4 Lessons: How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything

No foreplay today, only vibes

I have been reading The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma for the past couple of weeks.

Here are some of my favourite concepts:

Capitalization IQ

Successful people are rarely the most talented. They are the most committed. It's not about your talent, but how much potential you fulfil. Most professional football players were not the most talented, but the hardest working. They had grit (the capacity to have perseverance, courage, and determination).

Paradoxically, if you have talent you don’t (usually) work as hard, but if you struggle you build this training muscle. Kobe Bryant was an awful young player; that's why he developed his Mamba Mentality (to work harder than anyone else and catch up because he was so behind). Had he been the best, we would have never seen him become an NBA champion.

Eldar Shafir's Cognitive Bandwidth

You have a daily limited mental capacity. Imagine you have 100 coins of focus each day, and you pay a coin as you pay attention to different influences like checking the news, social media, work or training. That's why by afternoon, you feel you can't focus compared to the morning. It also affects our willpower and decision-making and is responsible for cheating on your diet at night. Also known as "decision fatigue," this is the reason high-performing individuals wear the same clothes every day. Wasting bandwidth on trivial decisions, no matter how harmless, still takes away your "focus coin" or "decision coin."

The first step to beat it is to be aware of it. I have improved drastically my phone usage. Is not worth the trade-off if you know what you giving up.

Granularity

Superficial work and part-time commitment bring mediocre results. Think of granularity as "having depth" in your work. The opposite of “I’m just doing my hours”.

When you go to your favourite coffee shop and the barista has a great smile on their face and serves you amazingly, you can feel they are being the best they can be. Granularity can be performed in any endeavour, any task, any job. You do the work the best you can, which then gives you a sense of purpose and professionalism where you are gaining. Giving half-assed care also harms you. Do not send yourself the signal that you are lazy and do things halfway.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Self-fulfilling Identity

Increasing self-control in one area elevates self-control in all areas of your life."

Again, how you do anything is how you do everything.

The way you behave in one area splashes into every other area of your life. Think of everything you do in life as having a watcher. Well, you are that watcher. And every time you lie, the watcher sees you lie. It doesn't matter what you try to say to yourself; you cannot fool the watcher. That is why when you wake up early, no matter what, the watcher sees the commitment and builds your identity.

Be careful what you do, think or say. There's always someone watching.

stay curious, Karam