Notes & Quotes: Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

The following are my favorite quotes from Derek Sivers' Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur:

1. These are my philosophies from the ten years I spent starting and growing a small business. Business is not about money, it's about making dreams come true for others and for yourself. Making a company is a great way to improve the world while improving yourself. When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world. Never do anything just for the money. Don't pursue business just for your own gain. Only answer the calls for help. Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what's not working. Your business plan is moot. You don't know what people really want until you start doing it. Starting with no money is an advantage. You don't need money to start helping people. You can't please everyone, so proudly exclude people.
2. Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business. The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.
   
3. Don't waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response.
4. If you're not saying, "Hell yeah!" about something, say no. When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than "Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!" then say no.
5. Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision--even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone--according to what's best for your customers. If you're even unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, "How can I best help you now?" Then focus on satisfying those requests.
   
6. It's a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.
7. Please don't think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.
8. Never forget why you're really doing what you're doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn't that enough?
9. How do you grade yourself? It's important to know in advance, to make sure you're staying focused on what's honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should.
10. Any business that's in business to sell you a cure is motivated not to focus on prevention.
11. The Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you'll do well.
12. There's a benefit to being naive about the norms of the world--deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.
13. There's a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left. 
14. Make sure you know what makes you happy, and don't forget it. 
15. Whatever you make, it's your creation, so make it your personal dream come true.

Tomorrow Never Comes

If you're anything like me, there have been times when we've set a date for sometime in the future when we're finally going to do x, y, or z. 

• "I'm going to get in shape." 
• "I'm going to start eating healthy." 
• "I'm going to start watching my alcohol consumption." 
• "I'm going to start saving money."

Often, for me anyway, that date comes and goes and I'm stuck in the same position (or worse) without making any significant progress toward creating the life that I seek for myself.

The problem with setting future dates is that it gives us satisfaction that we did some sort of work. "Look, I created these goals." The reality is that tomorrow is going to be just like today if we don't do something about it. There's no magical switch that we can flip so that our vision becomes a reality. It's not going to make a difference that December 31st becomes January 1st.

Additionally, we need to stop waiting for somebody or something to come and save us. The only person that can save us is ourselves. The world-at-large is simply too busy living their own life to give a damn. We got ourselves into this situation and we're the only ones with the power and responsibility to fix it.

If it's truly important to us, we must start now. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Identify the smallest possible step and act on it immediately. Build upon it over and over again. Day in and day out. It's the only way. When we fall off the horse, we don't beat ourselves up. We accept it and move on. We learn. We do better next time.

Our best selves and the life we were meant to live is waiting for us. We have to stop wasting time and execute. Right now!

Notes & Quotes: Secular Buddhism by Noah Rasheta

The following are my favorite quotes from Noah Rasheta's Secular Buddhism: Eastern Thought for Western Minds.

1. "The secret of Buddhism is to remove all ideas, all concepts, in order for the truth to have a chance to penetrate, to reveal itself." Thich Nhat Hanh
2. The essence of Buddhism is to discover that there are two realities: reality the way it is and reality the way we think it is.
3. There isn't room for new awareness or understanding in a mind already filled with ideas and beliefs.
4. We humans have a tendency to want to search for answers to questions that are frankly irrelevant. 
5. Spirituality is really just a combination of two things: connection and meaning.
6. When we seek connection and meaning, we're on a spiritual path.
7. "Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true." Daniel Kahneman
8. The anger we feel around a situation has nothing to do with the situation itself, and everything to do with the story we tell ourselves about it.
9. Victor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and the author of Man's Search for Meaning, talks about how there is a space between the stimulus and our response, and in that space we have the freedom to act. This is the sense of freedom that is important on the spiritual path. There is no freedom in reactivity.
10. From the Buddhist perspective, faith is simply the attitude of being open to whatever may be, and not attaching to an idea or belief of how we want or expect things to be.
11. As Koyo Kubose likes to say: "Wisdom is nothing more than the attitude of adaptability."
12. The Four Noble Truths:
1. There is suffering.
2. The cause of suffering.
3. The cessation of suffering.
4. The path to end suffering.
13. This is the cause of suffering: suffering emerges when we want life to be other than it is.
14. Wanting to change others is wanting for life to be other than it is, which is the very definition of suffering. 
15. Letting go is an act of liberation rather than a sacrifice.
16. The Eightfold Path:
1. Wise understanding.
2. Wise intent.
3. Wise speech.
4. Wise action.
5. Wise livelihood.
6. Wise effort.
7. Wise mindfulness.
8. Wise concentration.
17. Buddhism if often referred to as a practice because you're always practicing to be a better whatever you already are. The Eightfold Path can serve as a guideline for the specific areas of our lives where we can focus on becoming better versions of ourselves.
18. The water in a river is continually flowing and changing, so it's always a new river. The fire from a candle is continually flickering and burning more fuel, so therefore it's constantly a new fire. Life is constantly changing from moment to moment. All things are constantly changing and evolving...all things are impermanent.
19. The understanding of emptiness is that all things are empty of meaning until we assign meaning to those things.
20. This is emptiness. It's the understanding that as life unfolds, it doesn't mean anything...and that's not a positive or a negative thing (who knows what is good and what is bad). All things are simply as they are.
21. "It's not happiness that makes us grateful; it's gratefulness that makes us happy." Brother David Steindl-rast
22. Simply stated, karma is the law of cause and effect within a system of interdependence.
23. In this incredible vastness of space and time, at some point, you and I came into existence. Through absolutely no effort on our part, we each suddenly became alive and conscious.
24. From the Buddhist perspective, birth and death are not the beginning and end of life. Death is simply the culmination of the phase that started with birth but the overall process of life started long before and will continue long after our individual birth and death.
25. There is no need to fear death because while death may be the end of the song, it is not the end of the music.
26. What is there about us that is permanent? There is nothing. When the building blocks of our identity are removed, what do we have left? We have an empty person that we do not know. We've been living with ourselves, like a stranger for a roommate that we've never actually met.
27. We can begin here and now to make life meaningful by understanding that meaning isn't out there waiting to be found, it's in you, waiting to be created.
28. Buddhism teaches us that there is no need for regret. The present moment is the result of the past and it can't be changed. We only experience regret when we compare the present moment as it is to how we think the present moment should be.
29. Of all the goals we an aspire to be, we serve ourselves and the world best when we aspire to discover and become exactly who we are.
30. One of the most difficult and dangerous ways that suffering shows up is in the labels and titles we add to ourselves...The thing is, labels never define the reality of ourselves, because they represent who we think we are, not who we actually are.
31. When we learn to look in we awaken to one of the key teachings found in Buddhism: that we are already perfect. We always have been.
32. Try removing the ideas and concepts you have about people and situations in your life and see what happens. Perhaps you will suddenly see something that was there all along but you were blind to it all this time This is what it means to be awake, to be capable of seeing ourselves and others as we see the clouds--perfect shapes that are constantly changing and interdependent with their environment.