Eric Barker

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.’ In other words: Fail fast, fail cheap.

As W.C. Fields once said, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again . . . then give up. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.’

Author Tony Schwartz says, ‘Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.’

We got to the moon and built the pyramids without checking email. You can go a couple of hours without checking them.

So don’t be afraid to do some experiments, and quit the ones that don’t work. It can lead to great things. You need to quit some things to find out what to be gritty at.

So, what’s the first step? Know your number-one priority. Then start quitting stuff that isn’t as important and see what happens.

George Valliant led the Grant Study, which followed a group of men for their entire lives, from college until their death. What did he say to sum up their findings from this decades-long research? ‘The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.’

Not only did dreaming not bring you your desires; it actually *hurt* your chances of getting what you want. No, folks, The Secret doesn’t work.

In the famous commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 he said, ‘Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.’