Today I have a special guest on the show, Shutong. He’s an MBA student with me here at Columbia with a finance and PE background. We explore the role and conversations happening (and not happening) around pressure, failure, and stress in both the startup and financial industries.
Rocked by a recent life tragedy with a family friend unable to cope with stress, Shutong shares his desire to make conversations around pressure and failures an open and comfortable discussion topic in high-stress industries as well as with the students putting their all into trying to get a job there.
From viewing failure as an opportunity to learn, to talking about failure and stress as inherent ingredients of the financial industry, we hope you join us on this week’s (special) edition of Cliff’s Notes.
As always, I hope you feel inspired and motivated in these talks and so will leave you with the Cliff’s Notes of a book that addresses and helps guide you through: Taking Charge of Your Life.
Cliff’s Notes: Taking Charge of Your Life
- We don’t find what we need, we find what we search for.
- Be thankful (remove cynicism); be eager to learn; be a good listener and focus
- Price and promise: it’s not easy to pay the price when you can’t see the promise
- Success is a doing, you have to actually do it
- Don’t mistake movement for achievement
- Don’t get caught telling more than you know because of lack of preparation
- Interest, fascination, sensitivity, knowledge
- It’s the emotions loaded into the words that has the power of what we say
Deep Dive – Taking Charge of Your Life
Influence is one of the greatest experiences life has to offer. We all have the opportunity to influence someone else: their thinking, future, lives. The key is to develop the skills too. You can either do it casually and haphazardly…or do it on purpose.
Gather the skills to help influence people
- Sincerity. To accomplish something, especially in lecturing/listening, you have to start with sincerity. Sincerity is not a test of truth.
- Ideas + inspiration. If you want your life to change, you need both
Ideas
Everything (every good and new idea) you need is within reach. Finding is reserved for the searchers. We don’t find what we need, we find what we search for. Needing is not the prerequisite to getting value. (You don’t say to the soil, “I need food.” The soil will say, “bring be your seed, your life, or go somewhere else! Don’t give me your need.”) You can’t be a needer, you have to be a searcher. If you’ll search, if you’ll try, if you’ll go, if you’ll listen…ideas are within reach.
And ideas are life-changing. There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
A few daily disciplines makes a great deal of difference in one year, three years, five years.
Now’s the time to fix the next ten years. Sometimes you have to come to grips with reality. Big question: are you reading the books that are gonna take you where you want to go in the next five years? In order to get where you want to go in the next 5 years, you’re either reading the right books or you’re not.
Inspiration
Here’s what we don’t want to engage in: disillusion. Hoping without acting, wishing without doing. The key is to take a look, and say, ‘where am I?’ What can I do to make the changes, to make sure that I can take more certain daily steps toward that treasure I want:
- Mental treasures
- Personal treasures
- Spiritual treasures
- Financial treasures
It is WORTH TAKING THE TIME.
Three keys to success
- Be thankful. To get more, you have to first be thankful for what you already have. Remove cynicism.
- Be eager to learn! No matter what you know, there’s always some more. Argue with all this stuff later. The key is to stimulate the mind!
- Be a good listener (focus!)
The 5 Major factors to the life puzzle:
- Philosophy
- Attitude
- Activity
- Results
- Lifestyle
Philosophy
Simply what you know. So it’s important to know. And two more corrections on old clichés:
- what you don’t know WILL hurt you, and
- ignorance is NOT bliss.
Philosophy sets the course of your life…it is THE major piece.
Gather! What you don’t know will affect your economic future, the book you miss will make a difference in the legacy of your equities over the next months, years
3 types of philosophy
- Basic Philosophy: early life upbringing
- Expanded philosophy: having a place in society, giving some value to it
- Refined philosophy: the extra thinking, studying and debating
Influence: it plays a major role in the development of our philosophy
- Who am I around?
- How are they affecting who I am becoming?
- Evaluation. We weigh what we know.
- What if we weighed things a little wrong?
- Life accumulates! Be aware of that fact.
We all must suffer one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Regret weighs tons, discipline weighs ounces.
Attitude
You cannot escape the accumulated effect of the selection of your attitude.
“There comes a day in every man’s life when he must sit down at a feast of consequences.” ––Oscar Wilde
So one of the major things to check is, how do I feel? And am I on track or off track with my attitude?
Here’s an attitude to pick up: “No matter what they pay me, I always come early and I always stay late to invest in my own future.”
Questions of attitude to ask:
- How do you feel about your past?
- Let the past instruct you.
- How do you feel about the future?
- Life is affected by two major things: price and promise. It’s not easy to pay the price when you can’t see the promise.
- How do you feel about your community?
- You can’t succeed by yourself. It takes a community to build a society. It takes all of us to make any one of us to be successful.
- How do I feel about myself?
- Understanding self worth is the beginning of progress.
- What could you do? What could I become in terms of value?
- What could I do in the marketplace, enterprise, family, love, home, experience, friendship?
- If I’m operating at 20%, what could I possibly do with the other 80%? DO I HAVE IT IN KNOWLEDGE, WORTH, EXPERIENCE?
Activity
If you want to influence and help people, here’s a key: success is a doing. You’ve got to actually do it.
Activity is HIGH PRIORITY.
Important question: what is your philosophy on activity? How much time are you going to spend doing?
- We’ve all got to have a philosophy of activity. Your philosophy on activity will affect the rest of your life. Not to think so is naïve.
- Make rest a necessity not an objective.
- The reason for life is enterprise, productivity; to see what you can do.
- Whatever your hands find to do, do with all your might.
Ant philosophy: it’s simple and it’s good
- Ants never give up.
- Ants think winter all summer.
- Ants think summer all winter.
- Ants gather all they possibly can.
It’s not about the amount of money, what’s important is the full extent of your reach.
- The only way to feel maximum good about yourself is the full extent of your reach.
- What should you do? All you can! Books? All you can! How many skills? How many people should you touch? What all should you engage in?
- Why not go to the max? How tall does a tree grow? As tall as it can.
Our choices: To be all, or to be part.
- You can choose to be less than your were designed to be, or you can choose to be all of it.
- What most messes with the mind: Doing less than you can, being less than you could be, trying less, less enthusiasm…it damages our minds and our self-image.
Results
The name of the game.
The questions are
- What we can become
- What we can accomplish
We want to become skillful enough to do rewarding things with our life: influence, productivity, activity, results, economics, social, spiritual.
Life can be so empty without measureable progress.
We must get on problems and the challenges, lest we yield too easy to the things that can leave us empty instead of full, and leave us with pennies instead of fortune.
- One of the major reasons for looking at results is to see what might be wrong with activity, philosophy, or attitude.
- Don’t mistake movement for achievement.
- Disciplined activity is like birth-pains.
- Values were meant to be costly
- The only way to appreciate a value, is to know its cost!
Lifestyle
Lifestyle: Figuring ways to live uniquely. Learning to live well. Finding ways to bring joy, pleasure, excitement, appreciation, and awareness of how unique life can me.
How you choose to live, how you design your life. Some people have learned how to earn well, but didn’t study lifestyle. Got the money, but not the joy.
Happiness in not an accident, it is an art. Lifestyle is not an amount. Culture is not an amount. Sophistication is not an account, it is a practice, an art.
Understand the difference between trinkets and treasures