
- Cain and Abel are personifications of two distinct functions of consciousness: the limited perception of the senses and an imaginative view of the world.
- Cain represents a passive acceptance of life-based on appearances and leads to discontent or disillusionment, while Abel represents a vision of fulfilled desire that lifts a person above the evidence of the senses.
- The Lord, or consciousness, rejects Cain’s gift and delights in the gift of Abel, which is the active use of imagination on behalf of oneself and others.
- Faith is the belief in something that is not seen and sacrifices apparent facts for unapparent truths.
- Through the power of imagination and the persistence of an assumption, even if denied by the evidence of the senses, it can harden into fact.
- The story of the woman who imagined her nephew’s birthmark away illustrates the power of imagination and the importance of persistently holding an assumption.
- The power of imagination and the persistence of an assumption can be applied to any desire or goal.
- In a dream, Jacob had a revelation of the ascending and descending levels of consciousness, or a scale of values, which gives meaning to everything in the outer world.
- The meaning of an object or event is a direct index to an individual’s level of consciousness.
- The objects and events in the world occupy a lower level of significance than the level of meaning that produced them.
- Most people try to explain higher levels of significance in terms of lower levels of what and how things happen.
- There are three levels of awareness for an accident: the event itself, how it happened, and why it happened.
- On the ascending scale, each higher level brings us closer to the truth about an event.
- The Lord or meaning is the creator and cause of the phenomena of life.
- The individual’s level of consciousness determines their perception of the world.
- By understanding the ascending and descending levels of consciousness, an individual can bring about change in their life.
- Life is a game played on the playing field of the mind.
- The aim of the game of life is to increase awareness and achieve our goals and desires.
- The rules of the game of life are simple but take a lifetime of practice to use wisely.
- One of the rules is that what we think in our hearts influences our reality.
- Inner conversations shape our outer circumstances and we must be aware of our mental activity to play the game of life successfully.
- The power of the word cannot be broken and inner conversations based on already having something can lead to its manifestation.
- The fault for not achieving our goals lies within ourselves, not in external circumstances or other people.
- We can achieve our goals by using the power of the word and focusing on the goal, not the competition or obstacles.
- The serpent is a symbol of the power of endless growth and self-reproduction, and man should learn to shed his old self and grow a new environment.
- Man’s outer world and conditions are the out-picturing of his inner state of consciousness.
- The serpent was also associated with the guardianship of treasure or wealth, and man should awaken the power of his imagination to grow and outgrow and find his treasures.
- The spiritual body of imagination is not interlocked with the physical body and environment and can withdraw to imagine a desired state in hope that it will solidify as a new environment.
- To prepare for a new environment, a person must construct a life-like representation of it in their imagination and visit it repeatedly until it feels natural, then return to the physical world.
- The new environment will then manifest in the physical world as the person’s new circumstances.
- The symbols of water and blood in the gospel and Epistle of John represent psychological truth and living a life according to that truth, respectively.
- Literal-minded individuals who do not discover the hidden meaning behind symbols of truth remain on a lower level of understanding and do not experience true transformation.
- The “cup of water” (psychological truth) must be turned into “wine” (active application of truth) in order to truly taste and experience it.
- Salvation and transformation come from actively using imagination to appropriate a specific state of consciousness.
- This state of consciousness is a man’s demand on the infinite storehouse of God and will manifest in his life as his new environment.
- The Bible is a collection of parables that reveal the laws and purposes of the mind of man.
- The parables should be interpreted mystically to reveal deeper meanings.
- The advice to the disciples to not provide shoes for their journey symbolizes the importance of not relying on intermediaries between oneself and God and taking personal responsibility for one’s actions.
- Imagining evil is not enough, one must actively and lovingly use their imagination to visualize well in order to clothe and feed Christ (awakened Human Imagination).
- The chariot in the Song of Solomon symbolizes the mind, with the pillars of silver representing knowledge, the bottom of gold symbolizing wisdom, and the purple covering representing the incorporation of love and truth.
- The story of Joseph’s chariot also symbolizes the mind, with the tributaries following him representing the thoughts and actions that follow a person.
- Purple is a symbol of love and truth and is used to clothe the incorruptible four-fold wisdom of the mind.
- The “wood of Lebanon” symbolizes incorruptibility and is used to make the chariot, representing the importance of building a mind that is not susceptible to corruption.
- The “wedding garment” in the parable of the wedding feast represents the individual’s purified and illuminated mind, which is necessary for entry into the kingdom of heaven.
- The parable of the sower and the seeds represents the planting and growth of thoughts in the mind, with the different types of soil representing the receptivity of the mind to these thoughts.
- The parable of the tares among the wheat symbolizes the coexistence of good and evil thoughts in the mind, with the separation of the tares and wheat representing the eventual victory of good over evil in the mind.
- The mustard seed in the parable represents the power of imagination to grow and transform.
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What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan | Book Summary
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Discover the key principles behind business success with What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan — a powerful guide that breaks down how great leaders think, act, and make decisions. In this book summary, we explore the timeless fundamentals every CEO — and every employee — should understand: cash flow, margins, velocity, growth, and customers. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, manager, or professional aiming to think like a CEO, this summary will help you see the bigger picture, make smarter business decisions, and understand what truly drives performance in any organization.
📘 Key Takeaways: Learn how CEOs simplify complex businesses into core drivers of success. Understand how to think strategically like a leader. Discover the importance of financial intelligence in decision-making. See how execution, cash, and growth connect to long-term success.
👉 Watch till the end to master the mindset that top CEOs use to run high-performing companies.
💡 Perfect for: Entrepreneurs, business owners, managers, students, and anyone looking to level up their business thinking.
What the CEO Wants You to Know: How Your Company Really Works by Ram Charan
Completely rewritten for today’s business world, What the CEO Wants You to Know, expanded and updated, written by bestselling author Ram Charan, describes the fundamentals behind every business, from street vendors in Mumbai, to Fortune 500 companies. Drawing on stories from Uber, Amazon, Apple, Toyota, Netflix, Lyft, The Limited, Walmart, GE and Starbucks, Charan, in the most accessible language imaginable, explains the ins and outs of how companies work, from gross revenue and operating costs, to inventory and cash flow, from turnover, profits and margins, to return on capital and accounts payable and receivable, from product quality to sales. A classic in the business literature, with hundreds of thousands of copies in print, this short and engaging book is like a miniature MBA course between covers.
For everyone who wants to master and understand the levers that drive a successful business, What the CEO Wants You to Know is the perfect answer.
What the Best CEOs and Street Vendors Share
When it comes to running a business, street vendors and the CEOs of the world’s largest and most successful companies think exactly the same way. The complexities of their businesses are different; their approach is not. Anyone who figures out a clear way to make money has business acumen, or what some people call ‘street smarts’.
4 Things Every Company Needs to Master
#1 Customers
It all starts here. If you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business.
At your company, you may talk about the people who buy your products as “customers.” But they may not be the people who ultimately use the product—the “consumers.” It’s important to understand both. When P&G develops new products, it tries to understand the needs and wants of the consumer, but many of its processes—logistics, discounts, merchandising—are geared to serve customers such as Target.
As you think about both consumers and customers, keep it simple and specific. What are consumers buying? It might not be the physical product alone. Maybe they’re buying reliability, trustworthiness, convenience, service, or the entire customer experience, whether in the store or online.
#2 Cash Generation
Cash generation is one of several important indications of your company’s moneymaking ability.
Don’t lose sight of cash generation—the difference between all the cash that flows into the business and all the cash that flows out in a given time period.
An astute businessperson wants to know: Does the business generate enough cash? What are the sources of its cash generation? How is the cash being used? Businesspeople who fail to ask these questions and/or don’t figure out the answers eventually stumble.
Cash generation can be a problem for even the largest companies for any number of reasons: margins are too low, expenses are too high, or it takes too long to collect receivables, for example. The automobile industry has a history of having problems with cash generation. Chrysler ran out of cash in the early 1980s; Volkswagen did, too, in the late 1980s. And the classic example is probably GM, which was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2009. When you don’t have enough cash and you can’t borrow, you go bankrupt.
Running out of cash is also a common problem for start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. It takes longer to get the product into the marketplace than expected, or the costs of getting under way are substantially higher than budgeted.
No matter what kind of organization you work for—a for-profit company, a nonprofit, or a government agency—understanding where the cash comes from and where it goes is important. All people in an organization, not just those in finance, need to know how their job affects cash generation (or consumption) if their career is going to thrive.
#3 Gross Margin and Return on Invested Capital
A key part of cash generation is understanding gross margin.
Gross margin is calculated by taking the total sales for the company and subtracting the costs directly associated with making or buying it. Those are things such as the cost of the material used to create the products along with the direct labor costs.
In the early days of the personal computer, the PC industry enjoyed gross margins approaching 38 percent. Then came the era of intense competition. The price of a PC fell dramatically, which shaved gross margins dramatically to 12 percent. To survive, PC makers had to change their entire business approach. IBM got out of that business, and Dell went private, which relieved it of the pressure from shareholders to deliver quarterly earnings as it shifted its strategy.
Another key part of cash generation is understanding return on invested capital. Return on invested capital is calculated by taking the net income and dividing it by total capital – your money plus any money you’ve borrowed. Keeping track of this number is critical because there is often a perfect correlation between how well a company uses its capital and how its CEO is perceived.
#4 Growth
Today, no growth means lagging behind in a world that grows every day. Either you are growing or you are dying.
But growth for its own sake doesn’t do any good. Growth has to be both profitable and sustainable. Sometimes senior management inadvertently encourages unprofitable growth by giving the sales force the wrong incentives.
One $16 million injection molding company rewarded its sales reps based on how many dollars’ worth of plastic caps they sold; they were not accountable for profits. Everyone was excited when the company landed $4 million of new sales from two major customers, but these large contracts were on slim margins, not enough to generate the cash needed to fund the sales.
This Is What the Best CEOs Do
Superior CEOs use their business acumen to test the logic of their priorities and the path they are setting the business on. They consider what will happen to the company’s moneymaking as a result by revisiting the basics—customers, cash, return on invested capital, and growth—as they shape the future.
Take, for example, Steve Jobs and the invention of the personal computer. The necessary components—the monitor, disk drives, mouse, keyboard, microprocessors, software, and printer—all existed in the mid-1970s. The seeds had been planted, yet Apple caught the office-automation giants like Wang and Digital Equipment off guard when it introduced its first computer in 1976.
Jobs, working with Steve Wozniak, had the ability to see the moneymaking potential of a machine that promised independence and freedom. No venture capitalists were needed to get Apple off the ground. It made money in its first month and hit a billion dollars in sales within ten years. Today revenues are well over $200 billion and the company’s net profit margins average 20 percent.
Execution In a Nutshell
Here’s a quick primer on how to work efficiently:
- Be totally clear on what you want to accomplish.
- Break goals down into time segments (“We will have this done in a week; that in a month”) and milestones (“We know we will be halfway there when we do X”).
- If you run into an obstacle, ask for help.
- Constantly monitor progress, and follow through.
That last one may be the most difficult thing to do. Bright people hate following through. For one thing, they believe it is micromanaging. For another, they think it is somehow demeaning to their subordinates to check up on their work.
But you have to follow through to make sure that what you said is clear and that progress is being made.
The Right People in the Right Jobs
Every business needs the right people in the right jobs. The modern corporation is built on the idea of “professionals” who use their particular talents to help the business succeed. No matter what the job, if the person making decisions is.
Leaders who deliver results consistently over a long period of time are the ones who recognize what an individual can do best. They link the business need and the person’s natural talent. They take the time and effort to place individuals where their strengths can have the most impact.
If you were Sam Walton and you were trying to build your business, how would you select people to run your stores? You would look for employees who truly want to understand the customer and who are fixated on selling reliable goods at a price lower than the competition’s. Making money in the retail business means managing margin and inventory velocity and growing volume. If you can’t find people who understand that, you will never achieve your dream of becoming a retailing giant.
Sam Walton carefully selected people who met those criteria, and he developed and trained them. Employees were taught to watch revenues, price, inventories, and customers like the proverbial hawk. And they had considerable autonomy to make decisions and take action.
You want to also consider the mindset of the other person. Does he or she have an inner drive to succeed? Is the person open to change?
For example, you want to know the mindset of a plant manager. If he’s used to two inventory turns a month and you tell him you’re going to thirty turns, how will he react?
Coaching
People who do well in a job also need attention. A true leader expands such employees’ capacity by helping them channel their talents and develop their abilities so they can advance to the next level.
Perhaps you think you give people feedback when you do their annual performance review. In reality, performance reviews are rarely used to develop people. Most of the time they’re simply a way to communicate a salary change based on last year’s performance, or they’re used to justify a promotion. That is not the way to help people grow and develop.
So what is the right way? Building on the person’s strengths with feedback that is honest and direct. No sugarcoating. Use every encounter as an opportunity to coach. The sooner the better.
Your Part in the Big Picture
Link your own priorities to the big picture.
If you’re in human resources, for example, you can help people break out of their silos, and coordinate efforts with people elsewhere in the company to help ensure that the company has the right people in the right jobs.
If you work in information technology, maybe you can create links with customers and suppliers so your company can collaborate more easily.
An in-house attorney can help by keeping up to date with legislative changes globally and staying alert for new opportunities that might arise as a result.
Those in finance can assist with many kinds of decisions—whether to add capacity, how to improve pricing for better margins, where best to deploy cash, and the like—by providing accurate and timely information.
Maybe you can break new ground by coming up with a novel idea that relates to the overall business. Maybe you can help by simply reframing an issue, bringing the underlying assumptions to the surface, and challenging them.
What does it mean to reframe an issue? Here’s an example.
Say you work for a car company and there is a need to cut costs on next year’s model. Put on your businessperson’s hat and ask, “Are there features that customers don’t care much about and that can be eliminated to reduce cost?”
Instead, you can ask what customer needs are not being met. If you can meet them, would that create value, allowing you to raise prices? If so, how would that affect volume and utilization of manufacturing capacity?
Don’t be afraid to take a step back to get a total picture of your business. You always want to look at things from different vantage points to try to broaden the range of moneymaking options. Apply your common sense. And your business sense. You will be surprised how many good ideas you can generate.
It’s Your Turn
Don’t let what you read become just another intellectual exercise. Be prepared to answer this question:
What are you going to do to help your company’s moneymaking efforts in the next 60 to 90 days?
Let the excitement begin!
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The Art of the Click by Glenn Fisher | Book Summary
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The Art of the Click: How to Harness the Power of Direct-Response Copywriting and Make More Sales by Glenn Fisher
Every business making sales online is engaged in a battle to get customers to click. More clicks equals more sales equals a more successful business.
How do you write copy that will encourage more people to buy from you? How do you persuade customers over the line to make that final buying decision? What is The Art of the Click?
The answer lies in the power of direct-response copywriting.
In this entertaining and highly readable guide, copywriting expert Glenn Fisher boils down over a decade of experience to present a huge array of techniques, tactics and industry secrets to improve your copywriting, get more clicks… and ultimately, get more sales.
You will discover:
— The single thing every great writer must do if they want to improve.
— How anyone can learn to write a headline that will stop all potential customers in their tracks.
— Where to find inspiration and how to feed ideas.
— How you can get a customer physically nodding along with every word you write.
— How to avoid waffle and make your copy more succinct.
— How you can write irresistible offers than no one can refuse.
— And much more!
Pick up The Art of the Click now to improve your copywriting. You’ll soon be wondering how you ever made a sale without it…
All great copywriters start here
All great copywriters start at a swipe file – a file that records a copy you have. A swipe file can contain both good and bad copy. Good copy so you can take inspiration and bad copy so you can avoid making the mistakes. That’s the aim of a swipe file – to inspire and to avoid.
The key to keeping an effective swipe file is not just keeping for the sake of it. Analyze each piece of copy in your file using the insights you’ll learn in this summary.
The importance of rote learning
When it comes to finding successful long copy sales letters, a good resource is affiliate networks like Clickbank and JVZoo. Put it simply, they’re a marketplace for people to sell their goods and in doing so, you’ll find hundreds of good long copy sales letters there. Not all of them are good but you can see from the sales figures which ones are worth looking at.
Understanding your audience
Write with a specific reader in mind. The more specific you can be around this reader, the better your copy will be. In targeting your copy at a specific person you already know, your copy will sound more human, authentic and instantly relatable to a wider audience.
If the product is intended for an older generation, write as if you’re speaking to your granddad. If it’s intended for a younger generation, write as if you’re speaking to your niece.
Doing your research
When researching for a copy project, split your job into two parts.
Part one is the research itself. This is where you read books and look up social media and the Internet. At this part, you’re not really an expert and because you’ve only looked at stuff online, everything is potentially interesting to you. Once you’ve done your part one, you’ve got to go deeper.
In part two, you’re looking into the points of interest you discovered and figure out which of them are already known in the industry and which are genuinely new discoveries. The key is to understand the value of that part one research in bringing you up to speed in the industry you’re writing for.
The importance of good ideas
James Altucher, the author and entrepreneur, argues the brain is like any other muscle and you need to exercise it if you want to grow it. Exercising a brain is as simple as keeping a pen and paper and jot down at least ten ideas every day. They can be completely random, either related to what you’re working on or anything else that pops in your head. This daily ritual keeps your brain active. Think about it for a moment.
If you generate ten ideas a day, you’ll have generated 3,650 ideas by the end of the year. And at least one of them is bound to be great, and hopefully many more besides.
Features versus benefits
If you’re writing copy in an industry you’re not familiar with, don’t just rely on your assumptions. It’s possible to draw out some benefits yourself but you’ll be able to tap into much more interesting and authentic benefits if you speak to people who use the product firsthand. They might even give you the details you wouldn’t have normally thought about. And this tiny detail might just be the thing that really hits home and helps others relate to your product at a deeper level.
Promise, picture, proof and push
The four Ps – promise, picture, proof, push – is pretty universal. The key is to use the four P as a guideline, not as a commandment. Sometimes, to invigorate a piece of copy, you need to break the rules. If you find a copy isn’t hitting the mark, try leading with a picture or a proof, instead of starting with a promise. Assuming the key elements are all still included, mixing up the order of the Ps doesn’t really make a difference.
Urgent, useful, unique and ultra-specific
If you’ve ever stuck with a headline that’s not working as well as you hoped, look at it again with 4U. But you should think about the 4U – urgent, useful, unique and ultra-specific – only after you finish writing the first draft of your copy. Copywriting is ultimately a creative act and creativity is all about finding the strange cave of secrets in your subconscious. One you’ve got the weird and wonderful ideas from your subconscious, that’s when you apply the 4U concept to your copy. Use them to direct, not dictate.
Grabbing and holding the reader’s attention
When writing a long piece of copy such as a blog post or sales letter, you need to create a hook for people to notice. It’s natural for any reader to get distracted no matter how good your copy is.
We live in a world of constant distractions and it’s important to regularly engage your reader. You can do this by breaking up your copy with exclamations such as “Wait! Did you just read that right?” or “What you’ll read next will shock you!”
Alternatively, well-designed images and a series of short, punchy bullet points can also draw the reader’s attention back to your agenda.
Salutations, fellow cop writer
When you write any piece of copy, make sure you start with a salutation in your draft and finish by signing it off, even if it doesn’t have your name at the end.
Doing so reminds you that you’re writing for a human that will be read by a human. Even a basic salutation like Dear John helps remind you to keep things human. This is especially handy because when we hide behind a laptop screen for hours, it’s so easy to get lost in our own head and forget who we’re writing to.
The importance of narrative
When it comes to direct response copywriting, try to write in second person as often as you can. Do so and your copy will be much more compelling for the person reading it. That strange but effective second person viewpoint brings the reader into writing. It makes the reader the hero of the story.
Even if your grammar teacher disagrees, do your best to go with what’s engagingly good, not necessarily what’s grammatically right.
The paradox of testimonials
Embrace the negative testimonials, instead of shying away from them. Providing the product or service you’re writing for is good and you can stand for it, don’t be afraid of using negative feedback in a positive way. Address the concerns they raise and give counter arguments as to why the customer may have not had a good experience. When done successfully, overcoming objections this way can be extremely authentic and compelling.
Making an offer
Present the price in a way that makes it seem more palatable.
Spending $100 on an e-reader may sound like a lot, but if you say “30 pennies a day to read all the books you need”, it instantly sounds more reasonable.
Alternatively, you can transfer the cost to something the customer already knows and takes for granted. Spending $100 for a year of access to expert financial advice might sound expensive, but when you consider it’s less than you’d spend on a cup of coffee each day, it seems a much better value.
If in doubt, cut it out
Ask a couple of friends, families, coworkers to review your writing. The key is to have a group of people who can openly criticize you and won’t be offended by any disagreement you might have. Honesty is essential. If you haven’t got a peer group yet, try to cultivate one as soon as you can. It’ll make you a much better copywriter.
Time management tips for writing copy
When you learn your content isn’t working, before you throw it away… stop and think. Despite the initial failure, you have something black and white on your hands. You know the copy doesn’t work but the problem could be one of these three things:
- People aren’t just interested in the idea.
- It’s the wrong time for the idea.
- People don’t understand the idea.
If people aren’t interested in the idea, you’ll only waste your time tweaking something that’s fundamentally broken. If it’s not the right time, again you’ll only waste your time convincing the time is right. In both cases, set your copy aside and make a note to revisit when the situation changes. The good news is if people don’t understand the idea, you can try a different headline that more explicitly expresses the idea. If you don’t see any improvements, chances are that people are not getting it and now you can spend more time rewriting your idea so people do.
Sell or share?
Sure, copywriting is sometimes a lonely game. But as much as you want to picture the cliched image of a lonesome writer in their ivory tower, a good copy is never the product of a single person.
A good copy is a collaborative effort that represents a multitude of experiences and mindsets.
So next time you lock yourself away with your laptop, think about it. Avoid the restrictive nature of working alone and find ways to bring others into your work. Be open to ideas and share yours too. You’ll be almost guaranteed for a stronger copy.
The Only Skill That Matters by Jonathan Levi | Book Summary
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The Only Skill that Matters: The Proven Methodology to Read Faster, Remember More, and Become a SuperLearner
by Jonathan Levi
In the next ten years, every knowledge worker on earth will become one of two things: invaluable or obsolete. No matter the industry, the pace of progress and new information is faster today than ever before in human history—and it’s accelerating exponentially.
In this new reality, how can we possibly hope to keep up? How can we learn, unlearn, and relearn fast enough to stay relevant in the world to come?
In The Only Skill That Matters, Jonathan Levi unveils a powerful, neuroscience-based approach to reading faster, remembering more, and learning more effectively. You’ll master the ancient techniques being used by world record holders and competitive memory athletes to unlock the incredible capacity of the human brain. You’ll learn to double or triple your reading speed, enhance your focus, and optimize your cognitive performance. Most importantly, you’ll be empowered to confidently approach any subject—from technical skills, to names and faces, to foreign languages, and even speeches—and learn it with ease.
The Explosion of Information Overload
Whereas it used to be only doctors and programmers who struggled to keep up with the pace of their field, today, it’s almost everybody. Marketing managers who aren’t caught up on all the latest consumer psychology research. Sales professionals who haven’t learned the latest features of their software of choice. Professionals in every industry who want to take their career to the next level but are struggling to keep up with the work they already have—much less make time for leisure learning.
Fortunately, there’s a better way. A way to not only choose the right things to learn, but to absorb them with relative ease—and actually remember them! Fortunately, you can become a super learner.
The Only Skill That Matters
‘Learning’ is the only skill that matters. After all, if you can learn effectively, you can learn—or become—anything you want. With these skills, you can go from being a depressed social outcast to a happy and successful entrepreneur. You can go from being a struggling young professional to a leader in the company of your dreams. Most of all, you can go from wherever you are today to wherever it is you aspire to go. And that’s why, now, it’s your turn to learn
Learn like a Caveman
You see, the types of information that gave our Paleolithic ancestors a survival advantage didn’t come from textbooks or Bible verses. It was olfactory, gustatory, and visual information—in other words, smell, taste, and sight.
The most innovative schools, from the established Montessori to the new-age MUSE, know this and have modeled themselves accordingly. Students in these schools don’t learn geometry from a textbook; they learn it by building real structures and observing real phenomena. They don’t study biology by listening to a teacher drone on; they learn it by cultivating gardens that feed the entire school. Fortunately, it is not too late for you to claim your birthright as a super learner. You just need to return to the basics. To learn like a caveman. But first, let’s examine what it actually takes for your brain to learn something.
10X Your Memory: The Power of Visualization
If you want to improve your memory tenfold, create novel visualizations, called “markers,” for everything you wish to remember. As a general rule, the markers you come up with should abide by the following rules.
Rule #1 Create Highly Detailed Visualizations
First, picture as much detail as possible. By creating a high level of detail, you ensure that you are adequately visualizing a vivid, memorable image in your mind’s eye.
Rule #2 Opt for the “Out There”
Next, wherever possible, your visualizations should include absurd, bizarre, violent, or sexual imagery. Though it might make you blush, the truth is, our brains crave the novel.
Rule #3 Leverage Your Existing Knowledge
The next important principle in developing our visual markers comes from our dear old friend Dr. Knowles. Wherever possible, you should make use of images, ideas, or memories you already have.
Rule #4 Connect It Back
Finally, it’s important that as you create visualizations, you also create logical connections to what you’re trying to remember. Obviously, a visual marker is no good if you can’t remember what it stands for.
For example: instead of trying to memorize the word caber, or “to fit” in Spanish, we can come up with a visualization of a taxi cab trying to fit a bear inside.
This is an example of a truly perfect marker. First, it has the sounds: “cab” and “bear,” which allows us to work our way back to the sound of the word. Second, it’s ridiculous! If you saw a bear hanging out of the window of a taxi cab, you’d remember it—wouldn’t you? Finally, what’s so clever about this marker is that it has the meaning, “to fit,” baked right in.
Never Forget Again: The Power of Spaced Repetition
Spacing effect states that things become infinitely more memorable if we repeatedly encounter them. You should also meet its supportive cousin, the lag effect. It states that the spacing effect is compounded when encounters are spaced out for extended periods of time. Learning something once, no matter how well you do it, just isn’t enough. In his early work, Herman Ebbinghaus found that there were tremendous benefits to continued review—even if he believed he “knew” the material. He called this technique overlearning, and it’s an essential part of creating memories that stick. Fortunately, there’s a smart way to do this—a way that minimizes wasted time and cuts things down to the minimum effective dose.
Today, there are a range of spaced repetition systems (SRS) out there. These include the completely free Anki, the former memory champion Ed Cooke’s Memrise, and even new upstarts, such as Brainscape.
The idea behind digital SRSs is quite simple. Create flashcards—or download someone else’s—complete with audio, video, pictures, and text. Then, start reviewing. For each piece of information, tell the software how difficult it was to answer, on a scale of one to four. The algorithm then considers your answers and reaction times and predicts when you’re likely to forget that card. If you answer “easy” within a few seconds, you’re unlikely to see that flashcard again for weeks—or months! If you struggle before admitting defeat, the flashcard will come up again during that study session. In fact, you’ll see it again and again, until it’s easy. Then, it will come up again tomorrow, and the day after that, until you can consistently answer quickly and confidently.
The end result is a whittling down of the amount of review necessary to learn large amounts of information. This allows you to either save time, if the amount of information you need to learn is fixed, or to pile on new information sooner.
Use Both Visualization AND Spaced Repetition
Visual mnemonics are not enough without spaced repetition. Well, it turns out, the converse is also true. Always create visual markers—even if you don’t add pictures to your flashcards. Where appropriate, remember to place those markers into a memory palace. This will supercharge your spaced repetition and save you even more review time.
Priming Your Brain: The Power of Pre-Reading
The skill we call pre-reading is actually two processes in one: Surveying and Questioning
Pre-Reading: Surveying the Situation
When we pre-read a text, we’re essentially skimming. But not your normal type of skimming. Instead, we’re spending a couple of seconds per page, skimming at a speed of about five to eight times our current reading speed. We are not reading the text—or even trying to. Instead, we’re looking for titles, subheadings, proper nouns, numbers, words, or anything that doesn’t seem to fit in. When we pre-read, we gain an understanding of the structure of the text, and we build a sort of mental map. If there are cutaways, or terms that jump out at us as unfamiliar, we stop our pre-reading and gain a better understanding before resuming.
This means that when you actually read the text, all you have to do is fill in the rest of the details. This skill takes time to fully develop, but it’s a pivotal one in speed-reading—or reading in general. Practice it diligently, and it will make you a much more effective and focused reader.
Pre-Reading: Question Everything
How will I use this information? As you pre-read the text and begin to get a feel for its contents, try to envision scenarios in which it could affect your life. Imagine how you could benefit from having that knowledge. How could you use this knowledge in your day-to-day life? Who are some people in your life with whom you could share it? When might it be useful for sparking up a conversation? It sounds basic, but simply giving your brain this “why” is often the difference between intently focusing and feeling your eyes glaze over.
Check Yourself
Dr. Malcolm Knowles, adults learn much more effectively when we have an immediate application and a pressing need for whatever it is we’re learning. This, more than the actual format of the test, is probably why studies show testing to be such a boon to learning. After all, as the saying goes, “Learning is not a spectator sport.” So why not develop our own “tests” in ways that are fast, fun, and effective.
Let’s say you’re learning a musical instrument, and you wish to improve by a certain amount. You could always hire a private tutor to “test” your knowledge of the piano. But in reality, this will be much less rigorous than a form of testing that requires analysis, critical thinking, or even your own creation. What if you instead committed to testing your skills by learning a friend’s favorite song for their birthday? Better yet, what if you committed to composing an original piece for them? Now that would be a powerful test of everything you’ve learned, from key signatures to tempo, and it’s bound to be more rewarding than some boring online quiz.
Done this way, “testing” yourself can not only be fast but also fun. It need not feel like a waste of time; it can be practical and useful. Sure, subjecting yourself to a more traditional form of testing is certainly advisable and is definitely worth doing, if you can bear it. With that said, to truly become a super learner, you need to take a broader view of what “testing” means.
Marketing Rebellion by Mark Schaefer | Book Summary
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Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company by Mark Schaefer
“Marketing Rebellion” is a wake-up call. Now that our customers have the accumulated knowledge of the human race in the palm of their hands, they expect something more from us. They don’t want to be interrupted, spammed, or intercepted. They need us to come alongside them at their point of need.
This book helps you tune-in to the new world of consumer realities and offers inspiring, actionable steps for your business to connect to customers in meaningful ways. Backed by extensive research and expert interviews, “Marketing Rebellion” started a movement in truly human-centric business practices.. Highlights include:
- How cataclysmic consumer trends are a predictable result of a revolution that started 100 years ago.
- Why businesses must be built on human impressions instead of advertising impressions.
- The five constant human truths at the heart of successful marketing strategy.
- Why customer loyalty is dying and what you need to do about it right now
- How to help your best customers do the marketing for you.
- Actionable steps to provide an immediate course-correction for businesses of any size.
Through new research, singular insights, and inspiring case studies, this entertaining book challenges your view of what it means to be a marketer today and provides an innovative blueprint for business growth. The Marketing Rebellion is knocking at your door. Are you ready?
The rise of the marketing rebellion
Modern marketing consistently sees the trend in consumer resistance against the marketers. Take for example. People are developing algorithms (such as Adblock and pop-up blockers) to stop marketing messages from getting through. This in turn encourages the marketers to come up with even more sophisticated methods to deliver their messages across. The result is a war that never ends and no common ground in the end.
Meet the Human-Centered Marketing (HCM)
Human-centered marketing requires empathy because it puts customers experience at the center of all marketing and sales efforts. It begins with understanding customers perspective, desires, and motivations so the marketers are relating to them as humans and not objects they’re trying convert.
Under human-centered marketing, every marketing endeavor must touch at least one of the five innate human needs:
- Belong
- Be Respected
- Be Loved
- Protect their self-interest
- Find meaning in their lives
A community is a byproduct of brands paying attention to people.
People want to find meaning in their lives.
If your brand shows integrity and consistency in standing up for what it believes in, your customers will not only stay loyal to you, they will also bring you more people with the same set of beliefs.
Take Nike for example. In 2018, Nike ran a campaign featuring Kaepernick. Nike ran the numbers, knew there was going to be a backlash and that it had to take a stand anyway for what it believes in. In the following day of its controversial campaign, Nike valuation dropped whopping $4 billion. However, seven days after the initial loss, Nike ended up with $3 billion valuation more than where it started.
Culture is driven from the top.
There’s no such thing as a grassroots organizational change. As an organization leader, the new human-centred marketing starts with you. So, be willing to roll up your sleeves, get out there and get your hands dirty. Once you’re committed to understanding the needs and concerns of your customers, it’s a matter of time everyone at your organization follows your steps.
Companies are judged so strongly along the lines of warmth and confidence.
‘Warmth’ and ‘confidence’ factors alone account for half of all purchase intents, brand loyalty and likelihood to recommend the brand. Take for example – Pepsi thought that the new generation were not searching for a new beverage, they were looking for a new place to belong. And so Pepsi designed their marketing messages to instill a sense of fun and warmth into the young consumers.
3 myths of customer loyalty
- Customer wants to have relationship with brand.
- Customer engagement builds relationship.
- The more interactions with the customer, the loyal the customers are.
The truths are:
- 77% of consumers don’t want a relationship. They want discounts.
- Customer engagement does not build relationship. Customers are already suffering from information overload.
- There’s no correlation between the number of interactions and the customer loyalty.
Marketing Myopia
Train companies used to think that they were in the railroad business until they were quickly overwhelmed by cars, trucks and the new highway system. Unfortunately, it’s too late. Most train companies were already irrelevant when finally learned to see beyond their vertical. Had they seen that they are in the transport business, they could have seized the opportunities that the automobiles presented.
This phenomenon is known as ‘marketing myopia’ – a nearsighted focus on selling products and services, rather than seeing the “big picture” of what consumers really want.
Anyone can generate customer buzz with some efforts.
- Customers delight is at its highest peak right when they bought it.
- Customers trust other customers’ product photos than the brand or retailer photos.
- Customers are more likely to engage a brand when it’s easy to find.
What does this mean for you?
- Encourage customers to share their delight at peak moment.
- Encourage customers to share brand photos. For instance, ask your new customers to film their first day with their new vehicles or their first impressions of their cosmetics.
- Meet where your consumerist are. Take for example – social media has made it effortless for brands to interact with their customers, without costing a dime.
3 Steps to Word-of-Mouth Marketing
- Through insight and research, establish the stories about your band that are authentic, interesting, relevant and repeatable.
- Connect those stories to audiences who will share your stories organically as opportunities arise.
- Build an environment for people to share in face-to-face settings.
4 Ways to Enable Peer Observation
- Use distinctive branding. A notable identity can help us distinguish what product is being used. (example – Apple earbuds, Guiness beer)
- Appeal to groups. Group discounts can win the group and reinforce the purchasing decision is accepted by friends.
- Expose normally invisible customer behaviors to peers. On websites, adding counts and statistics of how many people are buying increase both sales and the price the customer are willing to pay.
- Build peer observation into product launches.
3 Characteristics of Elevated Moments
- Turn up the volume on sensory appeal. Things that taste better, look better, sound better or feel better usually are better.
- Raise the stakes. Add an element of productive pressure, such as competition, game, performance, deadline or public commitment. We feel most comfortable when things are certain. But we feel most alive when they are not.
- Break the script and violate expectations about the experience. If they’re taking pictures, that must be special.
Build Psychological Ownership
- Enhance control by allowing customers to have a hand in designing and making the product. (example: a T-shirt company can have the customers design and vote for the best, then selects the best design and reward the winner).
- Encourage investment of self by making products customizable. (example: Coca-Cola let the soda fans create their names on Coca-Cola cans).
- Offer intimate knowledge of the product to make customers feel like insiders. (example: Star war fans are notorious for their psychological ownership of the film franchise they know intimately).
“Social media is not a place people like to be marketed to. Brands should aim to organically join in the social sector with the human voice.”
Sadly, this is not the reality today. Most businesses still hold an outdated focus on me-centric posts, random acts of content and misguided attempts to manufacture engagement.
15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy by Luminita D. Saviuc | Book Summary
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15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy: An Inspiring Guide to Discovering Effortless Joy
by Luminita D. Saviuc
Based on a phenomenally popular blog post, a simple and counterintuitive approach to finding true joy
When Luminita Saviuc, founder the PurposeFairy blog, posteda list of things to let go in order to be happy, she had no idea that it would go viral, shared more than 1.2 million times and counting. Based on that inspiring post, this heartfelt book gives readers permission to give up–that is, to let go of the bad habits that are holding them back from achieving authentic happiness and living their best lives. Lessons include-
Give Up the Past
Give Up Your Limiting Beliefs
Give Up Blaming Others
Give Up the Need to Always Be Right
Give Up Labels
Give Up Attachment
Give up the PAST
Your past doesn’t have to equal your future, unless you want it to.
If you cling to the past and keep on using it as an excuse for not moving on with your life, then yes, your future will be very similar to your past. On the other hand, if you give up the past and allow yourself to be present and engaged in your day-to-day life, while at the same time having a clear vision of what you want your future to look like, then your future will be nothing like your past. It’s all up to you. You have the power to decide. The future of your life is in your hands
Give up your FEARS
You can’t hold on to fear and expect to feel loved.
If you want to be happy, if you want to experience the many wonders of life, and if you want to feel what it really feels like to be fully alive, you have to let go of fear. You have to tear down all the walls you have built between you and the world around you and you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable. You have to allow yourself to be fully seen. You can’t serve two masters. You have to choose one—fear or love—and based on the one you choose your life will either be happy or unhappy
Give up your LIMITING BELIEFS
Beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies.
They shape our reality, they make us who we are. And if we really want to create a better life for ourselves and for those we love, we have to make sure that the beliefs we hold on to are serving us well and that they aren’t sabotaging our happiness, health and well-being.
Give up your EXCUSES
A lot of times we limit ourselves because of the many excuses we use.
Instead of growing and working on improving ourselves and our lives, we get stuck, lying to ourselves, using all kinds of excuses—excuses that 99.9 percent of the time are not even real.
When you’ve lived most of your life in an environment where excuses were part of your everyday existence and where most people perceived themselves as victims of their circumstances, it can be quite challenging not to perceive your excuses, fears and limitations as truths. But you have to be willing to let go of your excuses if you want to create something new, something fresh and something better
Give up your RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing.
Life is meant to be fully experienced, with good and bad, with both ups and downs, and the more you try to keep life from happening by resisting and fighting change, the more you will continue to suffer and the unhappier your life will get.
Change is a natural process. You can’t run away from it, just as you can’t run away from life. And if you try, you’ll miss out on life and you’ll miss out on the great opportunity to know yourself, to be yourself and to love yourself.
Give up BLAMING
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own.
You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, the president. There is no peace in pointing the finger and making others responsible for how you feel and for what your life looks like. There is no peace in giving your power away to forces outside of yourself and making them responsible for the quality of your life. There is no peace in putting your life in other people’s hands and expecting them to live it for you.
If you continue to blame outside circumstances for the way you feel and if you continue to put your life in the hands of other people, you will continue to be at the mercy of other people and you will continue to be a victim of your circumstances.
Give up COMPLAINING
Complaining not only ruins everybody else’s day, it ruins the complainer’s day, too.
Complaining, just like blaming and criticizing, sucks us dry. It keeps us in dark places, and it continues to feed this false idea that our lives will never get better until outside circumstances start to change. But the truth is that it’s not the outside world that determines how we feel on the inside, but rather how we feel on the inside that determines how we perceive the outside world.
Give up CRITICISING
Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
People grow together with love and appreciation, not blame, judgment and criticism. Relationships flourish when there’s respect, understanding and support between the people involved, and they perish when those things are missing.
Our job is not to criticize what others are doing. Our job is to focus our energy on healing, accepting, loving and embracing all that we are. Because the moment we make peace with ourselves, we also make peace with all those things, people, places and experiences that once caused us to feel hurt, unloved and neglected
Give up LIVING TO OTHERS’ EXPECTATIONS
Life needs you to be YOU—the unique being that you were born to be, nothing less.
It’s true that our families, friends and the many people around us expect a lot of things from us, but it’s also true that we have our own heart to please and our own life’s purpose to fulfill. And if we waste our lives trying to be whatever everyone expects us to be, we can no longer honor the relationship we have with our own heart and soul, with our inner divinity, and we can no longer fulfill our own destiny.
Give up SELF-DEFEATING TALKS
You and I are not what we eat; we are what we think. —WALTER ANDERSON
A toxic mind has the power to create a toxic life. It has the power to sabotage our happiness, our relationships and our lives, and it has the power to constantly re-create the same painful experiences, either in the same places with the same people, or with completely different people and in completely different places.
It all starts with you. It starts with how you think about yourself, with how you talk to, and about, yourself, and with how you expect to be treated by those around you and by life itself. And once you give up your self-defeating self-talk, once you purify your own thoughts and your heart, the world around you miraculously gets purified as well.
Give up CONTROL
Our lives aren’t meant to be difficult, but we make them so by constantly doubting ourselves and interfering with the natural flow of life.
Life knows a lot more than we do, because life is a lot wiser than we are. And even though our minds might try to convince us that we need to control everything and everyone, and we need to make sure that things always go our own way, the truth of the matter is that life is meant to be lived, not controlled; people are meant to be loved, not controlled; feelings are meant to be felt, not controlled. And by giving up control and allowing life to guide us, we will be able to experience, understand and know this truth.
Give up THE NEED TO ALWAYS BE RIGHT
Don’t let your ego get in the way.
There is nothing healthy in arguing with someone over who is right and who is wrong. There is nothing healthy in damaging the quality of our relationships and causing a great deal of stress and suffering for ourselves and for others, just so we can be right and label the other person wrong.
Arguing with people over who is right and who is wrong is nothing but a waste of time and energy. Life isn’t about doing things that make sense and feel right for others. Life is about doing things that feel right and make sense for us, and allowing others to do the same for themselves.
Give up THE NEED TO IMPRESS
You already are enough.
We live in a world that teaches us to look for external love and approval—a world that teaches us that in order for us to feel truly happy, we have to please those around us by behaving in certain ways, and by surrounding ourselves with all kinds of expensive and shiny things. As a result, “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like,” as Dave Ramsey has so aptly observed.
Your job here on earth is not to spend your life impressing those around you. Your job is to be yourself, authentically and unapologetically, to live your life in a way that makes sense for you—to love yourself and honor yourself more than you care about impressing those around you.
Give up LABELS
Once you label me you negate me. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD
It’s true that we live in a world where labels need to be used so that we won’t have chaos and madness present all around us. And it’s true that many of the labels we use are meant to help us manage and guide our conduct, to navigate the many decisions we have to make and to contribute to a clear and healthy communication between us. But it’s also true that labels are often meant to divide us from one another, creating a false sense of separation between us, causing us to perceive some people as being more important and more valuable than others.
We are all in this together. This planet belongs to all of us, and there isn’t one human being on this earth who is more deserving than another.
Give up ATTACHMENT
Learning to live is learning to let go.
When you hold on too tightly to everything and everyone, when you desperately try to cling to things, people, places and experiences, you take the life out of them and you keep life from taking you where you need to go. Everything in life changes. Nothing stays the same. And the more you try to cling to things, desperately trying to control and change the natural course of life, the more you will suffer and the unhappier your life will get.
