59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot - By Richard Wiseman

Be warned - this book is going to prove many of your preconceived notions and assumptions wrong.  We all have so many beliefs about various subjects including productivity, happiness or how to bring up our children in the best possible manner possible.  When you read this book many of your assumptions will turn out to be wrong.  And all this is based on scientific research.

Key Points

"Yale Goal Study" is a myth.  It never happened.

Happiness - 

Happier you are, more successful you are likely to be.  Usually we think it to be in reverse order.  Happiness improves your confidence, immunity and ability to resolve conflict. It means you will have better relationship, better health and fulfilling career.

Most people think money will make them happier.  It does.  However the effect are not long lasting.  If you win a lottery you will be happy but with time you will get adjusted to the fact you won the money.

Those is Forbes 100 Wealthiest list are only slightly happier than average american.

Once basic necessities of life are met more money does not increase the happiness proportionately.

For example buying a new car or house can make us happier for the moment, but then we get used to them in some time and the increased happiness is not longer there.

So how to have long term happiness?

Diary -

Write about your thinking and deep thoughts in a diary.  This will help you to offload some of your trauma or negative thought and make you happier.  Take 10 to 15 mins each day and write on of the following.

Attitude of Gratitude - Having a sense of gratitude increases the happiness many folds.  Write about 5 things you are happy about in your diary.  You can write about simple things you are thankful about.  For example being able to witness the beautiful sunrise or sunset, having a healthy body or having a tasty dinner.  This increases your happiness dramatically.

Describe the best future self.  Spend each day imagining and writing about the ideal future you think about.  This improves the happiness.

Affectionate Writing - Write a short letter to the person who is important in your life and and write to them how important to you and how much you care about them.

Persuasion - 

How can we persuade others including our children to do some activity.  Usually we think rewarding them is a good way.  But research shows that offering them reward can have the opposite effect.  It can make them think that they are being made to work on that activity which means they do not like that activity.

Recent studies show that small rewards are better at motivating people.  The rewards should be a surprise and encouraging comments work better. Rewarding with more money makes the people think that they must not be liking the work hence they are being paid more.

Creativity - 

Common belief is that group creativity is better than individual creativity.  Similarly we also beleive that more can be achieved when a group works on a task as compared to same number of people acting alone.  However research show that it is not necessary true.  Individuals work harder that average effort of each individual in a group.

Attraction - 

Relationships - 

Stress - 

Decision Making - 

Parenting - 

Richard Wiseman is a wise man indeed and his tips are easy to read, understand and practical.  I would suggest this book for people who 

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Fear of Falling

Learning to skate is one of my 50 Goals for me. At the beginning of the year I included this as one of my goals for this year. I already had a pair of skates at my place and started practicing. I only put the skates on one leg and used the other leg to to push. I was afraid that I would fall down if I put on the skates on both the legs therefore I felt that it would be safer to put on the skate on only one leg. Another reason for practicing on one leg was I felt that it would give me the feel of skating without the risk and later I could move on to skating on both legs smoothly. How wrong was I.

However much ever I practiced on single leg, the feel is never the same as practicing with skates on both legs. Also it did not help me overcome the fear of falling down because I never fell down practicing on single leg. It happened for two weeks and then I lost interest. That was until last week.

Last week guests came over to our house to stay for couple of weeks. They also have small children and as is usual with most children they want to try out new things. They do not have the fear of failure or falling down as we elders have. Usually that fear is instilled by grown ups in the children. Some of the fears like teaching them to be safe from fire or electricity may be good for them but lot of others are not good for their growth.

Anyway to continue with the story, they started trying out the skates and on the second day I noticed that their nine year old daughter decided to try to skate on both legs. She took baby steps and was successful in covering a small distance without falling down. I was impressed with how quickly she was able to do that and main reason was she did not have the fear of falling. What I was reluctant to try even after two weeks, she decided to try on the second day itself. That is what innocence of a child can achieve.

This gave me hope and I immediately decided to give it a try. I put on the skates on both the legs and was able to cover a distance safely. I was thrilled. I tried again and decided to call my son to show this. My son came saw me trying to skate on both the legs. He was not impressed with the speed with which I was moving and gave me a good push on my back. I fell down on my back. Though it did not hurt much physically, my ego was hurt and got angry on him.

After I calmed down I realized that falling down was not that painful as I had assumed it to be. In fact it was good that I was pushed and I fell down. That incident removed my fear of falling. Now I am practicing skating and hope to gain sufficient skills in near future.

My Lessons
1. Likelihood of falling or failing is lesser that we assume.
2. Falling down is not as painful or disgraceful as we imagine it to be. Falling removes the fear and it is good for us in the learning process.

Go ahead and pursue your dreams. Falling down is part of the process to succeed after all stepping stone to success are the failures. Falling or failing helps us to lose our fears which stop us from growing.

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Stop being a Doormat

Do you feel that no one listens to you? Do you feel that people take you for granted by your friends and relatives? Do you feel that you are exploited at the work? Are you tired of people treating as their doormat?
There are people out there who mistake your sincerity and decency to meekness and try to take advantage. If you give in to them they become bolder and next time they are back to exploit you. These people are present everywhere as colleagues, bosses, relatives. Standing upto these situations is very important because, you can lose your self esteem very fast with these kind of people. There is no point in sulking privately. Stand up and face them. You are responsible for your situation and if you allow them to dictate you are giving the control of your destiny in the hands of others.

Here are few suggestions to follow if you want to come out of that situation.

1. Start Saying No
   Learn to say no to the task which you feel is not justified. Even if you are afraid, still say no. No one should be allowed to take you for granted. The people who are unreasonable while dealing with you are also aware of that, only thing is they are confident that they can bully you into doing it since you always allow that. Once you start saying No, and then say than whenever there is some unreasonable demand gradually you will earn respect and able to bring the situation into your favor.


2. Do Not Be Afraid of Loosing
   Many times we are afraid that if we say no, we will lose these friends or relatives and therefore cannot say no or continue to tolerate their nonsense. Remember that true friends or well wishing relatives will not like to hurt you. If they do that then tell them so and in case there is no improvement, it is better to separate with them. Life is too precious and short to tolerate wrong kind of people in your life.


3. Improve your Self Esteem
   Usually people who are treated as doormat are those who lack self esteem and it gets eroded further whenever bad things happen again and again. Start saying no which is mentioned in the point number 1. That is the first step. There are other steps which can be useful and mainly they are related so removing the fears related to social interactions. You can take baby steps to success. Here is an article on removing your fears.

It is your life and do not allow anyone to treat you shabbily. Once you take the first brave step, you will find that people will treat you more respectfully. Continue to take braver steps and you will find that other aspects of your life also starts improving magically and no one will treat you as a doormat again.

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How to Strategize for Success

In my last post I mentioned the importance for strategising for success. In this post focuses on how to strategize. As mentioned earlier, purpose of strategeizing is two fold. First it helps us to solve a problem and more importantly it helps us to get to the solution in a cheapest manner compared to the resources we use. When strategizing we aim to be effective instead of striving for perfection. We are then ready to compromise with achieving around 80% of the expected full value with the least investment.

Doing this in the long run, helps us have enough free time for fun while achieving more than average success rate in all the spheres where we work.

3 Good Ways to Strategize

1. Decide How much is important
   It is easier to focus on less. Do not commit the mistake of trying 100 percent of the area. Then you would not able to strategize. For these you need to take the following approach.
   First identify which part is absolutely essential to the task and without which essence of the task will be lost. Do not let it be more than 60% of the total task. Make sure that this portion is done perfectly. Then identify the tasks which are not as important as the first part but can give boost to the output with least amount of efforts. Do not let these to be more than 20% of the total task. Concentrate on this 80% of the task and finish it as fast as possible without losing focus.


2. Look For Help
   If you are going to start a task on which you have little knowledge, identifying the important portions mentioned in the point 1 may also be difficult. Also you may know what you need to do but do not know how to do that. For this best is to look for a person who has knowledge on the subject or google it. This will help you to eliminate the mistakes and wastage of time by avoiding the wrong paths. While you do that be aware that it is not guaranteed that the path suggested may be the best path. Think over the solution before you start. It is possible that once you have the insight you may be able to come up with a better solution.


3. Start working on the Work
   Once you cross the first two steps start to work on the work as soon as possible. You determination and energy is at their peak at the beginning and you should use that energy to quickly get over large portion of the task. This will give a boost to your chances of finishing the task. Most of the tasks which we do not ever start working on is due to the delay in starting it. If you eliminate this obstacle then chances of succeeding increases many folds.

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Optimum Path Strategy For Success

One of the key difference which sets the successful people apart from the others is once they decide to achieve a particular challenging goal is that they strategize and maximize their chances of success with minimum efforts. They strategize on how to attack the problem or grab the opportunity and then go for it with all their energy. They choose a optimum path to achieve a goal.

An example could be that if a giant corporation is launching a product they can spend millions of dollars in marketing and launch to ensure success. The resources which the giant corporations have are not available to every individual. Now if an individual wants to launch a product he would need to strategize so that using his limited resources optimally chances of success are improved significantly. By resource I mean money, individuals at disposal, raw material or time. “Resource” here is basically any thing which can be used for productivity.

Another example is, if your exams are coming nearby or you are about to face an interview then you tend to put your full energy into the relevant studies. I have talked to many students and lots of them say that they study the most during the last two days of the exams. What they do is grab the question papers of last few years, mark out the sections from which questions are most likely to be asked and then prepare those sections. Most of them are successful in doing this and get good grades. Though I am not in favor of this approach because for me knowledge more important, but in the current education system this somehow fits nicely. The point I want to make here is that when these students put whole hearted efforts for only a few days the results are good. So they have strategized on how to use their time effectively by intelligent guessing and decreasing the preparation time.

These students do not plan to get 100% marks but use the time in other activities. Therefore they are sacrificing some marks but then their goal is not full marks but to get “Good” enough marks without spending too much time.

Other examples of Using Optimum path strategy

Similarly for success in other fields, for example a small business which you want to start this approach will serve you quite well. This strategy can also be used to test market your ideas before you go full fledged with more money and resources.

Optimizing Test Marketing For Success

Let us say you want to start a business of supplying handicraft articles which are quite beautiful and unique. Now you want to start mass production but you are unsure of the market. You can use this approach only for finding out the market demand and to decide the pricing before you start the business to maximize your chances of success with least investment.

First you will need some samples. That will help you to find out how much cost will be incurred in the production process. The cost may reduce when the articles are manufactured in mass.

Now you decide to approach 5 retailers every day for next 30 days come what may. If you feel afraid in approaching the retailers think his way “At present I do not have this retailer as my customer so I have nothing to lose. Best possible outcome will be that I will be able to add him as my customer and worst thing is the status will remain as it is so I am not going to lose anything from here.” You can refer to “How to increase your comfort zone” which will help you to increase the comfort levels.

Above approach will solve two positive purposes. Either you will have a new retailer in you bag to whom you may supply your goods and if the retailer refuses to become your customer then ask his honest opinion on why. You will gain good insight on the market and any existing competition if any. Another benefit will be that if so are able to create a good rapport with the retailer you may approach him in the future also with any new products which you may come out with during that time. To make this approach even better ask him if he can refer someone who can be

With the above strategy you will be able to talk to around 150 prospective customers. The chances are very high that you will be able to get some customer if you approach right type of retailers. If you are not able to sell the idea to these retailers then it should give you an idea that that product which you want to come out may not have much demand.

On the other hand if you still have strong conviction in your product then you may want to approach a different market like trying to sell on the ebay on the internet. This way you will save a lot of money and increase the chances of your success.

Similarly you can strategize the way you will try to crack a problem. For example if you face a technically challenging task during your work, your approach may involve looking for the probable causes of the problem, talking to colleagues or searching the internet for probable solution and then picking the solution which best fits the current environment. Usually talking to you colleagues who have faced a similar problem in the past if the fastest way to solve any problem so you strategy should be to go for that option first.

Strategizing and finding a optimum path helps you to achieve success faster and at a lesser cost of time and money. Initially this may be difficult to do when you are not habituated to this. But when you keep on applying this approach repeatedly you will be able to innovate and strategize more easily which will take you to your designated goals sooner than ever before.

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How to Expand Your Comfort Zone for Success

Comfort zone can be defined as the situations or the actions in which you can work without any inhibitions or most confidently. You are not conscious of your surroundings and even if you know that people disapprove your action are not as much bothered as to stop the activity. Your productivity in any work is related to the comfort zone in which you are present. Your productivity can be at its maximum when when you are in your comfort zone and decreases substantially when you are outside your comfort zone. It is a sort of psychological safety zone in which you can work with minimum stress. Basically any environment in which we feel physically and emotionally safe can be described as out comfort zone.

Here are few examples.
When you join a new organization your comfort level is quite less and as the days and weeks pass you grow used to the new environment and start performing better. Usually companies provide some buffer time to anybody who are new joiners so that they can develop their comfort zones. Similarly if your boss is very short tempered you will feel threatened all the time and not be comfortable. This can also affect the performance.

Another example can be any newly married lady who moves to the in laws place. For initial few months she may not be comfortable as she does not knows anyone in the new house. Gradually as she become comfortable with the new new home and the family her comfort zone increases and she can stay and behave more confidently.

These were examples of social comfort zone. There can be skill related comfort zones like learning a new Software or operating a new gadget. In my opinion social comfort zones are more important as most of the time we deal with people.

Comfort Zone and its Role in Your Success
More comfortable you are in difficult situations, more successful you are in doing them confidently. People who can do tasks which most others cannot are the ones who are the highest paid and the most rewarded persons. If your comfort zone is much bigger than others than it you will be able to take actions more easily where people with smaller comfort zones may not be able take actions and that will keep you ahead of others and make you look stand out.

People who take risks are able to take those because there have face many uncomfortable situations and expanded their area of security so much that they will that they can handle new uncomfortable situations also although they may also be unfamiliar and uncomfortable in the new tasks.

Basic principle is to do small acts of bravery which can instill more confidence and make you familiar to the experience so much that you are able to develop the comfort zone in that situation. Once you reach that level then you can increase your comfort zone by selecting some tasks which are difficult. This way you can increase the volume of your comfort zone till it becomes a big dome.

Here are few tasks which will increase your comfort zone

I am mentioning all the tasks which will increase the comfort zone at social level since most of us face challenge more at the social level compared to any other situation.

1. Look into the eyes of 3 people
   Try to look into the eyes of 3 people each day till they back out. This will be quite uncomfortable for both of you but you aim is to increase your comfort level. In case some one takes offense then tell them that he/she reminds you of some old friend. If you do this regularly will end up more comfortable with people.


2. Talk to Strangers
   While in a mall or on a traffic signal ask what time it is or ask how to reach a particular place. You may also ask silly question like what time it is, or when will the sun set today and say that it is really important for you to know that it can be a life saving decision. Just make up any story and talk to someone.


3. Sing in the public place
   Try singing in a public place like road or mall. Do it when you have quite a few people in the audible distance. If you have really bad voice that should be more the reason to do this :) Initially you can hum loudly till you gather enough courage though.


4. Change your hair style or facial hair
   Take a completely different hair cut compared to your usual style. If you are male then try our different things with your facial hair like beard and moustache. I used to be real conscious of this and for year stuck to one hair style. First time I shaved my moustache I was ashamed to go to office and kept on think what the people will think. Now I am more adventurous and keep on changing style every few months. Now I look forward to people's comments and if they are negative I brush them aside.


5. Wear clothes the wrong way
   Wear two socks of two colors or wear the dress inside out. Make sure that people notice that and then observe their comments. Say that you were in a hurry so did that and refuse to make it correct the entire day.

If you feel afraid to try these then there is even more reason to go for these as these actions will definitely increase you comfort zone. One thing is for sure, at the end of these exercise you will have some interesting stories to tell. So try these and see how interesting your life becomes.

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