Summary "The Magic of Thinking Big" by David J Schwartz

The Magic of Thinking Big by David J Schwartz

There is nothing magical or mystical about the power of belief. “I-am-positive-I-can” attitude, generates the power, skill and energy needed to do. When you believe I can-do-it, the how-to-do-it develops. Think victory and succeed. Thinking that guides your intelligence is much more important than how much intelligence you have. Attitude is more important than intelligence.

A person is a product of his own thoughts. Believe big and adjust your thermostat forwarding.

The three guides to acquiring and strengthening the power of belief:

Think success, don’t think failure.

Remind yourself regularly that you are better than you think you are.

Believe Big.

Any training program must do three things: It must provide content (the what to do) . Second, it must supply a method (the how to do it) and third, it must meet the acid test (how to get the result).

Action cures fear. Indecision, postponement, fertilizes fear.

These simple actions automatically and instantaneously banish shyness. Confident action produces confident thinking.

Be a front seater.

Practice making eye-contact

Walk 25 percent faster

Practice speaking up

Smile big

Following pay in every way to think big:

1.  Don't sell yourself short. Conquer the crime of self-deprecation. Concentrate on your assets. You're better than you think you are.

2. Use the big thinker's vocabulary. Use big, bright, & cheerful words. Use words that promise victory; hope, happiness, pleasure; avoid words that create unpleasant images of failure,defeat, grief.

3. Stretch your vision: See what can be, not just what is. Practice adding value to things, to people, and to yourself.

4. Get the big view of your job. Think, really think your present job is important. That next promotion depends mostly on how you think toward your present job.

5. Think above trivial things. Focus your attention on big objectives. Before getting involved in a petty matter, ask yourself, "Is it really important?"

USE THESE TOOLS AND THINK CREATIVELY

1.  Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to a solution.

Eliminate impossible,"won't work," can't do," no use trying, " from your thinking and speaking vocabularies.

2. Don't let tradition paralyze your mind. Be receptive to new ideas. Be experimental. Try new approaches. Be progressive - in everything you do.

3. Ask yourself daily, "How can I do better?" There is no limit to self.improvement. When you ask yourself, "How can I do better?" sound answers will appear. Try it and see.

4. Ask yourself, "How can I do more?" Capacity is a state of mind. Asking yourself tills question puts your mind to work to find intelligent shortcuts. The success combination in business is: Do what you do better (improves the quality of your output), and: Do more of what you do (increase the quantity of your output).

5. Practice asking and listening. Ask And Listen, and you'll obtain raw materials for reaching sound decisions. Remember: Big people monopolize the listening; small people monopolize the talking.

6. Stretch your mind. Get stimulated. Associate with people who can help you think of new ideas, new ways of doing things. Mix with people of different occupations and social background.

Cement in your mind the question - "Is this the way an important person does it"- . Use this question to make you a bigger. More successful person. In a nutshell. Remember the following:

1. Look important; it helps you think important. Your appearance talks to you. Be sure it lifts your spirits and builds your confidence. Your appearance talks to others. Make certain it says. "Here is an important person: intelligent prosperous and dependable."

2. Think your work is important. Think this way; and you will receive mental signals on how doing your job better. Think your work is important, and your subordinates will think their work is important too.

3. Give yourself a pep talk several times daily. Build a "sell-yourself-to-yourself" commercial. Remind yourself at every opportunity that you're a first-class person.

4. In all of life's situations, ask yourself, "Is this the way an important person thinks?" Then obey the answer.

MAKE YOUR ENVIRONMENT MAKE YOU SUCCESSFUL

1. Be environmentally-conscious. Just as body diet ,makes the body, mind diet makes the mind.

2. Make your environment work for you, not against you. Don't let suppressive forces-the negative, you-can't-do-it-people-make you think defeat.

3. Don't let small-thinking people hold you back. Jealous people want to see you stumble. Don't give them that satisfaction.

4. Get your advice from successful people. Your future is important. Never risk it with freelance advisors who are living failures.

5. Get plenty of psychological sunshine. Circulate in new groups. Discover new and stimulating things to do.

6. Throw thought poison out of your environment. Avoid gossip. Talk about people, but stay on the positive side.

7. Go first class in everything you do. You can't afford to go any other way.

Grow attitudes that will carry you forward to success.

1. Grow the ''I'm activated" attitude. Results come in proportion to the enthusiasm invested. Three things to do· to activate yourself are:

• Dig into it deeper. When you find yourself uninterested in something, dig in and learn more about it. This sets off enthusiasm.
• Life up everything about you: your smile, your handshake, your talk, even your walk. Act alive.
• Broadcast good news. No' one ever accomplished anything positive telling bad news.

2. Grow the "You are important" attitude. People do more for you when you make them feel important. Remember to do these things:

• Show appreciation at every opportunity. Make people feel important.
• Call people by name.

3. Grow the "Service First" attitude, and watch money take care of itself. Make it a rule in everything you do: give people more than they expect to get.

IN A CAPSULE, PUT THESE PRINCIPLES TO WORK

1. Make yourself lighter to lift. Be likable. Practice being the kind of person people like. This wins their support and puts fuel in your success-building program.

2. Take the initiative in building friendships. Introduce yourself to others at every opportunity. Make sure you get the other person's name straight, and make certain he gets your name straight too. Drop a personal note to your new friends you want to get to know better.

3. Accept human differences and limitations. Don't expect anyone to be perfect. Remember, the other person has a right to be different. And don't be a reformer.

4. Tune it!. Channel the Good Thoughts Station. Find the qualities to like and admire in a person, not things to dislike. And don't let others prejudice your thinking about a third person. Think positive thoughts towards people-and get positive results.

5. Practice conversation generosity. Be like successful people. Encourage others to talk. Let the other person talking to you about his views, his opinions, his accomplishments.

6. Practice courtesy all the time. It makes other people feel better. It makes you feel better too.

7. Don't blame others when you receive a setback. Remember, how you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

GROW THE ACTION HABIT Practice these key points:

1. Be an activationist. Be someone who does things. Be a doer, not a don't-er.

2. Don't wait until conditions are perfect. They never will be. Expect future obstacles and difficulties and solve them as they arise.

3. Remember, ideas alone won't bring success. Ideas have value only when you act upon them.

4. Use action to cure fear and gain confidence. Do what you fear, and fear disappears. Just try it and see.

5. Start your mental engine mechanically. Don't wait· for the spirit to move you. Take action, dig in, and you move the spirit.

6. Think in terms of now. Tomorrow, next week, later; and similar words often are synonymous with the failure word, never. Be an "I'm starting right now" kind of person.

7. Get down to business-pronto. Don't waste time getting ready to act. Start acting instead.

8. Seize the initiative. Be a crusader. Pick up the ball and run. Be a volunteer. Show that you have the ability and ambition to do.

The difference between success and failure is found in one's attitudes toward setbacks, handicaps, discouragements, and other disappointing situations.

Five guideposts to help you turn defeat into victory are:

1. Study. Setbacks to pave your way to success. When you lose,learn, and then go on to win next time.

2. Have the courage to be your own constructive critic. Seek out your faults and weaknesses and then correct them. This makes you a professional.

3. Stop blaming luck. Research each setback. Find out what went wrong. Remember, blaming luck never got anyone where he wanted to go.

4. Blend persistence with experimentation. Stay with your goal, but don't beat your head against a stone wall. Try new approaches. Experiment.

5. Remember; there is a good side in every situation. Find it. See the good side and whip discouragement.

Put these success-building principles to work:

1. Get a clear fix on where you want to go. Create an image of yourself ten years from now.

2. Write out your ten-year plan. Your life is too important to be left to chance. Put down on ·paper what you want to accomplish in your work, your home, and your social departments..

3. Surrender yourself to your desires. Set goals to get more energy. Set goals to get things done. Set goals and discover the real enjoyment of living.

4. Let your major goal be your automatic pilot. When you let your goal absorb you, you'll find yourself making the right decisions to reach your goal.

5. Achieve your goal one step at a time. Regard each task yourelf regardless of how small it may seem, as a step toward your goal.

6. Build thirty-day goals. Day-by-day effort pays off.

7. Take detours in stride. A detour simply means another route. It should never mean surrendering the goal.

8. Invest in yourself. Purchase those things that build mental power and efficiency. Invest in education. Invest in idea starters.

HOW TO USE THE MAGIC OF THINKING BIG IN LIFE'S MOST CRUCIAL SITUATIONS

A. When Little People Try to Drive You Down, THINK BIG

B. When That "I-Haven't-Got-What-It-Takes" Feeling Creeps Up on You, THINK BIG

C. When an Argument or Quarrel Seems Inevitable, THINK BIG.

D. When You Feel Defeated, THINK BIG.

E. When Romance Starts to Slip, THINK BIG

F. When You Feel Your Progress on the Job Is Slowing Down, THINK BIG

Summary "Three questions we never stop asking" by Michael Kellogg

Three questions we never stop asking by Michael Kellogg

What can I know, what may I hope and what should I do? The author proceed by juxtaposing a pair of thinkers on each of these three questions. The first pair of the pair is a builder, the second a destroyer. One explorer the promise of a theory and the other the consequence of its ruin.

The first pair deals with the possibility of philosophical knowledge: Plato & Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second pair deals with the existence of God: Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. The third pair deals with virtue: Aristotle and Martin Heidegger.

The word philosophy comes from the Greek: philo-sohia, the love of wisdom. Philosophy -called the queen of the science because of its superposed ability to knit them all together into a unified vision, The history of philosophy divides roughly into three approaches to this question: the metaphysical (beyond physics), the epistemological, and the linguistic. The greatest of the metaphysicians is Plato, whose well known theory is ‘theory of forms’.

Plato offers a metaphor of a line divided into two unequal sections: one representing the intelligible world and one the visible world. He divides the visible world in turn, into images.  We use images, he says, to form beliefs and hypotheses about the originals. That is the method of the so-called science, for which their hypotheses are first principles. In the intelligible realm, by contrast, we use thought to obtain understanding direct, demonstrable knowledge of the immutable first principles from which we can reach conclusions, without making use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms and ending in forms.

The key article of faith for Plato, however, is that the model of mathematical knowledge can be extended to moral issues. IN our own hierarchy of knowledge, we would agree to place mathematics at the top, followed by the natural sciences, followed by social sciences (including economics, psychology and sociology). But Plato places philosophy with mathematics, as offering a purer, better and more certain knowledge than the changeable sciences.

We are lovers of sights and sounds, Plato notes,. We focus on beautiful sounds, beautiful colors and beautiful shapes, but our thought is unable to see and embrace the nature of the beautiful itself. As a consequence, we have no true knowledge.

This is Plato’s theory of forms. The forms are eternal, immutable and nonphysical. Plato, unlike Socrates, believes that the end result of probing is knowledge, not doubt. Plato asks future philosophers to choose: they must either accept some theory, such as the theory of forms, or they must explain how discourse can be possible when our words have no objective anchors, no intelligence to which they correspond.

Ludwig Wittgenstein makes three main observations that meet with increasing resistance.about how we actually use words. First, an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. We ascribe emotions, sensations, thoughts and feelings to others based on their behavior. Second, ‘I do... not.. Identify my sensations by criteria. Third, ‘my words for sensations are tied up with my natural expressions of sensations, my language is not a private one.

Wittgenstein simply denies that philosophy as traditionally conceived, can satisfy  that longing. “The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. It seems then that we are destroying everything that is constructive and beautiful in philosophy.

Existence of God

Religious thought typically takes one of three approaches to the question of God.

First, fundamentalism posits a God with an attitude, A God who issues commandments and actively intervenes in the world. We pray to the fundamentalist God to take our side in life and to reward our obedience after death. The fundamentalist God has revealed himself and his wishes through one or more texts such as the Hebrew Bible, the New testament, or the Koran, which are to be taken, more or less literally as a guide to God’s favor.

The second approach celebrates a God who underwriters, but does not interview in the world. This is the God of Benedict Spinoza who believes not in everyday miracles (divine events), but in the miracle of the everyday. For Spinoza, God is immanent in all things and our sense of awe and mystery in the face of nature in both the beginning and the end of religious thought. Kant is deeply influenced by Spinoza and Kant argues forcefully that God is a living presence in the universe and that only immortality can make sense of our existence as moral beings.

The third approach is atheism (or agnosticism, which amounts to nearly the same thing). The atheist finds the hypothesis of God, neither helpful nor instructive, but all too often a force for ignorance and violence. A rash of recent books by Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others, promotes atheism. They present compelling arguments against fundamentalist religious belief but stop there, as if the death of the fundamentalist God were an endpoint, rather than - as Nietzsche thinks - the beginning of the inquiry. Far from treating the death of God with smugness and complacency, Nietzsche believes it signals a crisis in thought that necessities a complete revaluation of values.

Kant Does not suggest that we have any theoretical basis for concluding that all of nature is like an organism in this sense. Nor does he suggest that God actively intervenes in the world of our experience in any direct manner.Kant anticipates Einstein. Like Kant, Einstein places morality at the center of all human endeavors. “Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. He is dismissive of the idea of ‘a personal God;’ actively intervening in human affairs or influencing the course of events in response to prayers and ritual observances. Yet he feels that behind all the discernible laws and connections of nature, ‘there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable’ something there remains something ‘whose beauty and sublimity reached us only indirectly’. Einstein feels “veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend, and utter humility toward beyond anything that we can comprehend and ‘utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos’. This Einstein declares ‘is my religion’ and it is Kant’s religion as well.

The death of God:

In 1882, Nietzsche announces the death of God. By the death of God, Nietzsche does not of course mean that God once existed, but no longer does. He means that the believe in the Christian God has become unbelievable. With the death of God, the earth has been unchained from the sun. Man has been separated from all the absolutes that gave meaning and value structures to his existence.

“Genuine, original Christianity ‘ - which he considers ‘not a faith, but a doing - will be possible at all times. But the religious person, he claims, is an exception in every religion. The moral value judgements of the Christian church were developed for the many, for the few. “

The aristocratic value-equation (good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God). Christianity, however, effected a remarkable inversion of these aristocratic values.  Christianity celebrated meekness and humility and the opposite of worldly success. The week, unsurprisingly resented the oppression and dominance of the strong. They longed to overthrow that strength or at least turn it to their own advantage. Christian morality was imposed by the many against the few, by the weak against the strong for the protection of the weak. This process occurred not in open vault, but through more devious and subtle means. Christianity introduced concepts of guilt and sin in order to cabin the vigorous, free, joyful activity of the strong.

Christianity, morality accordingly took its stand precisely against life, against fullness, against strength. it constituted a major revaluation of values, what Nietzsche calls ‘the slave revolt in morality’. The slave revolt in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.

Nietzsche portrays three metamorphoses: of three metamorphoses of the spirit, I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel and the camel, a lion and the lion, finally a child. Camel Represents the ‘strong reverent spirit that would bear much. The camel wholly absorbs the existing values and tradition that they represent and whose culmination they are. ‘Like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, this the spirit speeds into its desert”.

When the spirit becomes a lion, who could conquer his freedom. His revolt against the constraints of tradition. The lion creates a new freedom for himself and assumes a right to new values. But to create new values and a new paradigm, ‘that even the lion cannot do’. For that the child is required, for the child is innocence and forgetting and freed himself from the tradition in which he operates, the creator must find a new affirmation within himself and forge a new paradigm in accordance with his deepest needs. “The spirit now wills his own will and he would have been lost to the world now conquers his own world’.

Virtue:

Aristotle’s ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ is largely concerned with public virtue. The virtue of character that Aristotle discusses - courage, generosity, justice, truthfulness, sociability, and even temperance - are usually presented as the virtues of a public man in a public setting. Those virtues moreover, are themselves publicly derived that is they follow accepted norms of right conduct.

In Heidegger, Western philosophy comes full circle and is ready to begin again. He is not the end of the story, but only another of many beginnings. Philosophizing ultimately means nothing other than being a beginner. Heidegger has passed through T S Eliot's:

‘Unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning”.

Heidegger beckons us to follow.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

‘Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

Summary "Me, myself and us" by Brian R Little

Me, myself and us by Brian R Little

The science of personality and the art of well-being.

Personality psychology emerged as an academic specialty in the 1930s, but its root extends back to philosophical and medical theories in the fourth century BCE Greece. Influential among these ancient theories were those that emphasized how various bodily humors  - air, black bile, blood, and yellow bit - gave rise to four corresponding temperamental types: phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine, and choleric personalities.

Freudian psychoanalytical theory saw personality as being shaped by the protected conflict between unconscious, primary sexual needs and the prohibitions of society. In George Kelly’s ‘The Psychology of Personal Constructs’, he challenged.

Generally speaking, introverts achieve higher marks in school, so by the time they are in university they are more likely to obtain a first class graduating average. The researchers suggest that learning environment that is critical. Extraverts learn better in environments that are stimulating and engaging and conventional schools may not be able to provide such an environment.

There are two other areas of intellectual achievement in which there are notable differences between those who are high and low on extroversion. Extraverts have better memories than introverts do, but only in short-term memory. Introverts do better on long-term memory tasks. Extraverts are more likely to opt for quantity, introverts for quality.

If we watch social interactions, we can easily spot the difference between introverted and extroverted styles. Extraverts stand closer, but speak more loudly. They tend to touch and poke, even hug. Introverts are less intense, more subdued, and definitely less huggy.

They also have contrasting verbal styles. Extraverts use direct, simple, concrete language. Introverts have a tendency to craft communications that are more oblique, contingently complex, and weasel-worded.

Human personality has both an inner and an outer reality. The inner reality consists of what we are intending to do - what personal projects we are pursuing at any given time. The outer reality consists of images that we create, consciously or not, for others. It in in the nexus between these two realities that our personalities are constructed, challenged, and reconstructed.

We can think of our everyday behavior as expressions of three different motivational sources that energize it. The first is biogenic: its roots are genetic and its influence arises from brain structures and processes that the rapidly emerging field of personality neuroscience is studying. If you make a loud noise near the newborns, what will they do? Some will orient toward the noise and others will turn away. Those who are attracted to the noise end up being extraverts later in development; those who turn away are more likely to end up being introverts.

One of the more interesting ways of informally assessing extroversion at the biogenic level is to do the lemon-drop test. There are several variations on the test, and I draw here on a demonstration procedure I frequently used with my undergraduates.7 Here are the ingredients you will need: an eyedropper, a cotton swab (the little stick with a wrap of cotton on either end, we use for babies and are admonished not to stick in our ears), a thread, concentrated lemon juice (regular lemon juice won’t work as effectively), and the willing tongue of a volunteer (such as yourself). Attach the thread to the center of the double-tipped cotton swab so that it hangs exactly horizontal. Swallow four times, then put one end of the swab on the tongue, holding it for twenty seconds. Then place five drops of the concentrated lemon juice on the tongue. Swallow, then place the other end of the swab on the same portion of the tongue and hold it for twenty seconds. Then hold up the swab by the thread. For some people the swab will remain horizontal. For others, it will dip on the lemon juice end. Can you guess which? For the extroverts, the swab stays relatively horizontal, but for introverts it dips. The reason is that introverts, because they have relatively high levels of chronic arousal, respond more vigorously to strong stimulation, like lemon juice, so they create more saliva. Extraverts, being less responsive to high levels of stimulation, stay relatively dry mouthed. In fact, there is evidence that because of this tendency toward lower salivation levels, extraverts actually have higher levels of tooth decay than do introverts

Each of the Big Five dimensions of personality can be assessed in terms of its biogenic roots.(The five factors are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism).  For example, there is growing evidence that highly agreeable individuals have higher levels of oxytocin.

In contrast with the American extroverted ideal, other cultures place a higher premium on introversion. This is sort of sociogenic sources of motivation.

Beyond the influence of the biogenic and sociogenic source of motivation, there is another compelling influence on our daily behavior that I call idiogenic motives. They represent the plans, aspirations, commitments and personal projects that we pursue in the course of daily life. Their origin is idiosyncratic and singular. By invoking biogenic causes we can explain a person’s behavior as the natural playing out of traits. By invoking sociogenic causes we can explain the same behavior as the natural consequences of social norms. But by invoking idiogenic causes we seek the reasons why a person is engaged in a particular pattern of behavior.

The situations and settings of our everyday lives plan an important role in the quality of our lives. The better the ‘fit’ between a person’s biogenic traits and the characteristics of the environment, the better the consequence for well-being.  One of the functions of the environment is to provide the right resources for enabling our personal projects. Our own research has shown that highly sociable individuals are happier if they are engaged in personal projects that involve a lot of social interaction.

[To fully connect with the audience, my lectures need to be fast paced, intense and interactive - in short, highly extroverted.]

High self monitors (HSM)  are concerned about how others see them, and they behave so as to reflect the norms and expectations of the situations they enter. Low Self Monitors (LSM) are less concerned with how others view them and are guided in their behavior by their own traits and values rather than situational expectations. Knowledge of SM scores provides us with rich material for reflection on the personality and well-being.

As you read this, that i am standing opposite to you when I ask you to do the following. Please write, with your finger, the letter Q on your forehead. Do it now.  Did you put the tail on the right side or the left side as viewed from inside your head looking outward? Which you did might offer a clue about whether you are a HSM or LSM. Those who put the tail to right side as viewed from inside your head looking outward more likely to be LSMs and those with the tail to the left m HSMs. The logic is that HSMs convey their information literally from the point of view of the audience, whereas LSMs do it from their own perspective. Another such example is when a person is served a steak. HSM like person will take steak even for putting slat first, whereas LSM will salt the steak first before tasting.

Are we better described as onions or avocados? When asked to list their attributes, HSM tend to report more publicly visible or available aspects of themselves, such as physical features, status, and roles they play. LSMs are more likely to report their internal attributes such as their values, enduring preferences, or the kind of subsumed by Big Five factors. HSMs are rather like Onions  one keep peeling back layer after layer, until one discovers no substantial self there at all. LSMs are like avocados when you dig down you discover a pit, a firm core that is invariant.

Students were asked to look at each situation and determine its SM press - that is, to what extent it was the kind of situation in which people should be monitoring their conduct very closely.

The highest SM press from the student’s interview are::

Job interview

Public speaking

Appearing in court

Meeting the dean of the university

Funeral

Giving a seminar in class

Serving customers

First Date

The lowest SM press are:

Sick at home

Watching TV with friends

Rock concert

Camping alone

‘Talking to a close friend

At the beach

Grocery shopping

Dinner at McDonald's