Friday, January 6, 2012

Mindvalley: Productivity Through Blissipline

Favorite Quotes:
"The Paradox of Intention: you must have goals, but your happiness cannot be tied to those goals...You will acceleration towards those dreams faster if you are happy in the now...The happiness comes from the journey, not the destination."

"Blissipline: the discipline of keeping yourself happy (and in flow)...If the happiness isn't there, your impact will be limited."

"What you appreciate, appreciates...Expressing gratitude for a few minutes daily, after 30 days, your happiness goes up by 25%."

"Every month 10% of our profits go straight to employees. As a result, peoples' salary checks literally double."

"This is one of the reasons why we won the award for World's Most Democratic Workplace. We call it the sweet-sugar-love machine...So, we created a software to allow people to appreciate and praise their coworkers...Every single day my employees get on this system and they send little symbolic gifts to their peers. Since we launched this, office politics, pettiness, people being too busy on their own stuff to help coworkers, all of that disappeared, and we started getting this really close-knit team. But, it did have a side-effect...right now 30% of my staff are dating someone else in the company."

"We have this rule in our company called the 45:5 rule. You only should work 45 hours per week...Five of those 45 hours you must invest in learning new stuff."

"We toss the biggest Halloween party in our city every year."

"The five closest people you hang out with will average out to who you become."

"You're happy when you help others become happy. That's what the Dalai Lama said."

"Start with small experiments and test your experiments. If it works, you expand that experiment."

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How Will You Measure Your Life?

I recently read this article by Clayton Christiansen out of Harvard entitled, “How will you measure your life?” It is what he tells his students on the final day of his class.

One of the items that he mentions sticks out to me. It reads as follows:

“One of the theories, . . . . . how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more [people think] that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people."

I’m sure you can see why it sticks out.