The Ten Minute Life Lesson Podcast

After another unexpected and seemingly unforced hiatus, I'm back. This week, I will detail how my current bout with severe depression took me off my game months ago and how I had to evaluate the situation to improve. I'm on the path to doing 'better' now, but not entirely out of the woods yet.

Inspired by a recent video produced by Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), I explain why personal and development is flush with books on the subject that are all recycled ideas, why we worship these books, and what you need to start doing now to justify all the books you already own (and the ones in your queue to buy next).You can watch Manson's video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQB3viVFhPA&t=310s

There is a universal belief in personal development that you should limit your time spent with the 'wrong' people. This episode will help you gauge who those people are and if you could be one of those people.

I have used this five-point plan to set goals for over a decade, and I want to take this week's podcast time to share it with you:-Take a calendar, and make a realistic sketch of your available free time and when it exists.-Download all your hopes and dreams. No matter how outlandish and seemingly impossible, write it down (alongside the more realistic ones) if you'd like it to happen.-Review and rate the goals on your list. Eliminate the goals you know are impossible and those you know you have little desire to follow. The most important potential goals should be at the top of the list. Determine how much time your top ten items will take to work on weekly.-Go back to that calendar and review the open space you designated as free time for personal development use. Start with the first item and see if the time needed and the times you can realistically work on them will work. Go down the list until you find one goal that works.-WORK ON THAT ONE GOAL UNTIL YOU SEE SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT. Then, use this process to select a new goal to work on moving forward. DOWNLOAD THE PDF OF THIS GUIDE HERE: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4q9knwqny58mqdp/The%20Last%20Goal-Setting%20Solution%20You%20Will%20Ever%20Need%20To%20Learn.pdf?dl=0

There is pressure for good tidings and cheer to be the familiar feeling for all during the Christmas season. The reality is many are not feeling all that jolly. Some, in fact, are feeling a good level of pain right now. Guess what? That is valid, but not an excuse to bring others down.

It is cliché in the world of personal develop that books are important to growth. This episode will go over some of the benefits of reading and offers some suggestions to where you can find your books.If you are interested in the Blinkist app, visit https://blinkist.o6eiov.net/c/2043256/707940/10732

This message is another way to state, ‘guard your free time wisely.’ It sounds like simple advice you’ve heard far too often, but give it a listen anyway.

Getting feedback is excellent. But the feedback you are getting is probably not very. Here is what you do to manage all the feedback you receive, for good or for ill.

Learning skills when you are unsure of the ‘proper’ steps to follow is an asset since you don’t know what you don’t know, and you don’t fear doing the things that others have cast off as the wrong things to do.

We as humans deal with too many daily issues that can not be simply resolved by throwing wads of cash at them. And then there are issues when throwing cash at them is the exact fix needed.

Every new person you meet is has lived a story they probably would like to tell, so be open at the beginning of the new possible relationship. But just like a terrible book or a boring streaming TV series, you are free to walk away if it is not working.

You will spend more hours in your lifetime not wanting to complete tasks then you will energized to get things done. What do you do to will yourself to a motivated state when you just don't have the energy to be motivated.

The point of personal development is to bulid yourself for a possible future. That means looking towards a possible future you and asking the right questions to get you as close to there as possible.

Just in time for all the gatherings of families and friends for the holiday season, here are five tips for managing yourself to help survive those gatherings.

There will be plenty of hard choices to make and hard times to live through that will need you to be a hard charger. But if not, you don’t always have to be.

Will Smith is a very entertaining person becoming more polarizing as he shares more personal life details. It was two competing personal projects that led to a public proclamation, a very profound one that you may have heard before but may get a boost from hearing it from someone else. You will hear me break down the proclamation and share how it has directly affected me.

I describe myself as ‘boring on purpose.’ I do not believe I am a boring person, and I am rarely in a situation where I am bored. But I will choose a dull and eventful day that ends in peace over a day of excitement that comes with unnecessary drama.

You come to the point where you are asking yourself, “Is it time to quit?” You probably already know the answer t that question, but this episode will help you come to terms with whatever the ultimate answer turns out to be.

All you need is a little knowledge, a person to coach, and a synced schedule, and you have as much right to call yourself a coach as anyone else, including me.

Per Wikipedia, ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ is the idea that all people on average are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. It seems impossible but real (mostly), and you can and should use this to your advantage.

It is great to revisit the best advice you receive, and some of the best advice I have ever received has dealt with clutter, sometimes physical, sometimes mental, and more often than not, a combination of both. And the advice? Clear the clutter.

Leader are readers. Readers are leaders. How ever you have heard it, those three words ring true. If you want to prove your agility to lead, you have to be read up. And not just with traditionally bound books.

If you claim to want to reach some elite goal, you have to be ready to take out someone who is already in range to achieve the same goal.

Never put your full faith in any man (or woman for that matter). Humans are human after all. Which means fallible and destined to fail you eventually.

Perseverance is defined as persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success. Two keys to perseverance are the reasons behind why you should keep going and distance (real or perceived) to where it is you want to go.

Circumstances beyond my control led me to stop producing this podcast, again. As it happens, circumstances have changed, and opened a window to allow me back in to produce this podcast.

Last week I had an extremely rough week at work, but a particular routine was interrupted that almost had me drop an especially important streak. As you work to progress in life and career, you cannot be scared to set a routine. But you also need to prepare for as many distractions as you can possibly plan for.

There is power in a goof mentor-mentee relationship. But the power is not inherent in the mentor just by their existence.

Any time you are ready to take a stab at personal improvement by setting a new goal to achieve, you can use this simple five-step goal planning system I use myself.

You can gain an advantage by taking time the night before to plan ahead. You can gain an extra advantage by planning your day from the end to the beginning.

There are many words you can choose to describe your view of the last 12 months. I would guess that few of them would be kind. But the word that should sum it up for all of us on the planet is hard. In fact, that word should fit any year.

That next encounter could be the introduction of the love of your life. Or it could lead to a huge business deal. Or it could be a polite conversation that fills a temporary gap in time.

It's a simple statement: you always learn more from real-world experience. But you don't have to be the person who lived through the experience to receive the lesson.

The song may state that 'everything is better with a friend,' but it's equally as true if you claim just about any type of coupling.

I had a former coworker who moved through various roles and nearly destroyed them at every stop. I have also had personal relationships that ended on sour notes with my ex’s pushing the needle even further after the break-up. Whether you’re dealing with a shift in your personal or professional life, you need to leave things better than you found them.

Risks are necessary for development. But these three risks are never worth the gambit.

The way to work toward the raising of the average is not to push hard for solid A’s and extra credit towards the end of the grading period. It comes from ensuring you never make failing grades from the start.

Your business should do more than just work to make a profit. It should matter to the people who work there, the people who shop there, and neighbors around it. Ask yourself this question and study your answers.

You have all the rights in the universe that you are the center of to do as you wish. But you do not have the right to bully anyone around that would directly affect their status as the center of their own universe.

It just takes one little slip to lose your momentum and all incentives from the hard work you had previously put in. But temptations will come, so you must have a greater understating of your true motivations to help you deflect those moments of weakness.

I once had a boss who tried to reassure me that my inability to clean my office (and create order) wasn’t a sign of failure, because I thrived when working in chaotic situations. This is me stating for the record that while I can work through just about any stressful situations, I still believe I can always operate at a higher if I am actually working from a base state of calm.

The ability to spread misery is more powerful than any virus that man could imagine. But you can do your part to keep the spread of misery down when you do find yourself in that state.

Being alive on a planet with over 8 billion other humans means abiding by rules to keep everyone civil and safe. But every rule on the books, despite its ability to keep us all civil and safe, may not be as necessary now as it seemed to be when originally passed.

There are two simple tenants to personal improvement. It is improvement for yourself that can affect the world around you (not the other way around), and there must be some sort of measurement of improvement to gauge if the efforts are working. And they are efforts that involve work.

In times of trouble, it’s good to know who will really be there to help you out. Do you know who will really be there to help you out in times of trouble?

Any goal worth achieving will take effort--i.e.--work to accomplish. But when that work turns to obligation or tedious activities, you have to ask yourself what about your work is making it so much like ‘work?’

This is the 100th episode of the Ten Minute Life Lesson podcast. And while I am normally big on celebrating milestones, this episode will focus on a simple premise: using a checklist to stay productive (and sane).If you need a form to use for your own checklists, you can try my Daily Dozens Planner here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hep00ddyc94of7z/daily_dozens_combined_sheets.pdf?dl=0

You have a story that someone needs to hear.

What people are into is a window into what they are going through.