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How to Live Life to the Fullest Through Personal Growth
Note: This is a guest post from Mark Foo of 77 Success Traits
“The beauty of empowering others is that your own power is not diminished in the process,” said Barbara Coloroso. This is an idea that has held true throughout much of my experience. In fact, empowering other people puts out the positive vibes into the atmosphere that will be returned to you, not in any sort of karmic sense necessarily, but in terms of improving your own sense of self-awareness and confidence. This can be achieved in a number of little ways that can range from simply boosting someone else’s mood to helping them realize new aspects of their personalities. We are all in this life together, and helping others achieve their goals can get our own on track.
The following are 50 little things you can do to empower other people and get started down this path.
1. Give out compliments that you mean. Most people can see straight through a phony compliment, but if you think your friend looks especially nice today with that new hairstyle, tell her so. Just be open and direct in your interactions.
2. Speak and act with honesty. If you always speak with integrity and believe in your own words and actions, others will also pick up on this and mimic it, fostering an atmosphere of trust.
Note: This is a guest post from Scott Young of Learning on Steroids
We’ve been taught how to study, but not how to learn.
That’s the only conclusion I can draw when I watch otherwise intelligent people spend hours cramming for exams, while failing to understand the material being taught.
Studying tends to focus on repetition. If you study a formula enough times, it will magically glue itself in your head. The more you repeat, the better you remember.
Learning isn’t just about repetition, it’s about making connections. Simply staring at the same formula a dozen times isn’t learning, even though we’ve been told it qualifies as studying. Learning a formula means understand what its components are, reviewing the proof or relating it to similar formulas.
Instead of trying to memorize by rote, you should be learning by connections.
There’s an interesting talk at TED by Stefan Sagmeister titled The Power of Time Off. In the talk, Sagmeister shared his experience of how he takes one full year off every seven years to recharge his creative life. During the sabbatical year, he closes his design company and doesn’t accept any design request. It might seem strange to take one full year for sabbatical, but he argued that it gives him more than what it costs.
There are at least three things he gets from his sabbatical years:
- He gets fresh ideas for his creative work. Referring to one sabbatical year of his, he said that all the ideas in the following seven years came out from that one year.
- It benefits him financially. Though he didn’t accept any request for one year, the improved quality of his work allowed him to ask for higher prices in the following years. He could eventually make more money than what he lost.
- It made his work a calling again. This is my favorite of the three. In the talk, Sagmeister talked about three levels of work: job (when you do your work just for money), career (when you pursue advancement and promotion), and calling (when you do your work simply because it’s fulfilling). Even if your work is something you love to do, the daily routine could make it a job. Sagmeister said that taking a sabbatical year makes his work a calling again.
Note: This is a guest post from Mark Harrison of Effortless Abundance
First – a sweeping statement. Everyone wants success and happiness. We might not agree about what this means – each of us defines ‘success’ and ‘happiness’ in a different way – but everyone aspires to these things. Yet for so many people, happiness and success are elusive, and we can spend a great deal of time looking for the answers.
For many years I was an avid collector of ‘self improvement’ books – I have several hundred in my collection – and yet, however many I read and enjoyed, I never seemed to get closer to finding what I was looking for. I was looking in the wrong place, of course. I was looking outside when the key was within me all along.
There is nothing wrong with self-help books: they can be entertaining, inspiring and challenging. But they cannot change you. What changes you is the realization that you are in control.
I always like to extract life lessons from seemingly unrelated ideas. This time I want to discuss an interesting article titled Why Poor Countries Are Poor. The article, which talks about the reasons some countries are poor, takes Cameroon as an example:
The average Cameroonian is eight times poorer than the average citizen of the world and almost 50 times poorer than the typical American. And Cameroon is getting poorer.
To grasp the situation better, look at the infrastructure there:
Douala, a city of 2 million people, has no real roads… Piles of rubble and vast holes mark unfinished construction or demolition work. Along the middle is a strip of potholes that 20 years ago was a road… As our car slowly bumped and lurched through the crowds, I tried to make sense of it all by asking Sam, the driver, about the country. “Sam, how long was it since the roads were last fixed?” “The roads, they have not been fixed for 19 years.”
19 years? How could that happen? Remember, Douala is a major city. Didn’t the people complain about it?
Note: This is a guest post from Thanh Lu of www.thanhdlu.com
You always hear that relationship is the basis for long term personal and business success. “Care” is the only strategy you need to connect and establish a great relationship that is based on trust and friendship. In Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People, getting people to like you and having genuine relationships with other people is the essence to a good quality of life. There are numerous reminders to nurture relationship and make the other person feel appreciated. I always wondered what that meant – how do you translate that into actions? How do you really translate that into real actions to be equivalent to creating a bond with another person? Abstract goals need to be measurable in real actions.
Below are 9 actions to build relationships with others:
