In the end, just about everything we do is motivated by power. Whether we’re to obtain it, or responding to someone else’s influence, it’s a constant factor. 

Sometimes getting to the top requires bending the rules of conventional morality. Best selling author Robert Greene distills thousands of years of historical evidence and research in his book, The 48 Laws Of Power.

We’ve broken out some of his best rules for those looking to get to the top. 

Find them here: http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-greene-the-48-laws-of-power-2013-2?op=1#ixzz2NHDGfJyi

The world’s most productive and successful people aren’t superhuman.

The biggest thing that separates superachievers from everyone else, says Camille Sweeney, co-author of The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do And How They Do It So Well, is that they have found a way to overcome failure. 

“Every successful person, just like everyone else on the planet, is going to meet with failure,” says her husband and co-author Josh Gosfield. “Instead of blaming everything on employees, the weather, the state of the economy, they take a merciless clear look at their own assumptions and biases [which allows] them to revinvent themselves.”

We sat down with Sweeney and Gosfield to discuss what they learned from dozens of superachievers — from Momofuku Founder David Chang to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh — including how to manage emotions like fear and self doubt. Watch our conversation here:

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-art-of-doing-how-superachivers-do-what-they-do-2013-2#ixzz2MDbWTMJi

A lot of Renaissance Man - esque attributes/action items here

Read More: http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-greenes-mastery-2012-11?op=1

Tim Ferriss’ new book, “The 4-Hour Chef” is definitely about learning to cook rapidly. But it’s also about learning just about any skill.

He writes:

“Whether you want to learn how to speak a new language in three months, how to shoot a three-pointer in one weekend, or how to memorize a deck of cards in less than a minute, the true recipe of this book is exactly that: a process for acquiring any skill. The vehicle I chose is cooking.” 

Along with the recipes, there are great insights into learning, and some great tricks you can use every day. We’ve broken out a few of the best tips. 

Source: The 4-Hour Chef

Nassim is one of the great thinkers of our time. In his book “Antifragile”, he explores the natures of complexity, and uncertainty - and ways to take advantage of these conditions - much like A-symmetrical warfare.

His thinking directly correlates with one of my upcoming books - “Supersaturation…How Complex Systems Sew the Seeds of Their Own Destruction”.

-Scott

Not content with having conquered coffee, Howard Schultz recently announced that the company’s making a strong push at dominating tea. It’s been met with some skepticism, but so has a lot of what Schultz has done. 

He’s known for taking some unconventional strategic paths, including shutting down every store to train people, bringing 10,000 employees down to New Orleans to volunteer and talk about the company’s future, and having a massive meeting with employees and their parents in China. 

Here are some of his best quotes on how he dominated the coffee industry, brought Starbucks back from the brink, and built one of the world’s most recognizable brands. 

HERE’S a trick question. What do you hear right now?

If your home is like mine, you hear the humming sound of a printer, the low throbbing of traffic from the nearby highway and the clatter of plastic followed by the muffled impact of paws landing on linoleum — meaning that the cat has once again tried to open the catnip container atop the fridge and succeeded only in knocking it to the kitchen floor.

The slight trick in the question is that, by asking you what you were hearing, I prompted your brain to take control of the sensory experience — and made you listen rather than just hear. That, in effect, is what happens when an event jumps out of the background enough to be perceived consciously rather than just being part of your auditory surroundings. The difference between the sense of hearing and the skill of listening is attention.

Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But hearing is a quantitatively faster sense. While it might take you a full second to notice something out of the corner of your eye, turn your head toward it, recognize it and respond to it, the same reaction to a new or sudden sound happens at least 10 times as fast.

This is because hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal that something dangerous or wonderful is somewhere within the kilometer or so that your ears can detect.

This is where attention kicks in.

Attention is not some monolithic brain process. There are different types of attention, and they use different parts of the brain. The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A chain of five neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second — elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate.

More complex attention kicks in when you hear your name called from across a room or hear an unexpected birdcall from inside a subway station. This stimulus-directed attention is controlled by pathways through the temporoparietal and inferior frontal cortex regions, mostly in the right hemisphere — areas that process the raw, sensory input, but don’t concern themselves with what you should make of that sound. (Neuroscientists call this a “bottom-up” response.)

But when you actually pay attention to something you’re listening to, whether it is your favorite song or the cat meowing at dinnertime, a separate “top-down” pathway comes into play. Here, the signals are conveyed through a dorsal pathway in your cortex, part of the brain that does more computation, which lets you actively focus on what you’re hearing and tune out sights and sounds that aren’t as immediately important.

In this case, your brain works like a set of noise-suppressing headphones, with the bottom-up pathways acting as a switch to interrupt if something more urgent — say, an airplane engine dropping through your bathroom ceiling — grabs your attention.

Hearing, in short, is easy. You and every other vertebrate that hasn’t suffered some genetic, developmental or environmental accident have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It’s your life line, your alarm system, your way to escape danger and pass on your genes. But listening, really listening, is hard when potential distractions are leaping into your ears every fifty-thousandth of a second — and pathways in your brain are just waiting to interrupt your focus to warn you of any potential dangers.

Listening is a skill that we’re in danger of losing in a world of digital distraction and information overload.

And yet we dare not lose it. Because listening tunes our brain to the patterns of our environment faster than any other sense, and paying attention to the nonvisual parts of our world feeds into everything from our intellectual sharpness to our dance skills.

Luckily, we can train our listening just as with any other skill. Listen to new music when jogging rather than familiar tunes. Listen to your dog’s whines and barks: he is trying to tell you something isn’t right. Listen to your significant other’s voice — not only to the words, which after a few years may repeat, but to the sounds under them, the emotions carried in the harmonics. You may save yourself a couple of fights.

“You never listen” is not just the complaint of a problematic relationship, it has also become an epidemic in a world that is exchanging convenience for content, speed for meaning. The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.

Every day we’re faced with decisions, from the trivial to extremely important.

Too often we simply go with our gut feeling and do what feels right.

The problem with that approach is that it leaves us open to a variety of behavioral and psychological biases that affect the way we think and can lead us to make the wrong choices.

By being aware of of the things that lead us down the wrong path and some ways to get it right, we can make better, more rational decisions.   

Click to find out how to make a better/smarter decisions: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-make-better-decisions-2012-10?op=1#ixzz2A01a2lmz

Perhaps bordering on pop psychology…but, still a good checklist to refer to - Scott

Yes.  Men are and should be more romantic.  It’s part of the dance. Scott

Normally I dodge articles loaded with pop psychology.  But filling our state of mind constantly with a condition called ‘gratitude’…always good to remind ourselves - Scott

——

I’m utterly convinced that the key to lifelong success is the regular exercise of a single emotional muscle: gratitude.

People who approach life with a sense of gratitude are constantly aware of what’s wonderful in their life.

Because they enjoy the fruits of their successes, they seek out more success. And when things don’t go as planned, people who are grateful can put failure into perspective.

By contrast, people who lack gratitude are never truly happy. If they succeed at a task, they don’t enjoy it. For them, a string of successes is like trying to fill a bucket with a huge leak in the bottom. And failure invariably makes them bitter, angry, and discouraged.

Therefore, if you want to be successful, you need to feel more gratitude. Fortunately, gratitude, like most emotions, is like a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger and more resilient it becomes.

Practice Nightly

The best time to exercise gratitude is just before bed. Take out your tablet (electronic or otherwise) and record the events of the day that created positive emotions, either in you or in those around you.

Did you help somebody solve a problem? Write it down. Did you connect with a colleague or friend? Write it down. Did you make somebody smile? Write it down.

What you’re doing is “programming your brain” to view your day more positively. You’re throwing mental focus on what worked well, and shrugging off what didn’t. As a result, you’ll sleep better, and you’ll wake up more refreshed.

Reprogramming Your Brain

More important, you’re also programming your brain to notice even more reasons to feel gratitude. You’ll quickly discover that even a “bad day” is full of moments that are worthy of gratitude. Success becomes sweeter; failure, less sour.

The more regularly you practice this exercise, the stronger its effects.

Over time, your “gratitude muscle” will become so strong that you’ll attract more success into your life, not to mention greater numbers of successful (i.e., grateful) people. You’ll also find yourself thanking people more often. That’s good for you and for them, too.

This method works. If you don’t believe me, try it for at least a week. You’ll be amazed at what a huge difference it makes.

1. Give a kind word when an angry outburst would feel more satisfying.

2. Take time each day to call (3) executives and just see how their day is going.

3. Spend time at the beginning of each week writing out your “must get done” tasks for the week.

4. Apologize when you make a mistake. Say it. You’ll feel it once you let your ego get out of the way.

5. Devote specific time each day to exercise, meditation, or therapy. Or all three.

6. Find (5) things you can be grateful for each day. Say “Thank You” early and often.

7. Find a way to solve the pain you see bothering someone else around you.

8. Write an encouraging hand-written note to someone you don’t want anything from right now.

9. Carve out time to read a biography and the business section of the Wall Street Journal.

10. Schedule follow-up and follow-though activity and make it the most important part of your daily religion.

11. Ask for help from those around you. Stop pretending like you aren’t desperate. You need to be.

12. Don’t go to sleep without putting in the effort required to be successful. Avoid excuses. Work harder.

13. Remember your manners.  Being polite and courteous doesn’t mean people will take advantage of you.

14. Make it pattern to invest in the physical, mental, and financial success of those around you.

15. Take notes in meetings. Assign responsibilities.  Be clear about the outcomes you expect and the deadlines.

16. Forgive fast.  Forget about fairness. Protest cruelty. Be strong enough to believe in you.

17. Sacrifice being misunderstood now for the truth coming out in the future.

18. Focus manically on making daily progress on each of your goals.  Do something every day to make tomorrow better.

19. Ignore the negativity you hear from your critics around you. Cover your ears. Get back to work.

20. Take it. Earn it. Prove to yourself that your dreams are important enough to pursue.

Very interesting study - Scott