Did you ever ask yourself **"what truly distinguishes high achievers?"** Recently, I started reading a book (Clear Thinking) that dives into this question. The author (Shane Perish) highlights four strengths that can genuinely shift the way we approach life: - self-accountability - self-knowledge - self-control - self-confidence That's my notes and insights from his book. #### 1. Self-Accountability Self-accountability is holding yourself accountable for developing your abilities, managing your inabilities, and using reason to govern your actions. In your life, others might not expect more from you, but you can always expect more from yourself. So when you face hard challenges, keep in mind that **complaining is not a strategy,** you have to work the world as you find it, not as you would have it be. **Be responsible for your actions, no matter the situation.** Complaining does nothing to change the current situation, instead you have to **"always focus on the next move."** When you put the outcome over ego, you get better results. **Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you control how to respond to everything.** #### 2. Self-Knowledge Self-knowledge means knowing your own strengths and weaknesses, what you are capable and incapable of. All of us have cognitive blind spots, and *there are things we don't know, including things we don’t know that we don’t know*. **Understanding what you know and don’t know is the key to playing the games you can win**. Self-knowledge isn’t limited to hard skills, it also means **knowing you are vulnerable to your own defaults.** The key to successful investing is to know what you know and stick to it. You need to always know what you value the most, then you can juxtapose what you gain and what you lose. #### 3. Self-Control Self-control is the ability to master your fears, desires, and emotions. You shouldn’t allow those waves of emotion to determine the direction of your life. **In simple terms, Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of blindly following instincts.** The emotion default tries to remove any distance between you and your emotions, but self-control is about putting that space in place and recognizing that you have the power to control how you respond. Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals. **The most successful people have the self-control to keep going anyway; it’s not always exciting, but they still show up.** #### 4. Self-Confidence Self-confidence is about trusting your abilities and your value to others. It is the strength to accept hard truths and empowers resilience in the aftermath of negative feedback. Not all results are immediate, and every successful task only further serves to deepen your trust in yourself. **Confident people don’t care what others think about them, they take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion.** The most important voice to listen to is the one that reminds you of all you've accomplished in the past. Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what's right instead of who's right. It’s about accepting reality, admitting mistakes, and changing your mind. Self-confidence is what it takes to be on the right side of right: outcome over ego. ### Raising Your Standards Your Standards - will become to -> your habits - and they will become to -> Your Outcome. The first step to building any of your strengths is raising the standards to which you hold yourself. Our surroundings influence us, both physical and people. **Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people, because we unconsciously become what we are near.** The most successful people have the highest standards, not only for others but for themselves. For e.g. one of the highest standards that each of us better to have is "Don't speak unless you know what you are talking about." **Never forget, The standards of excellence create champions.** There are two components to building your strengths by raising the bar: 1. Choose the right exemplars. 2. Practice imitating them in certain ways. **One of the best techniques for success is studying and adopting the good models of others.** **But be aware of "competing trap", the only person you are competing with is the person you were yesterday.** Victory is being a little better today. And always believe in yourself, you should know that someone out there is looking up to you and using your behavior as their North Star. ### Emulating Excellence A good practices is to always imagine your exemplar watching you. Do all things you know they would want you to do. Avoid all things you know they would want you not to do. Keep doing it until you acquire a new pattern of feeling, thinking, and acting. Keep practicing until it becomes your second nature, until it becomes what you are, rather than what you want to be. #clear-thinking #non-technical