This issue is made up of the following sections:

1. Personal Effectiveness Tips
2. Questions for Growth
3. Reality Check - A Balanced Life

1. Personal Effectiveness Tips
1. 3 Quick Common Sense Rules for Leaders:
   1. Know your followers-understand what they need, not what they say they need. There's a difference.
   2. Listen, then talk-you don't learn by talking.
   3. Stand for something-the world is full of indecisive and equivocating leaders. Don't be one.

2. Seek to add both breadth and depth to your life, no matter the area. This means that you look for varied experiences, and look to learn something new with each experience. This will allow you to connect with a wider array of people, and to add something to each conversation, be it that whales travel in pods, or that George Washington was a great leader but a subpar military tactician, or that the correct definition of the word peruse means to look something over carefully (most people don't know this). The more subjects you know, and the more you know about these subjects, the more interesting you are to others.

3. If you want others to respect you, you'll need to act accordingly. This means:
   1. Offering true opinions (rather than opinions that keep others happy)
   2. Questioning commonly held truths and facts (you can, in fact, have your cake AND eat it. You cannot, however, eat your cake AND still have it)
   3. Demanding accountability in others
   4. Treating yourself like you matter
   5. Following the Golden Rule (or, Grandma's Rule)
   6. Avoiding casually promise something you don't really intend to deliver

4. Depending on where you look, the average life expectancy is currently about 77 years. With that in mind, here is an estimate of how many days you may have left in your life, by current age:
   1. 30 years old=17,155 days left
   2. 40 years old= 13,505 days left
   3. 50 years old= 9,855 days left

   What are you doing with the time you have left? Studies have shown that individuals that surround themselves with good relationships, have a passion they actively pursue in their life, and eat a moderate and balanced diet add years on to their life expectancy.

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2. Questions for Growth
1. If you were to die today, how would your obituary read?

2. If somebody approached you about making a movie about your life, would anyone want to see it? Why or why not?

3. How many of your current behaviors would continue if you were to become a celebrity or public figure? (think carefully!)

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3. Reality Check - A Balanced Life

How balanced is your life? Strategically speaking, how much of your life is intentionally spent, including vacations and fun? Tactically speaking, how much time in your daily life is spent thinking about things? How much time is spent getting results?

One of the biggest problems our society faces today is the problem of life imbalance. We are taught from an early age that more is better, and then, never enough. We have to keep up with our supercilious neighbors, with our parents' skewed expectations of ourselves, and with our sybaritic inner voice. It is exhausting, really.

This old view of the "good life" is really a formula for personal disaster. More is not better, not even in most cases, and the problem with subscribing to society's view on what is good is that it is in a constant state of flux. Talk about stressful! It's akin to playing a game with someone who keeps changing the rules.

Balance is key, both strategically and tactically. This means that we plan our lives to allow for a varied amount and type of activities (strategically). Work, play, and downtime are all afforded equal importance, and engaging in one renews our energy for engaging in the other areas. Tactically, we strive to achieve a balance between thinking, feeling, and doing. For some of us, that means thinking about things less and getting out and achieving more. What good are those master plans if they remain mere thoughts or pages in a notebook? For others, it means stopping to assess prior to taking our next adventure; sometimes slowing things down is prescribed. You can't hurry through enjoying a sunset, right? Finally, for others still it means understanding that emotions serve a purpose, good and bad, and that we are not slave to them. Use them as action signals, as cues to take action somehow.

Push yourself to achieve better life balance. What you'll find is that you'll have more energy, better perspective, and more fun in your daily life.

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