Million Dollar Maverick: Forge Your Own Path to Think Differently, Act Decisively, and Succeed Quickly (Alan Weiss, 2016)

Leaving the Herd

• It's not the "road most traveled or less traveled." It's the road you create for yourself.
• Leadership doesn't start at the top; it starts in the middle.
• Team building can't work because you have committees, not teams.
• Commitment is fine, but compliance is often what's needed.
• The more you pursue a "paperless" office, the most paper you'll get.
• If you think you should conform to your colleagues, you'll never stand out in a crowd. You'll simply be one of the herd.
• People pay those they respect, but they have lower expectations for the quality of advice from pals.
• Personal questions
• Do I have financial goals appropriate for my talent or am I using other's metrics or even my parents' beliefs (which are often based in a poverty or scarcity mentality)?
• Am I settling or selecting in my personal relationships?
• Do I have a healthy selfishness about my time and energy or do I constantly sacrifice for others out of guilt?
• Do I go on recreation that is uniquely enjoyable to me or I follow where others go or recommend?
• Do I constantly grow or change my circles of friends or know the same people I did 5 years ago?
• Professional questions
• Am I creating intellectual property or simply using what others had created?
• Do I follow the bandwagon and crash down the hill or I can truly recognise a trend and add value to it?
• Am I telling the same stories or I have improve it annually?
• Are my market expanding geographically and demographically or it is remained at the old segment?
• Do I create multiple marketing collateral or a one-trick pony?
• Environment questions
• Have I become a slave to social network or am I educating myself in a more sophisticated means?
• Did I read more or less with the influence of technology?
• Have I move from a scarcity mentality or to an abundance mentality?
• Am I putting in effort to grow continuously or I am in my comfort zone?
• Am I leaving a legacy or just footprints?
• The truth
• MLM: ponzi.
• Financial experts: they could have invested themselves but using your money instead.
• Ice bucket challenges: who really donated?
• Social media marketing: "experts" are under-experience.
• Gifting forward: give anonymously.

Losing the fear of failure

• If you're not failing, you're not trying.
• You will win and you will lose. None of this has an impact on your worth as a person.
• Assertive risk management will safeguard your plans and enable you to be more daring and bolder than others.
• Risk components
• Probability: likelihood
• Seriousness: impact

Gaining influence

• The art of the compromise is to protect your "musts" and negotiate away some "wants".
• Consensus is something you can live with, not something you'd die for.

Critical thinking skills

• We learn in "conscious competency" and incorporate success on a regular basis by making such learning "unconscious competency".
• Instead of blaming others and ourselves, learn from it instead.
• Innovation is applied creativity and the utilitarian application of them by others.
• Problem solving definition
1. Deviation of actual from desired course
2. Cause is unknown
3. Deviation is serious enough to concern us
• Actions for problem
• Corrective action: remove the problem.
• Adaptive action: live with it with alternative.
• Sherlocks Holmes: the dog that didn't bark in the night.
• What's distinctive about a duck?
• The tighter the comparison, the more valid and useful the distinction that result.

Learning the hard way

• We often face unexpected, inescapable pain, but we create our own suffering.
• Ask yourself what the other person's motive probably is. Is it really to strike at your, personally?
• Self-esteem workout is as necessary as physical workout.
• How to calm yourself down?
• What is the motive of that person?
• Join a group if you feel the cause is just.
• Assess the real harm done.
• Fuggedaboutit: it's no big deal
• Judgement
1. Recognition of success
2. Positive self-talk
3. Healthy feedback intolerance
4. Appropriate avatars
5. Dynamically growing skill sets
6. Social cue adeptness
7. Judgement: for taste, swim with tide; for principle stand like a rock

Pain, not suffering

• Suffering is a conscious choice, not a requirement or unavoidable condition.
• Break your doom loop and establish your achievement loop.
• If you put your ego on the bow of the ship, it's going to get whacked by waves until it's unrecognisable.
• We endure pain; we create suffering - for ourselves and for others.
• Smug definitions
• Confidence: honest belief
• Arrogance: the belief you have nothing more to learn
• Smugness: arrogance without talent

The art of the setup

• If you don't take credit, someone else will. The lottery ticket you did not encash will go to someone else.
• There is no one so zealous as the converted.
• If you allow others to create the ballpark, establish the rules, and hire the officials, you will lose that game.

The word

• Even in auctions, the first bid is seldom the winning bid, and in business the first suggestion is seldom the winning suggestion. The "firstest" also requires the "mostest".
• We remember best and respond with most commitment to tangibles we can relate to in our daily lives, not abstract theory.
• A consultant is a brain, not a pair of hands. If you're simply following someone else's direction, you're a hired hand. If you're providing direction, you're a trusted advisor.
• Framing
• A border enclosing something to be viewed.
• Reframing: To change the border in your favour so that the viewer is seeing the issue in your context and perspective.
• Steps in reframing
1. What is your best interests to accomplish?
2. What is acceptable to the other parties yet still in your best interests?
3. How you can use language to reframe and translate the issue in a favourable and acceptable manner?
4. How to make manifest the new frame?

The "app" of success

• Attract people who attracts people.
• A community is a perpetual motion attraction machine. Focus on the exponential effect of every member drawing another dozen members.
• Evangelists are the most important promoter you will ever have, are free, and are nurtured by community.
• We are all unique. The key is to build a career around that uniqueness - what you are passionate about and great at doing - and carve away all else.
• Only the gifted few can wing it. "Playing by ear" never results in truly great music, and the "seat of your pants" is usually busy bearing weight.

No guilt, no fear, no peer

• There is always a bigger boat.
• You can always make another dollar, but you can never make another minute.
• If you find yourself debating things that are irrelevant in your current situation and success, you're sliding back through open doors to previous levels.
• We are often shocked into immobility by abject fears without basis or rationale. Hence, we can't eliminate them and they self-perpetuate. We need to find the cause of our fears.
• If you rely on external validation to tell you whether you are worthwhile and successful, you will be neither in any meaningful way. These are your decisions. Don't abdicate them.
• 4 level of existence
1. Survive
2. Alive
3. Arrive
4. Thrive
• Free from guilt
1. Embrace the concept of "earning".
2. Life is not a zero-sum game, you and others can win together.
3. Ignore those who attempt to instil guilt.
4. Recognise success and avoid feeling not success enough.
5. Never rely on others for validation.
• No peer philosophy
1. Don't be easily impressed by attempts to impress you.
2. Never try to compete for the sake of competing.
3. Remember you are "valid".
4. You must engage in lifelong, sustainable learning.
5. You need to look the part.

Epilogue

• There are a lot of dentists drilling on your teeth who don't want to be dentists, and a lot of therapists listening to your woes who are solely interested in curing their own.