Set your limits: This could be limiting TV time to limiting how much you eat to when you answer emails. Limits, constraints, guard rails are your friends.
Stay positive: As in, welcome adversity, know that there’s a solution to every problem and create the good in others’ experiences.
Surround yourself with really really remarkable people. The people will make or break you. Fortunately, you have a choice on who you hang with.
It’s improbable to find pleasure long-term in situations that don’t change.
At some point, boredom hits or a drive to find something better encroaches.
So the best step forward is to find new ways to improve or alter the current situation; to not just find the good but create more of the great in the situation.
Let’s just imagine you owned a coffee shop for a moment. No doubt there are some people who would enter that you would go above and beyond for.
Or maybe you manage an email list.
Or maybe you’re at a firm with a handful of clients.
Now imagine if your “above and beyond” situation became the norm, the status quo, the expectation.
Two things would happen. The first is you’d blow the competition out of the water and two, you’d need to find even more ways to treat different people differently.
Both are possible.
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On a similar note, there was a seminar on the college campus that I went to when I was younger. The speaker told everyone to stand up and reach as high as they could; to really stretch and get our arms, hands and fingers pointed as high as we could. We did. Then we were all asked to reach a tiny bit higher – and we did. Then he said something along the lines of this. “You guys rock more than you know. At first you thought you were reaching as high as you could, that was what was asked of you. But you were still able to reach higher. We hold back on ourselves. We can do more and be better if we ask it of ourselves.”
That experience has stuck with me to this day and it doesn’t just apply to how we hold back on ourselves, it’s also how we hold back on others. We can give more than we think we can.
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Stay Positive & Go Above And Beyond (Then Go Above And Beyond More)