Lessons from Richard Branson, Tony Robbins and Ray Dalio
Here are the tips, disciplines, habits, and mindsets, that separate world-class performers who reach their goals, from whose who fall short.
Ray Dalio
“If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential”
“I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”
“It is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning.”
“Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.”
“Having the basics—a good bed to sleep in, good relationships, good food, and good sex—is most important, and those things don’t get much better when you have a lot of money or much worse when you have less. And the people one meets at the top aren’t necessarily more special than those one meets at the bottom or in between.”
“Truth - more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality - is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.”
“the happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.”
“Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.”
“I just want to be right—I don’t care if the right answer comes from me.”
“Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life—you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.”
“Pain + Reflection = Progress”
“Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.”
“I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up.”
“Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.”
“If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done”
“The greatest gift you can give someone is the power to be successful. Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger.”
“first principle: • Think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 . . . . . . and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking available to you.”
“It’s more important to do big things well than to do the small things perfectly.”
“To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.”
“Unattainable goals appeal to heroes,”
“I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me, great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chose for me was from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
“Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop our movement down this river and we can’t avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.”
“Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.”
“Remember that most people are happiest when they are improving and doing the things that suit them naturally and help them advance. So learning about your people’s weaknesses is just as valuable (for them and for you) as is learning their strengths.”
“The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections. If you can acquire this habit yourself, you will learn what causes your pain and what you can do about it, and it will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness.”
“Remember that the only purpose of money is to get you what you want, so think hard about what you value and put it above money. How much would you sell a good relationship for? There’s not enough money in the world to get you to part with a valued relationship.”
“Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.”
“Remember that in great partnerships, consideration and generosity are more important than money.”
“Thoughtful disagreement is not a battle; its goal is not to convince the other party that he or she is wrong and you are right, but to find out what is true and what to do about it.”
“Meditate. I practice Transcendental Meditation and believe that it has enhanced my open-mindedness, higher-level perspective, equanimity, and creativity. It helps slow things down so that I can act calmly even in the face of chaos, just like a ninja in a street fight. I’m not saying that you have to meditate in order to develop this perspective; I’m just passing along that it has helped me and many other people and I recommend that you seriously consider exploring it.”
Richard Branson
"If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!"
"Life is a helluva lot more fun if you say yes rather than no"
"Respect is how to treat everyone, not just those you want to impress."
"Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to."
"The brave may not live forever – But the cautious do not live at all"
"I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive then I believe you are better off not doing it. A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts."
"You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over."
"Throwing yourself into a job you enjoy is one of the life's greatest pleasures!"
"As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy. Waking up stressed and miserable is not a good way to live."
"Business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another one coming."
"There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you."
"Only a fool never changes his mind."
"A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts."
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
"It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside."
"Most "necessary evils" are far more evil than necessary."
"Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients."
"to be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running"
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
"Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again."
Tony Robbins
"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. "
"It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny."
"People who fail focus on what they will have to go through; people who succeed focus on what it will feel like at the end."
"You can’t have a plan for your day, ‘til you have a plan for your life."
"Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we can be"
"Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach."
"The past does not equal the future."
"Success is buried on the other side of rejection."
"How am I going to live today to create the tomorrow I've committed to?"
"You can’t hit a target if you don’t know what it is."
"A real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken a new action. If there's no action, you haven't truly decided."
"Nothing tastes as good as looking good feels."
"You can't stop dreaming just because the night never seems to end."
"The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you."
"Focus equals feeling."
"It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean."
"Change is inevitable. Evolution, however, is optional."
"I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge you to join the ranks of those people who live what they teach, who walk their talk."
"I can tell you the secret to happiness in one word: progress."