The best way to achieve your entrepreneurial goals

Avthar's Weekly Wisdom #48 (04/02/2021)

Welcome to edition #48 of Avthar's Weekly Wisdom!

🔥 This newsletter is where I share practical wisdom about self-mastery, entrepreneurship, health and happiness, all to help you live better. My guarantee is that you’ll discover one thing that will help you change your life every week.

Here's what I want to share with you this week:

• The importance of believing you can improve at something

• The best way to achieve your entrepreneurial goals

• A framework for deciding when and what to eat

• Why success is an internal experience

To your growth and success,

Avthar

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🏆 On Self-Mastery —

The Power of Believing You Can Improve: Following last week’s article on the importance of the growth mindset (Everything is a Skill), I want to share a talk which will help you build a growth mindset.

The talk is by one of the most foundational mindset researchers, Carol Dweck. In it, Dweck talks about learning curves, the “power of yet” vs the “tyranny of now”, and why praising process (rather than outcome) helps develop grit and a growth mindset.

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🚀 On Entrepreneurship —

I stumbled upon a quote about helping others, which I think holds the secret to helping achieve entrepreneurial goals:

“One individual, no matter how powerful, how clever, cannot survive without other human beings. 

So the best way to fulfill your wishes, to reach your goals, is to help others, to make more friends.”

“How do we create more friends?” he now asked rhetorically. “Trust”.

“How do you develop trust? 

It’s simple: You show your genuine sense of concern for their well-being.” 

- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “Book of Joy”

Success in business tends to have connotations of selfishness and greed. But the truth is that you can succeed by being selfless and genuinely caring about the people you serve (your users, customers, partners, employees, team etc).

You will win if you genuinely want to help people, rather than use people as a means to an end. The rest will take care of itself. 

For example, if you focus on helping others, you’ll end up with a product which customers find truly valuable, a high-performing team where everyone feels appreciated, and a reputation for generosity which will help in future endeavors.

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💪 On Health —

A framework for deciding when and what to eat: This video on “Macronutrients and the Nervous System” helped me better understand the effects of what I eat on the state of my nervous system, as well as when it's best to eat carbs, protein and fats.

Here are my key takeaways:

• Macronutrients in the food you eat affect the state of your nervous system, which in turn affects our ability to function at work, during exercise, and socially.

• The key is to eat to trigger the state you want to be in next, rather than eating reactively.

• Carbohydrates tend to push you toward a sympathetic state (fight, flight or freeze). It’s best to eat carbs during the day to fuel strenuous activity or before heavy workouts.

• Protein requires more time to digest and thus pushes you toward a parasympathetic state (rest, digest and socialize).

• Protein and carbs eaten together tends to hamper the digestion of the protein. It’s best to eat protein at night, when we are naturally in a more calm, recovery-focused state.

• Modern life, with its long workdays and 3 meals a day, poses a puzzle about what to eat and when. You can use these principles and tailor your eating around your specific schedule and requirements so as to maximize aligned nervous system states.

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🙏 On Happiness —

Success is an internal experience: It’s easy to get bogged down in thinking that there’s only one definition of success (be it money, fame, power, freedom etc) and that if you don’t meet it, you’re a failure.

This 2 minute video is a reminder that success is an “internal experience”: it’s something you define for yourself, your definition can evolve over time, and only you can know if you’re successful, not other people.

Choose your definition of success wisely, or else you’ll spend a large portion of your life feeling like a failure, and life’s too short for that. 

📚 Related resources: 

• Nic Voge on Helping Princeton students learn, Procrastination, Self-worth (Youtube, Podcast)

• The Internal Scorecard

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👨🏽‍💻 What I'm up to these days —

Testimonials on my website: Finally, thanks to those of you who’ve submitted testimonials about how this newsletter has helped you. I’ve just added some of them to my website:

If you’d like to leave a one sentence testimonial about this newsletter or any of my other writing - just reply to this email!

🙏 Thank you again for reading and for your support! I wish you a week of happiness, success and peace!

Avthar 

🌐 avthar.com

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