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SUCCESS.com SUCCESS BOOK SUMMARIES

SUCCESS PointsIn this book you’ll learn:

• What neuroplasticity is, and how you can use it to create better habits

• How taking tiny actions can add meaning to your life

• How to harness your attention and focus on what matters most

• Why setting aside time for planning and reflection is critical to your success

Free Press © 2011, Allyson Lewis ISBN: 9781451628227 374 pages, $25

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What Is Your Focus?Become intentional about the life you’re creating.

QUICK OVERVIEW Allyson Lewis’s latest book, The 7 Minute Solution, will help you make the most

of your time, but the focus of the book isn’t time management. You won’t learn how to pack more meetings and activities into the day. What you will learn is how to pack more meaning into your life by focusing on your priorities and aligning your actions with your core values.

Blending science with inspiration, Lewis explains how your actions and thoughts can change your brain, which in turn makes it easier to change your life. Step by step, she shares ideas and stories that will help you identify what is most significant to you. When your priorities are clear, the powerful tools and strategies she provides will help you live a life of greater meaning… seven minutes at a time.

Lewis’s book identifies seven “vital signs” or elements that work together to create a meaningful life. This summary focuses on two of those vital signs: conscious awareness and perseverance.

APPLY AND ACHIEVE Allyson Lewis describes the think, write, do process in The 7 Minute Solution. If

you’re a student of personal development, you know your thoughts shape your life. In her book, Lewis recommends not only thinking about what you want in life, but capturing those thoughts on paper.

Writing your goals, dreams, values, priorities and even your to-do list helps clarify your thoughts. Once clarified, you can identify and write down the action steps necessary for turning your ideas into reality. Then, with plan in hand, do the actions you’ve listed. Move through that process on any project or goal and see how quickly you can achieve results.

The 7 Minute Solution Creating a Life with Meaning 7 Minutes at a Time by Allyson Lewis

The 7 Minute Solution


I magine being the first person on an accident scene and finding an injured person. The ABCs of first aid are to see if the person is awake, check for breathing, and then continue care. You shake the person gently and call

out to him. If he doesn’t respond, you watch his chest to see if it rises and falls, you put your hand near his nose and mouth to see if you can feel his breath. You feel his carotid artery to check for a pulse. You check for signs of life.

You may be up and walking around, but that doesn’t mean you’re truly living. Like an accident victim in shock, you may be walking through life in a state of unawareness. Chaos, distraction, interruption, procrastination, stress, and the increasing speed and demands of life squeeze the joy out of life—they can suffocate you before you know it.

It’s time to wake up and focus on what really matters to you. It’s time to check your vital signs. Your heart is designed to pump life-giving blood through your body, but it can’t function properly without oxygen. In the same way, it’s impossible to live the life you were created for if these seven vital signs are not part of your everyday existence. Action without purpose is like a heart without access to adequate oxygen—even if it is able to pump, what it delivers is not as rich or as beneficial as it should be.

Check your vital signs now by asking yourself the following questions. Are You Consciously Aware?

Life is � lled with so much noise that your brain has trouble � ltering out what is really important. The � rst vital sign to check is simple: Are you aware of what you really want from your life? Life will give you exactly what you demand, but � rst you must clarify your ideas in writing and create an action plan. Are You Motivated?

As you ask more of your life, you will discover gaps between where you are today and the person you want to be in the future. Motivation is the force that pushes you to stretch for your goals. By creating ninety-day goals, you will break your ultimate objectives into more quickly achievable mini-goals and experience the thrill of success more often. You’ll also develop a powerful momentum, because, by creating ninety-day goals, you will break up your ultimate obstacles into manageable

pieces and allow yourself to experience success on a regular basis. One win leads to the next. Are You Growing and Learning?

Your brain has incredible potential, but it functions on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. Growing and learning equip you to develop new and better ways to live. Growth is a vital sign, because it is what ignites your enthusiasm for letting go of old habits and routines.

Are You Engaged? Mired in routine, it’s easy to become a fatigued, bored

zombie oblivious to the brilliant opportunities that surround you. Purposefully focusing on your highest-value activities ensures that you are engaged with the people and priorities that matter most—and also primes you to be better poised to take advantage of any new opportunities. Are You Persevering?

Making signi� cant changes requires perseverance. Why? Bad habits are hard to break; they’re comfortable routines to return to, even if you know they’re not good for you. But it’s when you push through the barrier of your comfort zone that you experience amazing growth. Are You Living in a State of Flow?

The term “� ow” here means using your highest skills—your personal gifts and talents—to accomplish your most meaningful challenges. It is about channeling your abilities in a way that leads everything to click and let you know you are experiencing life at its optimal level. Are You Living with Faith?

The vital sign of faith ties together every element of life. Because of faith, you seek a better life—a life � lled with purpose and meaning—and you trust that it exists. Faith compels you to look beyond yourself, to reach out to others, to give of your time, energy, and love.

Your brain has incredible potential, but it functions on a

use-it-or-lose-it basis.



CONSCIOUS AWARENESS You are bombarded with millions of thoughts, ideas,

sights, sounds, smells, and physical inputs every second of your life. Each of these sensations is further impacted by the emotions you experience along with them. Your brain has a sophisticated filter. This filter constantly makes choices about what it will allow to enter your conscious awareness. It makes those choices based on what you think about regularly, what you value as most important, and what you have chosen to pay attention to in the past.

When we haven’t clearly identified what is most important, everything seems important. The constant noise demands our attention and crowds out our time. Rather than living with focused intention, distraction and disorder become the norm. Although you are bombarded with millions of pieces of information every second, you can choose to become consciously aware of how you filter them.

Values plus attention and choice equal conscious awareness. Put another way, conscious awareness is chosen attention. When you carefully begin to choose what you will pay attention to you can begin to walk down the path of a more conscious and meaningful life.

Controlling Your Brain’s Filter When you learn to control your brain’s filter, you

will be able to make conscious choices about what you want to pay attention to and how you can best use your time. These conscious choices are based on your values, priorities, purpose, and life goals. It should make sense that you will choose to pay attention to what is most important to you. The problem for many people is that they haven’t determined what is most important. They’re living passively, taking life as it comes. Without priorities, making choices is like setting your radio on scan and just listening to whatever song comes on the radio. If the scanner stops on a rap station, you listen to rap, even if what you really enjoy is country music.

To change your life, you must tell your brain what to allow to filter into your conscious awareness. It is your

reticular activating system in your brain that continually scans through the sights, smells, sounds, and data that surround you and makes subconscious decisions about what to catch and filter up to your conscious awareness.

Microactions: Tiny Steps Toward Success

All of life is really a series of tiny actions, tiny choices, and tiny decisions I call microactions. Microactions are important because they get us moving. They are a starting point, and they are the difference between being stuck (doing nothing) and moving forward.

Microactions compound. If you accomplish one microaction, such as returning a phone call to help you complete a project, it may not seem like much, but over time a series of deliberate microactions compound into a tipping point.

Microactions can be the difference between mediocrity and excellence. In my own life, the microaction of writing down a short description of purpose resulted in a major change in my personal and professional life. Microactions can take any number of forms, including:

• Outlining your daily plan of action

• Thanking a co-worker for a job well done

• Building time in the day to catch up between meetings

• Being on time or early for every meeting

• Writing two thank-you notes per week

• Reading ten pages of a book

• Getting up fifteen minutes earlier

• Choosing fruit over candy bars

• Drinking more water

Microactions are manageable and easy to accomplish. It is exactly because they are so easy to accomplish that, after only a few days of focusing on them, you will see results.


The exciting news is that you can program your reticular activating system to notice and make you aware of advantageous information, people, and resources that will help you experience the meaning and fulfillment you desire.

We program our reticular activating system with what we think, write, and do. We must consciously focus our attention on what we think, on what we write, and on what we do. The process of “think, write, do” will allow you to turn up the volume on what you want to pay attention to.

Think We experience life through our thoughts. By shaping

our thoughts into words—even if those words remain unspoken—they become real to us. You really do become what you think about moment by moment, day by day, year by year. The pathways in your brain are created by the thoughts you have. Through neuroplasticity, the more you concentrate your attention on a specific thought, the stronger and deeper those connections become. The stronger the connections, the more efficiently your brain becomes at processing them; that is how new habits and attitudes are developed.

Write Thought is important, but creating some way to capture

and clarify your thoughts is possibly a hundredfold more important. Your thoughts need a framework, a structure, and a place to be written down. You must translate and capture your thoughts by writing them down.

Do Finally, you have to do it. Nike made a fortune with the

advertising slogan “Just do it.” The 7 Minute Solution slogan is “Did I do it?” Every day, consider the choices and the actions you took that day and ask, “Did I do what I said I would do today?”

ARE YOU PERSEVERING? Planning, engaging, living with purpose—it all sounds so

easy, so idyllic, until life kicks you in the teeth and knocks you off your feet. Something happens to stop you in your tracks. Suddenly you’re scared, angry, exhausted, or all three at once. In such moments, you face a critical choice:

Will you persevere? Checking the vital sign of perseverance means asking

yourself, “Do I have the grit and determination to move beyond the hard times life brings? When I’m faced with obstacles, will I push forward, or will I quit?”

You need grit. Grit is the secret ingredient that empowers us to move from where we are today to where we want to be tomorrow. Grit is the difference between saying “I’ll try to do it” and saying “I will do it.”

Repetition—performing the right tasks and thinking the right kinds of thoughts over and over again—strengthens the connections in your brain. Eventually, all that repetition makes it easier to make positive choices and take positive action. Perseverance is what makes that repetition possible.

It is this “stick-to-itiveness” that enables you to do what you say you will do and, as a result, become the person you want to be and live the life you desire.

Perseverance is a choice. It is the commitment to following through on what you say you want to do. It means that:

• If you say you want to be in the best shape of your life, you do what it takes to be in the best shape of your life. You exercise, walk, run, lift weights, do cardio, and make the physical effort to improve your health daily.

• If you say you want to renew and restore your faith, you take daily steps to renew and restore your faith. You read, pray, listen, reach out, and serve the world around you.

• If you say you want to be more competent in your work, you work to become more competent. You study, practice, seek out mentors, and hold yourself accountable to your word.

There are people all around you who are doing what you have said you want to do, living the life you dream of, and

You must translate and capture your thoughts by writing

them down.

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accomplishing goals you set for yourself long ago. You can do the same.

Pushing Past the One-Yard Line Perseverance in business separates you from where you are

today and where you want to be in the future. How many projects in life have you started but not finished? How many times have you been swept away by the novelty of a new marketing concept, only to find the file sitting on your desk six months later untouched?

Why is perseverance in business important? Because half done is not well done.

In football, if you are able to run the ball from your own end zone to the one-yard line of the opposing team, you have done a great job of moving the ball ninety-nine yards down the field. Unfortunately, landing on the one-yard line is meaningless unless you have the perseverance to move the ball the final thirty-six inches into the end zone.

Being left on the one-yard line of life is a terrible place to be. You can see your destination. You have overcome all of the obstacles to get you this close. You have persevered to this point, and you definitely don’t want to settle for almost making it!

This last push is where we experience new growth and where we engage in powerful emotions of meeting challenges head-on with everything we have. The one-yard line of life is taking the next step and taking one more step and again one more.

To push through the one-yard line of life, you must begin with recognizing where you are stuck and what is holding you back. You may feel stuck because of your life circumstances. You may feel that you need additional education or a new skill set. Regardless of why you feel stuck, part of becoming unstuck begins with honestly acknowledging what you are thinking and feeling. Only then can you evaluate whether your thoughts and feelings are valid or are simply old, outdated cognitive models that need to be replaced.

Much of what holds you back in life are the self-defeating barriers of inaction, indecision, insecurity, and unpreparedness. The ability to push past the one-yard line usually relies on reviewing the foundational skills that made you so successful in the first place.

Pushing past the one-yard line means breaking out of your habits and ruts and trying a new routine. Like creating an exercise plan or getting to the office first. Or taking a Saturday morning to clean out the physical clutter in your office that has been holding you back. It is time to adopt the “100-yard mindset.” Half done is not done.

Three Types of Attention Focused attention is short term in its effect. You

experience focused attention every time something startles you—a waiter drops a plate in a restaurant, your cell phone rings in a meeting, or there is a knock at your door. This type of attention usually lasts less than eight seconds, and once the event is over you seem to refocus on what you were originally working on.

Sustained attention is the type of attention the 7 Minute Solution will help you improve. Sustained attention requires complete concentration, sustained over time. It enables you to focus your complete attention on a single task at a time without interruption. Sustained attention is what might be called thinking. It happens when you eliminate distractions from your mind and fully concentrate on the task at hand.

Divided attention in today’s workplace is often referred to as multitasking, but what is actually happening is task switching or divided attention. What is the problem with task switching? Divided attention takes more effort. As you quickly switch back and forth from task to task, you have to slightly repeat each task just to get back to where you were.

Regardless of why you feel stuck, part of becoming unstuck begins

with honestly acknowledging what you are thinking and feeling.

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© 2012 SUCCESS Media. All rights reserved. Materials may not be reproduced in whole or in part in any form without prior written permission. Published by SUCCESS Media, 200 Swisher Rd., Lake Dallas, TX 75065, USA. SUCCESS.com. Summarized with the permission of the publisher, Free Press. The 7 Minute Solution by Allyson Lewis. ©2011 by Allyson Lewis.


ACTION STEPS Get more out of this SUCCESS Book Summary by applying what you’ve learned to your life. Here are a few questions and actions to get you started.

1. Take 15 minutes to write down what is most important to you in life. What do you value?

2. Review your list and circle your top 10 core values.

3. Write down your personal mission or purpose statement. What is your life’s purpose? Why are you here?

4. Look at your schedule for the week. How many of the activities on your calendar refl ect your core values or your life’s purpose?

5. Write down your business, fi nancial, family and personal-growth goals for the fi rst quarter of 2012.

6. Review the list of microactions in the sidebar. Which of these (or other, small actions) would move you closer to your personal goals?

7. Look at your to-do list. What have you been putting off? Schedule time to complete at least one lagging project this week.

About the AuthorAllyson Lewis is a time-management and

productivity expert who works with major

corporations and individuals alike to help them

clarify their goals and establish habits that support

their priorities. Author of four books—The 7 Minute

Solution, The 7 Minute Life™ Daily Planner, The 7

Minute Difference and The Million Dollar Car and

$250,000 Pizza—Lewis has trained thousands of

people in cities throughout the country, including New

York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston,

Dallas, Orlando, Baltimore and San Juan. Recognized

as an opinion leader, Lewis has been a guest on CNN

and Bloomberg Information TV. She is a monthly

columnist for MorningstarAdvisor.com and has

appeared in a broad range of national publications,

such as Investors Business Daily, The Chicago Sun

Times, The Los Angeles Times, Advisor Today and

Family Circle magazine.

Recommended Reading

If you enjoyed the summary of The 7 Minute Solution, you may also want to check out:

Clutter Busting: Letting Go of What’s Holding You Back by Brooks Palmer

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Dan Pink

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experienceby Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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