QL Mindset Resources

STORIES

Contents

Pg 8 - Whose life are you leading? .................................................................................................. 4

Story: Gary biting his fingernails ................................................................................................. 4

Pg 12 – It’s All About Small Movements ......................................................................................... 5

Story: The Apollo Rocket ............................................................................................................. 5

Pg 14 – Thoughts Always Comes First............................................................................................. 6

Story: Alfred Hitchcock ................................................................................................................ 6

Pg 18 - Time Waits For No One ....................................................................................................... 7

Story: Gary’s Mother-in-Law Saving Fabric ................................................................................. 7

Story: Making Up For Lost Time .................................................................................................. 7

Pg 20 – Balance Is Bunk................................................................................................................... 9

Story: Strengths vs. Weaknesses ................................................................................................. 9

Pg 22 – The Dilemma .................................................................................................................... 10

Story: #1 Regret of the Dying .................................................................................................... 10

Pg 24 – Your Mind Map ................................................................................................................ 11

Story: Gary Keller’s Productivity Model .................................................................................... 11

Pg 30 – What does success look like? ........................................................................................... 12

Story: Miserable Attorney ......................................................................................................... 12

Story: Mother Teresa ................................................................................................................ 12

Story: $50M Lottery Winner ..................................................................................................... 12

Pg 36 – Crush It on Your 20% ........................................................................................................ 13

Story: Vilfredo Pareto – Pareto’s Principle................................................................................ 13

Story: George Zipf – Principle of Least Effort ............................................................................ 13

Story: IBM – Operating Code .................................................................................................... 13

Pg 66 – Multitasking Saves Time ................................................................................................... 14

Story: Research of Clifford Nass (The ONE Thing, p.43) ........................................................... 14

Story: Juggling Is an Illusion (The ONE Thing, p.47) .................................................................. 14

Pg 68 – Willpower is Always on Will-Call ...................................................................................... 15

Story: Bab Shiv’s Research (The ONE Thing, p.65) .................................................................... 15

Story: Israeli Parole System (The ONE Thing, p.68) .................................................................. 15

Pg 106 – The Truth About Money ................................................................................................. 17

Story: Elvis Presley’s Graceland ................................................................................................. 17

Pg 8 - Whose life are you leading?

Story: Gary biting his fingernails

I’m going to ask you a very simple question. Whose life are you leading and how do you know?

Because whenever I ask this question to people, whose life are you leading, they automatically

go well my life, you fool. Why would you even ask that question? I go really? Prove it to me.

And I’ll give you an example of why I ask the question. When I was in college like you, I looked

down one day and I was biting my fingernails. Okay. Now is that a good or a bad habit?

I had this out of body experience where I thought, “I’m biting my fingernails; why am I doing

that? That’s disgusting.” I looked and I went, why am I doing that? Right? Why am I doing

that? I find myself like a month later back at home around the kitchen table with my family and

I looked over and it was the weirdest experience. I saw my dad and he had his fingers crammed

in his mouth and he was biting his fingernails. And for the first time I saw my father’s hands.

And they were just nubs. And I went “Oh my gosh. I bite my fingernails because I grew up with a

fingernail biter.” I’m not leading my life. Not in the way I thought. I’m actually a byproduct of

my environment.

That was, that was a mind blower for me. That was the beginning of awakening for me where I

looked up and I went, hold it. I need to be a little more intentional and purposeful. Do I want to

bite my fingernails? I stopped and I’ve never bitten them since. And I am in control. It wasn’t

easy to stop, by the way. But it kind of became a symbol for me. It became a symbol for me that

I am leading my life dang gone it. I’m leading it. Okay? So today we’re going to talk about how

we’re going to lead our life and to do that we’re going to have to be intentional. (Gary Keller

Transcripts)

Pg 12 – It’s All About Small Movements

Story: The Apollo Rocket

Did you know that an Apollo rocket is actually on course only two or three percent of the time?

At least 97% of the time it takes to get from the earth to the moon, it’s off course. Put another

way, for every half hour the ship is in flight, it is on course for less than sixty seconds.

This is a nice anecdote in relation to how important it is to keep correcting your own course in

life. Have a destination in mind, but keep checking if you are on course.

Pg 14 – Thoughts Always Comes First

Story: Alfred Hitchcock

Someone asked Alfred Hitchcock once, “How do you make such great movies?” And he says it’s

real simple. He said, “I visualize the movie frame by frame in my mind and then when I film,

filming is an afterthought.” Your whole life’s an afterthought. Your whole life is an

afterthought.

Your whole, your entire life will be an afterthought. So what does that tell you? What comes

first? Action or thought? Thought. Show do we start in building the incredible you? By

impacting what you think. (Gary Keller Transcripts)

Pg 18 - Time Waits For No One

Story: Gary’s Mother-in-Law Saving Fabric

Let me tell you a story. My wife’s mother, was a school teacher. The last year of her teaching

career, my wife says, was the most stressful year of her life and the next year she got cancer.

She retired and then she passed away. Now here is what’s interesting about that.

Growing up, my wife says she would go to the fabric story and they would buy fabric and

patterns. And then she would go to her closet and she would put the fabric and the patterns in

the closet. This was her someday closet.

“When I retire, I’m going to pull all this out. This is kind of my hope chest if you

will. I’m going to pull it all out. I’m going to make the clothes and we’ve saved

our money and we’re going to, we’re going to travel and see the world.”

They never did any of that. She died. When my wife went home to help her father clean, what’d

she discover? The closet. Yeah she opened it up and it was an emotional experience when she

opened the closet up and there were all the patterns and all the fabric untouched.

Now her father whom I did know who passed away a few years ago, couldn’t spend the money

because he didn’t feel like it was his. He felt guilty the rest of his life over the fact that he lived

and had the money and she died and never got to spend it. He didn’t spend it. He wouldn’t

spend it. Would not spend it on himself. It wasn’t an amazing amount of money but he would

not spend it. He died having not spent it.

If you think there are promises on this planet that you’ll be alive tomorrow, that’s foolish. You

have no guarantee. One day you will wake up and it will be your last day. (Gary Keller

Transcripts)

Story: Making Up For Lost Time

I remember interviewing a guy for a business position and I caught him on vacation on his cell

phone out. He had just come in off a new sailboat he had bought for his family. Very rich man.

Very successful. And we were talking about a business deal.

I’m thinking to myself, you’re on vacation and you’re on the phone talking to me. That’s foolish.

What are you doing that for? I’m going, you got to be kidding me, right? But what was

interesting is the statement he made to me.

He says, well you know, I spent the last ten years working and I missed everything and I’m now

you know, making up for lost time. And I’m thinking to myself he’s got these teenage kids,

right? And I’m thinking to myself, I don’t know how you make up missing a five year old’s

birthday party. How do you make that up? You don’t get that back. You’re either in the

photograph or you’re not. You don’t get it back. You weren’t there. You don’t get it back. You

miss the little league game, you missed it. You don’t make up for it later. Trust me. You don’t

make up for it. We didn’t do business together. I don’t buy into that. (Gary Keller Transcripts)

Pg 20 – Balance Is Bunk

Story: Strengths vs. Weaknesses

Workforces Devoted to Weaknesses Are Dangerous "Gallup has studied the most successful people in the world, and we've found that they are not

well-rounded individuals," said Paul Allen, Gallup Strengths Evangelist, July 24 in Arlington,

Virginia, at the Next Generation of Government Training Summit for new and rising leaders in

government. "Instead, they are people who discovered that they had natural talent for

something at a very young age. They concentrated on that, invested in it, and turned that raw

talent into strength."

When you accept that nature gave you incredible talents and choose a career that allows you to

use them -- and if you have a manager who lets you play to those talents -- you can achieve

some amazing things. Instead, most managers want us to work on what we're terrible at until

we rise to the point of mediocrity. Perhaps that's why we tend to become less and less engaged

as we age. As Allen says, 76% of fifth graders are emotionally and intellectually engaged in their

work, but that number dwindles to 61% in ninth grade, 44% in 12th grade, and 30% among

adults.

Pg 22 – The Dilemma

Story: #1 Regret of the Dying

Bronnie Ware, and Australian nurse, spent more than a decade counseling dying people. Over

that time span, she began recording the top regrets that people have on their death bed. After

12 years, she concluded that the most common regret of all was this:

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others

expected of me.”

Pg 24 – Your Mind Map

Story: Gary Keller’s Productivity Model

Putting in the time doesn’t equate to productivity. Time is not money. People say all the time,

time is money. How you use the time is money. You can be busy or you can be productive.

They’re not the same thing. Most of the adults that I hang out with are mildly productive.

They’re not that productive. What I mean by that is they have not established clear goals for

what they want to do and then begin making it a priority to get those things done. That would

be the definition of productivity. Having a goal and achieving it is productive.

So essentially what you hear me saying is it starts out with making a decision about life and how

to be productive in life. When we get that done, let’s jump in there and drive that through our

personal life and our business relationships. And then drive that through money. Does that

make sense? So there’s an order to this conversation. We don’t want to go have a conversation

about financial or business productivity before we have the conversation about life and

personal productivity. Because this is the setup. First you maximize your life meaning potential,

then your career potential, then your potential through others, which is business, and then

your potential through money. It’s who am I, what am I going to do, what are we going to do,

and what is my money going to do?

This is a continuum of your life. I don’t want you to pass go until we get life productivity down.

When we’ve done that, we can add personal productivity. So you take who you are and you go

out to do something with your career. Then we’re going to take that and we’re going to

succeed through others and we just add a few things. So understand what’s happening here is

addition. We’re not leaving anything behind. And a really cool a-ha that kids have is if you

notice when you get to business productivity, what you point out is, after you’ve hired

someone, you immediately turn around and help them do one and two. If someone reports to

you, immediately you want to have a goal, a plan, a 411, time blocking and accountability. And

since you already do that, you understand how to do it. (Gary Keller Transcripts)

Pg 30 – What does success look like?

Story: Miserable Attorney

A law student graduates at the top of her class and is recruited to the most prestigious law firm,

but truthfully she doesn’t like law at all and only pursued it because she was pressured into it

by well-intentioned family members. Is she successful?

Story: Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic

congregation of women dedicated to helping the poor. She taught in India for 17 years before

she experienced her "call within a call", in 1946, to devote herself to caring for the sick and

poor. Her order established a hospice; centers for the blind, aged, and disabled; and a leper

colony. In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work. She was widely

admired for her charitable works and widely criticized for opposing both abortion and

contraception. She also received criticism for substandard conditions in the hospices for which

she was responsible. Was Mother Teresa successful?

Story: $50M Lottery Winner

A thirty-year-old father of two had been a sanitation worker for the past 12 years when he won

the lottery. After winning he quit his job, bought a big house and a nice car, and now spends his

time fishing and traveling the world with his family. Is he successful?

Pg 36 – Crush It on Your 20%

Story: Vilfredo Pareto – Pareto’s Principle

The Pareto principle, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, specifies an unequal relationship

between inputs and outputs. The principle states that, for many phenomena, 20% of invested

input is responsible for 80% of the results obtained. Put another way, 80% of consequences

stem from 20% of the causes.

This principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is

not balanced. For instance, the efforts of 20% of a corporation's staff could drive 80% of the

firm's profits. In terms of personal time management, 80% of your work-related output could

come from only 20% of your time at work.

Story: George Zipf – Principle of Least Effort

In 1949, George K. Zipf, a Harvard professor, discovered the “Principle of Least Effort”, which

was a re-discovery and elaboration of Pareto’s Principle. Zipf’s principle said that “resources

(people, goods, time, skills…) tended to arrange themselves so as to minimize work, so that

approximately 20-30% of any resource accounted for 70-80% of the activity related to that

resource.

When applied to self-mastery, we can restate the “Principle of Least Effort” as the “Principle of

Greatest Leverage”.

Story: IBM – Operating Code

In 1963, IBM discovered that about 80% of a computer’s time is spent executing about 20% of

the operating code. The company immediately rewrote its operating software to make the

most-used 20% very accessible and user friendly, thus making IBM computers more efficient

and faster than competitors’ machines for the major applications.

Pg 66 – Multitasking Saves Time

Story: Research of Clifford Nass (The ONE Thing, p.43)

In the summer of 2009, Clifford Nass set out to find out how well so-called multitaskers

multitasked. Nass, a professor at Stanford University told the New York Times that he had been

“in awe” of multitaskers and deemed himself to be a poor one. So he and his team of

researched gave 262 students questionnaires to determine how often they multitasked. They

divided their test subjects into two groups of high and low multitaskers and began with the

presumption that the frequent multitaskers would perform better. They were wrong.

“I was sure they had some secret ability,” said Nass. “But it turns out that high multitaskers are

suckers for irrelevancy.” They were outperformed on every measure. Although they’d

convinced themselves and the world that they were great at it, there was just one problem. To

quote Nass, “Multitaskers were just lousy at everything.”

Story: Juggling Is an Illusion (The ONE Thing, p.47)

Juggling isn’t multitasking. Juggling is an illusion. To the casual observer, a juggler is juggling

three balls at once. In reality, the balls are being independently caught and thrown in rapid

succession. Catch, toss, catch, toss, catch, toss. One ball at a time. It’s what researchers refer to

as “task switching.”

When you switch from one task to another, voluntarily or not, two things happen. The first is

nearly instantaneous: you decide to switch. The second is less predictable: you have to activate

the “rules” for whatever you’re about to do. Switching between two simple tasks – like

watching television and folding clothes – is quick and relatively painless. However, if you’re

working on a spreadsheet and a co-worker pops into your office to discuss a business problem,

the relative complexity of those tasks makes it impossible to easily jump back and forth. It

always takes some time to start a new task and restart the one you quit, and there’s no

guarantee that you’ll ever pick up exactly where you left off. There is a price for this. “The cost

in terms of extra time from having to task switch depends on how complex or simple the tasks

are,” reports researcher Dr. David Meyer. “It can range from time increases of 25 percent of

less for simple tasks to well over 100 percent or more for very complicated tasks.” Task

switching exacts a cost few realize they’re even paying.

Pg 68 – Willpower is Always on Will-Call

Story: Bab Shiv’s Research (The ONE Thing, p.65)

Stanford University professor Bab Shiv’s research shows just how fleeting our willpower can be.

He divided 165 undergraduate students into two groups and asked them to memorize either a

two-digit or a seven-digit number. Both tasks were well within the average person’s cognitive

abilities, and they could take as much time as they needed. Then they were ready, students

would then go to another room where they would recall the number. Along the way, they were

offered a snack for participating in the study. The two choices were chocolate cake or a bow of

fruit salad – guilty pleasure or healthy treat. Here’s the kicker: students asked to memorize the

seven-digit number were nearly twice as likely to choose cake. This tiny extra cognitive load was

just enough to prevent a prudent choice.

The implications are staggering. The more we use our mind, the less minding power we have.

Willpower is like a fast-twitch muscle that gets tired and needs rest. It’s incredibly powerful, but

it has no endurance.

Story: Israeli Parole System (The ONE Thing, p.68)

One of the real challenges we have is that when our willpower is low we tend to fall back on our

default settings. Researchers Jonathan Levav of the Stanford School of Business in California,

along with Liora Avnaim-Pesso and Shai Danziger of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, found

a creative way to investigate this. They took a hard look at the impact of willpower on the

Israeli parole system.

The researchers analyzed 1,112 parole board hearings assigned to eight judges over a ten-

month period (which incidentally amounted to 40 percent of Israel’s total parole requests over

that period.) The pace is grueling. The judges hear arguments and take about six minutes to

render a decision on 14-35 parole requests a day, and they get only two breaks – a morning

snack and late lunch – to rest and refuel. The impact of their schedule is a s spectacular as it is

surprising: In the mornings and after each break, parolees’ chances for being released peak at

65 percent, and then plunge to near zero by the end of each period.

The results are most likely tied to the mental tool of repetitive decision making. These are big

decisions for the parolees and the public at large. High stakes and the assembly-line rhythm

demand intense focus throughout the day. As their energy is spent, judges mentally collapse

into their “default choice,” which doesn’t turn out so well for hopeful prisoners. The default

decision for a parole judge is no. When in doubt and willpower is low, the prisoner stays behind

bars.

And if you’re not careful, your default settings may convict you too.

When our willpower runs out, we all revert to our default settings. This begs the question:

What are your default settings? If your willpower is dragging, will you grab the bag of carrots or

the bag of chips? Will you be up for focusing on the work at hand or down for any distraction

that drops in? When your most important work is done while your willpower wanes, default

will define your level of achievement.

Pg 106 – The Truth About Money

Story: Elvis Presley’s Graceland

Money will not change you. It will reveal you. Elvis Presley had no taste. When he got a lot of

money, he built Graceland. Go look at it. It’s obscenely horrible. Okay? Because he had no

taste. Just go to the jungle room. Jeepers, man. People who don’t understand money will go,

man they got money. It changed them. No, they were always like that. They just didn’t have the

money to display it. They said well money made them greedy. No, they were greedy. They were

just broke and greedy. The second they got money, they displayed it. They were miserly when

they got money. No, they were miserly before they had money. When they had enough money,

then you saw it. Be real clear about that. Money and old age reveal you. That’s just the way it

goes. It’s going to expose you. (Gary Keller Transcripts)