One of the best movies I’ve ever watched….It’s a classic.  Adding to my library!

Some of my favorite quotes from this movie:

A warrior does not give up what he loves, he finds the love in what he does

Death isn’t sad. The sad thing is: most people don’t live at all.

Sometimes you have to lose your mind before you come to your senses.

I call myself a Peaceful Warrior… because the battles we fight are on the inside

This is the only movie I’ve seen that is recommended by some of the best coaches and best-selling authors.  A must-watch movie – atleast once!

Creativity, using the mind rather than being used by the mind, is the cure for all stress disorders.

What kills us is intense attachment to our interpretations and failure to distinguish these interpretations from sensate reality. This process of learning to categorize experiences, and then forgetting the distinction between categories and experience itself, is what I call learning how to lie

We complicate our lives by holding on to these hard-earned lessons long after they have outlived their usefulness

In Yeats’ phrase, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of “shoulds’ is a disease, a mental illness, a condition to self-murder and cultural assassination.

Level three (of telling truth) is sharing with other people in ways that occasionally allow you to overcome your own egotism, including the egotism that comes from thinking you are great for telling the truth.

We invent some fundamental lies about how life should be and shouldn’t be, how life is or isn’t according to what we have taught ourselves to ignore or deny and what can or cannot be talked about.  We compensate for our sense of something missing and our boredom with a kind of frenetic, compulsive use of food, alcohol, and drugs to try to get temporary relief from imprisonment in our own minds.

The ongoing denial process uses a lot of energy and thought.  Thus, the angry feelings we try to control, end up controlling us.

Thinking is not the source of power.  Being is the source of power.

I see of lot of ways to apply these realizations in my life – this is one of the things I am going to be focusing on for next few months.

• Learn to be fully present in the given moment by being in touch with how I feel in that moment, rather than relying on my past categorizations of the that moment.

Highly recommend for anyone interested in pursuing spiritual growth the “simple” way.  Get it here: Radical Honesty, The New Revised Edition: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth

Big takeaways are:

1. Human beings are neither the product of their nature nor their nurture – they are shaped by the choices they make.  Power of choice lies between stimulus and response.  Leadership is a choice not a position – this choice can be developed by exercising the freedom of response between stimulus and response.
2. Whole Person Paradigm – Body (Physical), Mind(Intellectual), Heart(Emotional), and Spirit (spiritual).  We have four intelligences/Capacities – Evolving our four capacities is what makes our life balanced, integrated, and powerful.  Borrowing strength builds weakness – in self, in others and in relationships.  Over-relying on one of these four capacities exacerbate our weaknesses and weaknesses of others as well.  (e.g. engineers over-relying on IQ.  This is probably is a blind generalization – however, in my experience, engineers are typically over-relying on IQ – then they try to intellectually rationalize their behavior).
3. Things need to be managed, whereas, people need to be leaded (empowered).   Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they come to see it in themselves. With people, fast is slow and slow is fast.  Leadership is about sacrificing something good, for something better.
4. Service above self is true DNA of success.  It is not about “what’s in it for me”, but about “what can I contribute?”
5. Knowledge is not wisdom.  Nor is information.  Knowledge and information when impregnated with worthy purpose and principles, turn into wisdom.

My action-steps after reading this book are:

1. Take greater initiative in deposits – in both personal and professional relationships.
2. Develop all four capacities, stop over-relying on one of them.
3. Build moral authority by keeping promises to self.  Start small.  (e.g. Meditate every day for 10 mins to develop spiritual intelligence)
4. Strengthen principle-centered problem solving abilities – Constantly seek for the ways in which I can serve human needs – and channel my entrepreneurial pursuits in areas that serve biggest needs with the leverage of effective execution(discipline), synergy, and wisdom.

This book reignited my beliefs in the power of principle centered leadership.  I need to read it couple more times before I completely metabolize and internalize the information, principles, knowledge, and wisdom presented in this book.

Absolute must read.  Get it here:  The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness To Greatness