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Happy Thursday folks!

Here is my favorite passage of the week, two quotes and book of the week with two important lessons to ponder on:

Passage of the Week:

Columinist and Author Morgan Housel on all happiness in life:

Two Quotes:

Book of the Week with 2 Important Lessons:

The book of the week is The Score That Matters: Growing Excellence in Yourself and Those You Lead by Ryan Hawk and Brook Cupps.

An engrossing read with so many great perspectives. The book focuses on personal development and leadership, emphasizing the importance of living in alignment with one’s purpose and values. It is a distillation of actions, behaviors, and practical applications for our daily life.

We all love to keep scores. The score is and always will be an integral part of our lives. The question is not “Are we keeping score?” The question is “What score are we keeping?” That is the question that matters because we do get to choose. We get to decide what we value and what we don’t. It’s the process that we need to master, not the outcome. We can choose to shift our mind and heart to the score that matters right now.

With this book, Ryan and Brook shows that it’s not a complicated process by discovering our purpose, identifying our values, creating our critical behaviors, and living them faithfully every day in all aspects of our lives to unlock true fulfillment and happiness.

Here are two important lessons from the book:

1) Handle Hard Better:

The leaders who have had the biggest impact on you has the highest expectations of you. The teacher who made the biggest difference in your life didn’t let you skate by. The coach or boss who pushed you forward the most saw you for what you could be, not what you were, and then helped you become that. They gave you a reputation to live up to that was beyond what you thought of yourself. Yes, it is hard. Accomplishing anything of value always is. Most people look for the easy way with the fewest obstacles. We search for hours for a hack or investigate every turn for a potential shortcut.

The truth is this: hard is the shortcut. Hard makes us better. It prepares us for the future by challenging our present. It builds confidence and grit while making us question our resolve and fortitude. Reaching the summit of the mountain you trained for months, securing the client you studied and spent months getting to know, redeeming your team against opponent that seemed to have your number the last few years, the pride we feel is the byproduct of the struggle.

Hard has had a negative connotation for a long time. But hard is great. With no struggle, there is no pride in the accomplishment. What’s beautiful about doing hard things is, eventually, we stop seeing them as hard. It just becomes what it is. We stop categorizing and realize it doesn’t matter whether we describe something as easy or hard; it just takes what it takes.

2) The Reward for Producing Great Work:

Quantity leads to quality. We need to get going to get good. As Wilbur Wright said in the process of building the first-ever flying machine, “If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds, but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its trick by actual trial.”

The reward for producing great work is the opportunity to keep doing it. Shifting your focus to your inner scoreboard leads to a more fulfilling life. Whether you win the game or write a NYT bestseller isn’t fully within your control, but you can control your dedication to getting better each day. You can control how you choose to live your values. You can control the input you bring to the task. Outside influences and circumstances beyond your control have their own inputs, and the output is a combination of them all. Sometimes it will go your way, sometimes it won’t. In our experience, though, it seems that the people who are committed to their process each and every day seem to have it go their way more often than those who don’t.

Books I am currently reading:

The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel. This book lessons on harnessing the power of money to live a happier life. It doesn't provide budgets, hacks, or one-size-fits-all solutions. It gives you understanding of how your relationship with money shapes your decisions and how to reshape it so money works for you.

How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend by Rachel Barr. A delight-filled, evidence-based guide to taking better care of our brain; so it, in turn, will take better care of us.

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain. Loving it so far!