12 Leadership Books to Add to Your Reading List | Success.com

To become an influencer, never stop being a learner. 

No matter your business, leadership style or level of experience, there is a book that will inspire you, make you think differently and help you stir change where it’s needed.

Related: 25 Books for Success

We asked members of Young Presidents’ Organization for their top book recommendations and received everything from autobiographies to how-to’s, ancient scriptures to rap-lyric management.

Their responses show there is truly no single path to influential leadership.

1. Strategy Rules

David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano’s new book, Strategy Rules, examines five timeless lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Steve Jobs.

—Ian Halfon, managing director of Slick Restaurant Group

2. The Breakthrough Company

As an entrepreneur, The Breakthrough Company really speaks to me. It uncovers what it takes to build your startup to the next level and references the value of YPO’s networking and forum, which I found interesting and relatable.

—Ryan Gregg, managing partner of Underground Printing Group

3. The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg discusses how we should, as much as possible, build habits into our day so we don’t spend time making small decisions and can instead focus our energy on decisions we need to make.

—Joelle Goudsmit, president of Dimension-All Formworks and Scaffoldings

4. Creativity, Inc.

I thought Creativity, Inc. was very insightful about building a culture of creativity.

—Kelly Mooney, CEO of Resource

5. The E-Myth

Since I’m a small-business guy, I love Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth. It really helped me understand the concept of working on my business, not in it, and showed me how to set up procedures from day one that would last a decade or more.

—Jason Robbins CEO and president of ePromos Promotional Products

6. Traction

Traction by Gino Wickman helped me run our business much more effectively. It helped us have a clearer mission, accountability, efficient meetings, better interaction and much more. We hired a consultant to help us implement the concepts and it made a huge difference.

—Jamin Arvig, founder and CEO of US Water Filters

7. Talent Masters

Talent Masters by Ram Charan and Bill Conaty is about hiring and nurturing the right talent to grow your business. What impressed me was the lucid writing style and case studies collected from around the world. Good human resources make the biggest difference for a successful venture.

—Ramana Prasad, managing director of Hivelm Switchgear

8. Switch

I really enjoyed Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s about the psychology and science of change and emphasizing change within people. If there is something in yourself or your organization you’d like to change, the steps to doing so may be less intuitive than you think.

—Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments

9. The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The introduction to every chapter in The Hard Thing About Hard Things are lyrics from a rap song that relate to management and leadership. I found it both charming and real. The advice throughout the book comes from captains of industry with proven methods on a variety of topics I struggle with. Many of these founders and leaders have used solutions in the book to solve real problems that speak to me.

—Jenene Ronick, founder and CEO of Luxury Attaché

10. Our Iceberg Is Melting

In Our Iceberg Is Melting, John Kotter has thoughtfully and cleverly explained his model for effecting major and sustainable organizational change through a compelling and accessible parable. He tells the story of a young penguin who believes his clan’s iceberg is melting and will collapse with everyone inside it. The young penguin masterfully builds support to move to another iceberg by executing Kotter’s eight-step change management strategy. As I’ve worked on systemic change to the broken U.S. healthcare system, I found this book instructive and engaging.

—Richard (Rick) Kimball, founder of HEXL

11. Shrimad Bhagavad Geeta

Shrimad Bhagavad Geeta is a very spiritual book based on ancient Indian philosophy. The focus is on karma and the significance of one’s actions. It provides spiritual guidance that can be applied to the modern workplace. For example, it encourages focusing on the work and task at hand, not on results. It is something I always tell my team to do; positive output will happen, but they need to focus on input first.

—Shailesh Chaturvedi, managing director and CEO of Tommy Hilfiger India

12. Daring Greatly

I found Daring Greatly to be eye-opening and thought-provoking on the power of vulnerability.

—Kelly Mooney, CEO of Resource

What do you think?  What books would you recommend?  Let us know below!

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Becoming Unoffendable: How To Deal With Insults | Niall Doherty

“Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed.Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.” – Marcus Aurelius

I was at a busy library in London a few weeks back when a quirky, middle-aged lady started chatting to me. About three minutes into the conversation she commented on the grand size of my nose. And then she poked at it once with her finger while laughing.

A few years ago, such an incident would have really upset me. I would have turned bright red and cursed that woman under my breath. Then I would have spent the rest of the day secretly seething, and feeling very self-conscious about my appearance.

But what actually happened a few weeks back was this: Nothing.

What I once would have perceived as an insult had no effect on me whatsoever. 
The conversation soon ended and I went on about my day quite happily.

Last week in Munich I had another (albeit small) opportunity to take offense, when a German chap mistakenly identified me as an Englishman…

– I’m actually from Ireland.

– Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.

– [smiling] Don’t worry, it’s very hard to offend me.

Tis true. It is very hard to offend me nowadays. In this post I want to share with you the type of mindset I’ve developed that makes me pretty much immune to insults.

And then you can go post nasty accusations in the comments to test me out.

Refusing gifts

There’s a story about the Buddha that I like to keep in mind.

There was a man who constantly harassed and insulted the Buddha, throwing all sorts of verbal abuse at him. But the Buddha never seemed fazed by this. When someone asked why he didn’t take offense, he simply replied…

If someone gives you a gift and you refuse to accept it, to whom does the gift belong?

Last week in Frankfurt I was writing part of this very post while waiting for a train. An American woman approached and asked me for some spare change. When I returned a polite-but-firm no, she called me a jerk and moved on.

That was her gift, and I refused to accept it. I shook off the insult and got right back to work as if nothing had happened.

You always have a choice

I also like to keep in mind the words of Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search For Meaning.
Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and went on to found logotherapy. In the book, he recounts his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. He writes of the guards taking everything away from the prisoners, all of their human freedoms, in an effort to crush their spirit and destroy their will. But Frankl came to the realization that there was one thing that could not be taken away from him: his freedom to choose his reaction to what was happening to him. As Frankl himself put it:

Between stimulus and response lies man’s greatest power: the power to choose.

It’s easy to blame others for our misgivings.

— It’s his fault this happened!

— If only my boss wasn’t such a condescending bitch!

— I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those pesky kids!

I see that as surrendering your power to choose. Even if you find yourself in a terrible situation, or if someone throws the mother of all insults your way, you still get to choose your response. Nobody can take away that power from you, but too often we surrender it ourselves.

Standing up for yourself

I should clarify that I’m not advocating you sit back and let people insult you repeatedly without response (sorry, Buddha). You have to stand up for yourself every now and then, lest folks start taking advantage of you and your unoffendability.

I was in a hostel in Munich last week, sharing a room with three other people. One of them had a real knack for waking me up. It was like he’d been preparing his whole life for that one task. He’d get up at 5am, turn on the light, and start making all sorts of noise as he got ready for the day, seemingly oblivious to the fact that there were other people in the room trying to sleep.

The first morning I let it go, choosing not to take offense. But the second morning, when it became apparent that this guy wasn’t going to figure out the whole empathy thing on his own, I called him on it. If I hadn’t, I knew I would have carried the resentment around with me for the rest of the day, and probably would have bitched about the guy behind his back.

Too many of us do this, methinks. We whine and complain about how other people mistreat us, but we never actually say anything to the offenders. Whining and complaining is pretty pointless in general, but it also becomes spineless when you haven’t brought up the issue with the offender first.

So, if you ever have cause to take issue with someone or something, instead of getting offended, take action to rectify the situation. If you’re watching a movie that sucks, stop watching and go do something else. If someone pisses you off, call them on it.

And if you can’t call them on it for whatever reason, the smart choice is to distance yourself from that person, or just learn to accept their behavior. No good comes from enduring an annoyance and building up all kinds of secret resentment.

The Stoic approach to insult management

I recently read a great book about Stoicism as a practical philosophy of life. There was a whole chapter on how to deal with insults. I’ll share with you here a few of my key takeaways.

Let’s say someone insults you intentionally. Their goal is to upset you. The best way to handle that is to simply refuse to become upset. This not only stumps your insulter, but it also makes them feel completely powerless. It’s like someone trying to kill you by shooting you point blank in the chest. How do you think they’d feel if the bullet just bounced off, superman style, and you responded with nothing more than a raised eyebrow?

If someone is trying to hurt you with an insult, it can also help to imagine that they’re a child. Because, really, such insults are childish. If you’re at a friend’s dinner party and his 3-year-old son comes up to you and calls you a poo poo head, you’re probably going to look at him in amusement, maybe ruffle his hair and then return to the adult conversation. You wouldn’t take the insult seriously.

Unless, that is, you are actually a poo poo head, and not all that comfortable being one.

Which brings me to another point: Sometimes we find ourselves taken aback by insults because there’s some truth to them, because they poke at our insecurities. Like if you’re losing your hair and someone makes a bald joke at your expense. In such a scenario, realize that your reaction says more about you than it does about the severity of the insult. If you have a solid foundation of self-assurance and are comfortable with your appearance, you won’t take offense.

See, if you’re really sensitive about your hair loss, that’s entirely your issue to deal with. Instead of wishing people would stop mentioning your receding hairline (out of your control), you could just learn to be comfortable rocking the bald dome (within your control).

“Anytime we think the problem is ‘out there,’ that thought is the problem.” – Stephen Covey

Likewise, if someone calls you fat and you get offended by it, I suspect that you’re not truly comfortable with your weight. Instead of resenting that person, you should use their words as a launch pad for exploring your relationship with your body, and making it a healthier one.

The Stoics actually welcomed insults, for two reasons.

The first is best summed up by these words from Antisthenes (who was technically a Cynic and not a Stoic, but I digress)…

“Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.”

The idea here is that insults can act as signposts. If there’s a grain of truth to them, then they help point us in the direction of our faults and insecurities, and we can get busy working on those and improving ourselves.

The second reason Stoics welcomed insults was because they believed they helped build a kind of immunity against criticism. A man who has been criticized regularly in the past is likely to shrug off future insults as no big deal, while a man who has never been insulted before will surely be left reeling when someone first likens him to donkey appendage.

Along these lines, a Stoic named Cato purposely used to go against the norms of fashion in ancient Rome, shunning the popular light purple tunic in favor of simpler, darker attire. As explained in the aforementioned book…

Cato did this not because he “sought vainglory”; on the contrary, he dressed differently in order to accustom himself “to be ashamed only of what was really shameful, and to ignore men’s low opinion of other things.”

This mindset has definitely proven beneficial to me. I used to get upset by negative comments here on the blog, or by people disagreeing with me. But not so much anymore.

I encourage folks to put themselves out there online, and in the real world, because you learn how to deal with other people not liking with you, or disagreeing with you, or thinking you’re a complete asshole. I believe it’s important to learn how to handle that. You’re inviting criticism, sure, but I see it as hardening myself against criticism, building a thicker skin.

Again, imagine the guy who never puts himself out there, never puts himself in a position to be criticized. What happens when he falls into an unavoidable situation where criticism is inevitable?

Easy: He crumbles.

It’s (usually) nothing to do with you

Nowadays I tend to feel sorry for people who insult me. Granted, pity isn’t always my initial reaction, but give me a few seconds and I can usually reign myself in and realize that I don’t have to take offense.

Some people seem to be put out by the fact that I don’t drink, and they act a little shitty towards me because of it. I met a girl in England who openly mocked me about not drinking, and I understood perfectly once I saw her realtionship with alcohol. It wasn’t healthy, and she knew it. My teetotalling ways shone an unflattering light on her drinking habits, and she resented me for that. The quick and easy way for her to feel better about herself was to write me off as a weirdo, worthy of her best insults.

I once parted ways with a girlfriend, and a few months later she told me she was glad we broke up because I was “too free thinking and in love with the world.” She wasn’t being cruel — I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean it as an insult at all — but those words really hurt me at the time. Being free thinking and in love with the world are two of my favorite things about myself, and there was someone telling me that they disliked those qualities.

It took me a while, but I eventually came to realize that those words said more about my ex than they did about me. As long as I was happy with my world-loving, free-thinking ways, it didn’t much matter what she thought.

With that realization, I was able to let go of the hurt.

F*ck, and such

Some of us insist on getting really offended by profanities, like the word fuck. As my buddy Trevor notes, this makes little sense…

The only reason [some] words are bad is because we MAKE them bad… some people have chosen to interpret the noise of the air pressure of the consonant f, followed by the vocal chords making an uh, then more air pressure of the consonants ck, as poison to their ears.

And that’s really what it comes down to: a choice. Nobody can offend you without your permission. If you choose to interpret a word as offensive, that’s entirely your business.
Some people get upset when I use naughty words on this blog, or when I write about taboo subjects. Or they’ll get offended just because my opinion is different to theirs. And to those people I say: You do realize that thousands of children in the world are needlessly starving to death every day, right? If you’re going to take offense to something, I recommend you start there, not with what some random dude writes on the Internet, that little thing you disagree with, or wish your sensitive eyes hadn’t seen.
Stephen Fry said it best…

“If I had a large amount of money I should found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily”

(It must be noted though that Mr. Fry surely has accumulated a large fortune at this stage, yet still no such hospital. Color me disappointed.)

Now, all that said, I don’t advocate people go around shouting profanities from the rooftops. Best be considerate and refrain from asking little old ladies how their motherf*cking day is going.

Practical steps for dealing with insults

Alright, I feel a bit of a summation is in order. Here’s a step-by-step approach to dealing with insults that I’ve found particularly effective.

1. Pause

When someone throws an insult your way, the first thing you need to do is take a moment. Just breathe. Don’t respond right away. Most people immediately let their lizard brain loose to respond to insults, fighting fire with fire, and that’s how they get themselves in trouble and say or do things they later regret.

So take a moment. With time and practice, that moment will become shorter, because you’ll train yourself to instinctively respond in an appropriate manner.

2. Consider the intent

Don’t even worry about whether there’s any truth to the insult just yet. Consider the intent instead. If you can figure that out, it’s easier to come up with an appropriate response.

3. Respond

If the other person is intentionally trying to insult you, or at least that’s what you suspect, there are a few things you can do.

One is to just completely ignore the insult, to pretend you didn’t even hear it. Just act like whatever was said isn’t even worth acknowledging because it’s so ridiculous.

But there is a danger to that. As noted earlier, sometimes you need to stand up for yourself and call someone out when they insult you. Because if you don’t, they may receive the message that you’re a pushover, willing to be their verbal punching bag whenever they need someone to pick on.

My approach is to ignore the first insult. If that doesn’t work, and the person persists in trying to insult me, then I call them out. You can say something like, “Yeah, I heard you the first time.” Say it while looking them in the eye and with an amused look on your face, and hold that for a few seconds before going on to talk about something else.

Another way to call them out is to name the game. Ask them, “You wouldn’t be trying to offend me now, would you?” Or say, “Wow, my view on that really makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”

Again, you remain calm and appear as though you’re amused by the childish game they’re playing. Because insults are a childish game after all, and you’re above that. So let 
them know.

You can also respond to an insult with self-deprecation. If someone tries to make a joke at your expense, you add to the joke. Again, you’re sending the message that you can’t be messed with, that you don’t take offense to silly things.

4. Contemplate

Here’s where we switch from talking about outer response to inner response. Inner is more important, because on the outside you can fake a good response to an insult, or a good non-response, but you may end up secretly seething about it for months or even years afterwards.

And that’s not good. You don’t just want to appear unoffendable. You actually want to be unoffendable.

As mentioned, I don’t worry about whether there’s any truth to the insult when it happens (unless it’s an obvious falsehood and I can easily dismiss it). Instead, I focus on delivering an appropriate response and save the contemplation for later, usually when I’m alone and have adequate time to think. Only then will I consider if the insult actually has any basis in reality, and if it points to an issue I need to address. If not, I can just forget about it.

I’ve found that nowadays it’s almost impossible for me to get offended by false accusations. I’m secure enough in myself and I live in line with my values. If someone tells me I’m a terrible person, I know it’s not true.

And if there is some truth to an insult fired my way, I take that Stoic approach and try use it to my advantage. Not only does it help me discover parts of myself I need to work on, but it’s also good practice for handling whatever future criticism the world sends my way.

How do you handle insults?

This was a pretty long and comprehensive post, but I’m sure you fine folks can teach me a thing or two about handling insults via the comments. Have at ’em. 

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You Have One Life. Live It. | Sherry McConkey | TEDxUniversityofNevada

After the tragic death of her husband Shane in 2009, Sherry McConkey had to change in order to continue to thrive. 

Shane McConkey, regarded as the most influential skier in the world, believed that if you have the courage to be authentic, anything is possible.  In this very authentic talk, Sherry discusses how the legacy of Shane empowers her daily to discover a new and better version of herself.

Let me know what you think below!

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The Neuroscience of Perseverance | Christopher Bergland

Dopamine Reinforces the Habit of Perseverence.  

Perseverance separates the winners from the losers in both sports and life. Are you someone who perseveres despite difficulties and setbacks, or do you tend to throw in the towel and call it quits when faced with a challenge or adversity? What makes some people able to keep pushing and complete a task while others habitually fizzle and don't follow through?

Dopamine is the fuel that keeps people motivated to persevere and achieve a goal. You have the power to increase your production of dopamine by changing your attitude and behavior.  Scientists have identified higher levels of dopamine -- also known as the "reward molecule" -- as being linked to forming lifelong habits, such as perseverance.

Neuroscientists have known for years that dopamine is linked to positive behavior reinforcement and the 'ding, ding, ding' jackpot feeling you get when you accomplish a goal. Recently they have also discovered the specific receptors that link dopamine directly to the formation of good and bad habits.

A study released on December 22, 2011 found that key receptors for dopamine function like 'gateways' that are essential to enable habit formation. "Dopamine neurons regulate circuits all over the brain but they need to be regulated too," said Dr. Joe Z. Tsien, Co-Director of the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute at Georgia Health Sciences University.  Dr. Tsien says that this discovery opens the door to speeding up the process of forming good habits and, possibly, selectively removing bad ones such as drug addiction or smoking since the same circuits are seemingly involved in both.

Part of my work with The Athlete's Way is to make neuroscientific knowledge a tool that can be used to create behavioral changes in your life. Currently I am fine tuning the message to help get teens and pre-teens self-motivated to be more physically active. In this article I will give people of all ages a simple prescriptive of ways to trigger the release of dopamine. I will show you seven simple ways to tap your brain's internal 'pharmacy' and trigger dopamine production on demand so that you can create a habit of perseverance. Perseverance is the key to success in sports, competition and life.

WHY IS PERSEVERANCE SO IMPORTANT TO YOUR SUCCESS?

On a recent trip to Boston, I had the opportunity to talk about personality traits that lead to changing behavioral habits with an Associate Professor of Exercise and Health Sciences at U Mass Boston named Jean Wiecha, who is also the Director of the GoKids program there. Dr. Wiecha has been conducting community-based research on child health for 20 years.  Her work has focused on childhood obesity and environmental and policy influences on nutrition, diet, and physical activity.

Jean Wiecha and her team are taking the emphasis off talk of "obesity" and shifting it to empowering kids to want be healthy because they learn to love the feelings and consequences of being physically active and eating better.  The biggest pay-off isn't simply the shedding of pounds or lowering BMI, it is the broad spectrum of improvements that activity and health brings to their personal and academic lives. Dr. Wiecha and her team are focused on finding ways to help teens and pre-teens improve health, wellness, overall outlook and to stay in school--not just losing weight.

Dr. Wiecha's crystal clear blue eyes sparkled and her face lit up as she told stories of the metamorphases she has witnessed with teens and pre-teens in her program. She has seen hundreds of kids transform their lives through the GoKids program. When I asked her what the biggest predictor of long-term success was she simply said: "Perseverance." She believes that regular physical activity is the most effective way to begin to hardwire the habit of perseverance. Anytime you lace up your sneakers and start moving your body and achieve a goal you are reinforcing a mindset of perseverance that bleeds into all aspects of your life.
Jean Wiecha believes that if someone can stick with an exercise regimen long enough so that physical activity is no longer viewed as a 'disagreeable' experience that a type of 'conversion experience' occurs.  People go from thinking of exercise as something they have to do to something they want to do. Once physical activity and being healthy becomes a labor of love -- not just a matter of sheer will power or discipline -- Dr. Wiecha has noticed that behavorial changes become lifelong habits.

But the riddle remains: How can an outsider persuade someone who is resistant to adopting a habit of perseverance learn to have more grit? After my conversation with Dr. Wiecha, I went back to my neuroscientific roots and asked myself the million dollar question: Why are some people more inclined to persevere and others to quit?

Neuroscientific research shows that higher levels of dopamine might separate the internal drive some people have to persevere while lower dopamine levels cause others to give up. Obviously, there are a wide range of factors that come into play when someone decides to persevere--but dopamine can be harnessed and used as a prime motivating force to help you keep pushing and achieve your goals.

HOW DOES THE DOPAMINE REWARD SYSTEM WORK?

Your internal "Reward System" is a collection of brain structures that regulate your behavior by making you feel good when you achieve a goal. Everything necessary for the survival of our species - eating, mating, sleeping, and physical perseverance - is rewarded by a flood of neurochemicals that make us feel good. This is a very generous biological design and at the same time necessary for our survival. All animals seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, nature created an internal reward system that reinforced lifestyle habits necessary to survive. Dopamine floods your body and mind with a rush of satisfaction and reward anytime you succeed at achieving something biologically necessary for your survival.

In a modern world we still get the same rush of dopamine when it comes to primal things like dating or salivating over a meal - but it becomes less automatic when trying to achieve goals that are not part of our primal instincts. We have evolved to have hard work, sweat and perseverance trigger the release of dopamine. Unfortunatlely, in a modern world these achievements are not viewed biologically as a matter of life or death and do not automatically release dopamine.  Luckily, you can use your large prefrontal cortex and  the 'executive function' to trigger the release of dopamine using the seven methods below:       

1. PICTURE YOURSELF AS A HUMAN "LAB RAT" IN A SKINNER BOX

In 1954, researchers James Olds and Peter Milner discovered that the low-voltage electrical stimulation of certain regions of the brain of the rat reinforced positive behavior and learning when they were trying to teach the animals to run mazes and solve problems. Olds and Milner realized that they had found the 'pleasure center' of the brain. When the rat achieved a goal they rewarded the rat with a jolt that triggered the release of dopamine. The rats began to associate success at a task with a biological reward of feeling good. You can do this too.

You have the power to tap your own dopamine reserves simply by visualizing yourself as having your finger on a 'joy-stick' of pleasure, just like a rat in a skinner box with a lever.  Learn to associate perseverance and accomplishing a mission with feeling good. The motivation at a biological level is just to get the hit of dopamine--but in the real world this drive translates into you following through and achieving goals. Everytime you complete a task in your daily life visualize that you have just self-administered a hit of 'feel good' dopamine and that habit will be reinforced.

2.  THE 'PLEASURE PRINCIPLE' TRUMPS 'WILL-POWER' EVERYTIME

Perseverance is synonymous with pain and suffering to many people. Because all animals instinctively seek pleasure and avoid pain, you have to flip your perspective on perseverance 180-degrees and view struggle and perseverance as a doorway to pleasure. Stop viewing perseverance as drudgery but as an opportunity to neurochemically boost your confidence and make you feel good. When framed correctly, the process of perseverance becomes a hedonic experience. This is an explanatory style that makes certain people keep pushing and others to quit. As Henry Ford said, "There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something."

Whenever I meet someone who loves to exercise I ask them how they stay motivated to stick with it and persevere through workouts. The response I get nine-out-of-ten times is: "I exercise regularly because it makes me feel good." The next time you feel unmotivated to exercise or work harder towards a goal remember the "Pleasure Principle" and the equation that SWEAT = BLISS.  Laziness and lack of follow through is seductive because it's easy and requires no effort. But, over time the habit of complacency leaves your dopamine depleted and you become dissatisfied and depressed.

3. NOT ACHIEVING GOALS DRIES UP YOUR DOPAMINE RESERVES

Low levels of dopamine make you apathetic. If you do not accomplish something everyday your dopamine reserves will diminish. Humans are designed to work hard and to be rewarded for their efforts biologically. Being uninspired and lacking self-motivation is a downward spiral that can snowball out of control. It's so easy to become bitter, cynical and hopeless when your dopamine reserves are low.  But you have the power to turn this around by consciously looking at everything you achieve--from flossing your teeth, to taking out the trash--as a way to tap your dopamine reserves. Look at every thing you do in the day as a chance to create a sense of reward and deliver a rush of dopamine.

Puzzles and brain-teaser games are a great way to tap your dopamine reserves. Anytime you win at a computer game or solve a riddle you get the 'ding, ding, ding' dopamine feeling. In your down time you can use games and puzzles to make your dopamine levels swell. Playing word games and solving puzzles not only flexes your mental muscle, it keeps the dopamine pumping.

4. EXPECTATION AND BELIEF CAN PRODUCE DOPAMINE

In a recent New Yorker article, Ted Kaptuchuk, who is the director of the "Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter" at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, talks about the medical power of belief.  He says that if a patient believes that a placebo drug is the real thing that it can trigger the body to endogenously produce that chemical and the subsequent healing response.

According to Kaptuchuk, neuroimaging has revealed examples of patients with Parkinson's disease who are given a placebo--but told that that it is a drug that will help their symptoms--can create a spike of their dopamine levels.  Findings such as these reconfirm that creating a system of belief and an expectation of efficacy can cause changes in your brain chemistry. Through conditioning techniques your brain can "learn" to trigger biological changes that reduce pain and suffering. If you believe that persevering to achieve a goal will produce more dopamine, odds are it will. 

5.  BE METHODICAL: CREATE SELF-IMPOSED DEADLINES

To produce more dopamine, get in the habit of setting deadlines and completing goals in a timely manner. Create a daily schedule that includes self-imposed deadlines and stick to it! Use timers, calendars and peer pressure to keep you on track and condition yourself. Partner with a like-minded friend who has similar goals and make a pact that you will hold one another accountable to stay on deadline.

The release of dopamine is amped up when there are time constraints involved, but don't let the last minute rush of manic-panic become a habit. The use of time constraints in sports and game shows increases the production of dopamine and amplifies the thrill of having finished a goal on time--but this hastiness can backfire in real life.  Structure your challenges to have mini self-imposed deadlines that will release a steady dose of dopamine. Be methodical and stop leaving things till the last minute. You want to keep the flow of dopamine constant and break the roller-coaster pattern of procrastination followed by panic.

6. TURN A MOUNTAIN INTO "MOLE-HILLS" OF DOPAMINE RELEASE

The key to overcoming large obstacles or 'mountains' is to break them into doable doses and tackle them one 'mole-hill' at a time.  An effective way to get the jackpot feeling of dopamine while you are in the process of tackling a major goal is to break the bigger challenge, which is a "Macro-Goal" into very tangible "Micro-Goals", each of which gives you a small hit of dopamine. 

For example: Something as simple as putting fresh linens on your bed can be a dopamine goldmine.  Each step in the process: from pulling all four corners of a fitted sheet around the mattress; to putting the pillows back in their cases; to then tucking in the sheets to create "hospital corners" are all chances to give yourself mini-hits of dopamine. When you have the bed completely made you get a big spike of dopamine and a sense of accomplishment. You can break every task you face in daily life into mini-achievements that each release a hit of dopamine. 

Having a checklist of things that you want to accomplish every morning and literally checking them off your list will systematically release a hit of dopamine. One of the most important reasons to define an action as a 'goal' is that it needs to be viewed as something with a beginning, middle and end. When you accomplish the goal you will get the dopamine-based sense of contentment and satisfaction that always accompanies the act of persevering and getting the job done.

7.  BE YOUR OWN CHEERING SQUAD: LEARN TO SAY "YES! I DID IT!"

Nobody else really cares if you accomplish 99% of the goals you are striving for in your life. Be your own cheering squad. Don't base your feelings of self-worth on the praise and kudos of others. Doing this puts the release of dopamine and sense of accomplishment outside of your locus of control. This can leave you feeling dejected. Run your own race in everything you do. Having the eye of the tiger requires that you decide exactly what you are going for and then GOING FOR IT. Identify a target and hunt it down.  Get in the habit of pushing towards a goal to completion. And when you succeed get in the habit of saying, "Yes! I did it!" silently or under your breath.

Being self-congratulatory isn't about ego or hubris, it is about harnessing your reward circuitry and tapping your dopamine pipeline. It's so easy to become hopeless, cynical and bitter when you feel like what you do doesn't matter. This lack of self-belief creates a biological reality and downward spiral. If you neglect to consciously acknowledge that you have achieved a goal, dopamine will not be released and you will not reinforce the habit of perseverance.  

CONCLUSION

Creating a steady flow of dopamine is fundamental to creating a habit of perseverance. This incredible neurochemical is accessible to everyone. YOU have the power to tap into your internal dopamine reserves on demand.  Learning and conditioning yourself to self-administer this 'reward molecule' everyday can turn anyone into a go-getter.  With a slight attitude adjustment and shift in perspective everybody has the power to become more perseverant by tapping the universal power of dopamine.  The ability to create a habit of perseverance isn't something reserved for a few--it is available to you!

NOTE: In addition to being a scientist, Dr. Jean Wiecha is also an artist. The painting of the road included in the blog is one of her works. To see more of her paintings visit: http://www.jeanwiecha.smugmug.com/ (link is external) 

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Stop Waiting for Life to Happen | Peter Sage | TED Talks

Life is precious.  Life is a mirror:  the outer world reflects the inner world.  
The only thing that matters is what we do with what happens to us.  We can live from our hearts, not our heads. 

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New year, new you? Forget it | Oliver Burkeman

Old You is the last person you ought to trust when it comes to designing a New You.

So here we are again: that time known to publishers as “New Year, New You”, partly because they want to sell life-makeover books and partly because, well… alliteration! I trust we’re all in agreement that “New Year, New You” is preposterous and bad. But it’s preposterous and bad, I’d argue, for some interesting reasons – reasons it’s worth grasping if you’d actually like to make a few lasting changes this year. These all result from one rarely mentioned truth: that by definition, the only person who could successfully bring this New You into being is that feckless, lazy, overcommitted, weak-willed, Twitter-addicted, crisps-munching good-for-nothing called Old You.

And Old You is the last person you ought to trust when it comes to designing a New You. Consider the facts. For a start, Old You doesn’t currently do any of the things he or she claims will make New You happy and fulfilled. (Would you trust a personal trainer who chain-smoked through your sessions and never worked out? Exactly.) Moreover, Old You doesn’t even seem to like himself or herself that much, otherwise a makeover wouldn’t be on the agenda. Clearly, Old You has some issues. Lastly, Old You probably has a long track record of trying and failing to implement change – and yet you’re going to trust this shifty character with your future? That’s like taking your car to a mechanic who botches the repair job almost every time.

Behind the seductive lure of “New Year, New You” lies another kind of mistake, too: the idea that what we require, in order finally to change, is one last push of willpower. (Presumably, the hope is that the “January feeling” of fresh starts and clean slates will provide it.) The assumption is that you’re a bit like a heavy rock, poised on a hill above the Valley of Achievement, Productivity and Clean Eating. All you need is a concerted push to get you rolling. But the real reason that transformation is hard – as Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey make clear in their book Immunity To Change – is that people (and organisations) have powerful “competing commitments”, or reasons not to change. To use weakness of will to explain why you take on too much, or overeat, or date disastrous people, is to neglect the fact that those habits make you feel indispensable, or assuage feelings of loneliness, or distract you from inner conflicts you’d rather not address. Technically, physics fans will note, something similar is true of the rock. There are countervailing forces that keep it stuck, beyond the mere absence of an impetus to move.

One useful way to shift perspective is to hand both Old You and New You their marching orders, and narrow your focus to Present You. Don’t resolve to become “the kind of person” who runs, meditates, or listens to your spouse. Instead, just do that thing, once, today. Preferably now. It’s tempting to add “and then do the same tomorrow, and every day, for ever” – except that would be to fall back into the New You trap. Lower your sights. Today is the first day of the rest of your week.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com

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Getting Rich is Easy | Jim Rohn

Getting rich is easy, but it's easy not to do what you know to do!  That is the difference between success and failure.  He did not neglect to do every day what he knew that he could do to make money.    

Jim Rohn outlines the simple factors that made it easy for him to accumulate massive wealth in 6 years!  Its very inspirational!  

"If you will change, everything will change for you!"  

Start by changing your philosophy, your mind, how you think.  

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