This whole pdf is full of gems:

http://www.leadingedgegroup.com/assets/uploads/The-Toyota-Way-by-John-Shook.pdf

Skim if you're in a hurry; just the illustrations and charts have a lot of value in them.

My latest moment of "Try Harder Isn't The Answer" was after my first in-the-gym workout in a couple months. I've been training with bodyweight nearly every day, but today was the first time I got into the gym and got in squat, bench, deadlift.

The workout was rather brutal. I over-did it. (That's not humblebragging, I like, stupidly overdid it. I'll be more sore tomorrow than I need to be. I wasn't paying enough attention and should've started lower.)

Combine this with two new protocols -- multi-purpose clothing that can function for business casual or fitness meant I had on a long-sleeve shirt, long pants, and boots for more heat than normal, and training at a more rapid pace for metabolic development...

...and I get out of the gym nearly about to keel over and throw up.

Well, good enough.

It makes your life infinitely simpler if you don't renegotiate with yourself when it's time to do something.

"Ohhhh, I don't want to go to running, it's raiiiinning out..." --

how many thought cycles does that burn?

Does anything useful ever come out of that conversation with yourself, when you're debating if you'll do the right thing or not?

A short phrase that's useful:

There's a whole host of problems that, if unnoticed, do not hurt.

As soon as you become aware of them, you start to hurt.

Therein lies a problem.

The human mind seems to be pretty bad at going all the way back to root causes.

We focus on the proximate cause of problems.

High-ROI-activities that other skilled marketers aren’t doing — that you can and should do

by Scott Britton, as told to Sebastian Marshall

I got into marketing strategy by accident.

I’d been a business development and sales guy and I wanted to start teaching those skills because I loved it. Once I started putting the content online in the form of videos, blog posts, and courses, I wanted the people who’d benefit most to all see it.

In order to do that, I realized I needed to be a good marketer.

One of the unfortunate aspects of travel is when basic customs and practices are done very slightly differently, causing you to make a significant mistake.

One of the first that new travelers to Asia experience is that ATM machines don't always automatically release your debit card when you withdraw money. You have to press a button on the screen afterwards that says "Finished" or "Eject Card."

Many Americans -- where the ATM machines almost always spit out your card automatically before your cash -- forget to hit "Finished," and leave their card in the machine. Sometimes multiple times. It's a big hassle.

I adopted a rule to avoid this. I keep my wallet in my hand until I get my debit card back, or if I'm paying at a store, until my credit card is handed back to me.

My wallet won't go back into my pocket until the card is in it.

Salij MacNeacail, who is very smart, kicked off a good discussion on the comments of an old post, "The Philosophical Disposition vs. The Results Disposition."

You might find the whole discussion interesting and worth reading; there are a lot of good points in there.

One part that was flattering and made me write out my current conception of strategy was this,

I thought of the following while walking just now: one of the reasons I appreciate/value your blog so much, is that you don't divorce theory from practice... Effective strategy is a happy marriage between theory and practice, or between philosophy and action...

I've gotten tremendous gains out of breaking actions that are easy to fail into multiple steps so I know exactly where things worked or didn't.

The one I've written about before is in regards to healthy eating. I split "Eat Healthy" on my Lights Spreadsheet into two things I try to do in a day:

1. Eat Healthy -- Plan2. Eat Healthy -- Execute

In my experience, there's a tremendous difference between eating junk food as a result of no plan to eat healthy vs. a failure of execution and followthrough when you have a plan.

The vast majority of the times I've eaten poorly, it's been a result of not having a plan for where to get easy, fast, convenient good food. Transit days, the restaurant is closed, there's nothing in the refrigerator, or whatever else.

Counterintuitive but true —

Do you know that feeling where you can't fall asleep and it's really aggravating?

I've found that has zero correlation with next-day's success.

Laying down in bed, unable to sleep for whatever reason — this means I've already decided, ok, I'm done for the day. The inability to fall asleep, imperative as it seems at the time, is totally irrelevant and doesn't matter. Apparently lying there in bed is good enough for resting/recharging; the next goes well.

The flipside is that going to bed later than my scheduled times correlates really well with the next day going more poorly than normal.

If you're mulling over ideas and ethics, trying to decide what's right for your life, trying to think over conduct and actions...

...you might get to the point where you think, "Everyone's going to think I'm crazy, but..."

Here is a question I've found that helps with that:

What will people think, three generations hence?

I used to kind of think the opinions of others don't matter. There's lots of quotes from talented performers that say that.