Elevate Book Summary - Elevate Book explained in key points

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Elevate summary

Name: Elevate
Rating: 4.2 (131 reviews)
Author: Joseph Deitch

Joseph Deitch

An Essential Guide to Life

4.2 (131 ratings)

21 mins

What is Elevate about?

Elevate (2018) is an indispensable guide to upping your game and living your life to the fullest. Whether you’re looking for a career boost or want to bring more meaning and joy into your private affairs, these blinks contain an arsenal of tips and tricks to help you take things to the next level.

Table of Contents

Elevate
summarized in 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? A pro’s guide to personal growth.

The modern world is bursting with data. All this information can be overwhelming. What does it all mean and, more to the point, what’s the best way of achieving success and satisfaction in your life?

Luckily, you don’t have to try to figure it out on your own. In these blinks, we’ll turn to entrepreneur, author, and lifelong wisdom-seeker Joseph Deitch for help. Born in 1950, Deitch’s chameleon-like career has seen him excel in industries as different as financial planning and entertainment.

But whatever he turned his hand to, there’s always been a guiding thread: a commitment to personal growth and a burning desire to achieve excellence. And that’s just what we’ll be exploring as we unpack Deitch’s toolkit for upping your personal and professional game.

Along the way, you’ll learn

why listening is the key to learning;
how rewards can help you reach your goals; and
why love is all you need.

You can solve many problems and get what you want by simply asking the right questions.

How do you solve problems in your life? As you think of various techniques, you might be forgetting something obvious: taking a moment to think things through and asking yourself what the solution might be. It’s a deceptively simple approach that delivers incredible results.

Take it from the author, who spends his winters in Boston, Massachusetts. It’s a cold, grey, and dreary place and, like lots of Bostonians, he suffers from a mild form of winter depression. For a long time, he dreaded the arrival of November.

There was one highlight, however – Thanksgiving. That got the author thinking. What, he asked himself, was it that made the annual holiday so enjoyable? More to the point, what could he do to make the rest of November as enjoyable as Thanksgiving?

The answer? Getting together with friends and family. And that was the solution to the author’s winter blues. Today, he plans parties, excursions, meetups, and game-evenings with the folks he loves. It’s had a miraculous effect. Rather than despairing about the coming winter, he actually looks forward to it!

Here’s another easy way to tackle problems: don’t just ask yourself what you want, but how you’re going to get it. Think back to when you were a kid and how much you wanted sweets or that new toy your parents refused to buy you. Children typically react to these frustrations by whining or even crying. This is a self-pity trap that you need to learn to avoid.

The trick is to ask the right question: What do I need to do in order to get what I want? The author taught his son, Matt, to take this approach, and it’s worked wonders. When Matt wants something – a video game, say – he realizes that he has to do something to earn it, like cleaning the dishes after dinner or completing other household chores.

As you can imagine, that’s a great attitude to take to life’s many challenges and frustrations. Rather than passively grumbling about your lot, it encourages you to put yourself in the driving seat and proactively solve problems for yourself.

Listening to others is not always easy, but it provides valuable information and helps you improve.

If you want to learn something new, you have to listen to others – after all, when you’re the one doing the talking, you inevitably end up saying what you already know. Whether you’re with your friends and family or in a business meeting, listening is the best way of getting information and finding out what you can improve on.

Taking feedback on board can be tricky, though, especially when it’s critical. The author witnessed just how hard this can be a couple of years back, when he attended a seminar in which participants received feedback from their colleagues.

The way we think and talk affects our lives and shapes the way we feel.

Every night before bed, the author told his son Matt that he was an excellent sleeper who could always drop off whatever the situation. Amazingly, this worked and Matt has never had a problem getting a good night’s sleep. What’s going on here – how does this work?

The answer might surprise you. How we think and talk about things actually affects our lives. Think of the human brain as a computer. Like a PC, it can be programmed. Rather than using code, however, it’s programmed using regular, everyday language.

Positive, immediate, and certain motivation is the best way to achieve your goals.

Have you had a boss who inspired you to go the extra mile and produce the best work of your career? If so, you’ve probably wondered what it was that made them such a great motivator. Surprisingly, it’s a lot less complicated than you might think – in fact, it all comes down to a couple of straightforward rules.

Here’s the most important point: if you want to get the best out of others, you need to give them positive, immediate and certain motivation. Let’s break that down.

Structures help you to avoid mistakes, while conserving your energy prevents burn-out.

Life has a way of throwing us curveballs. When that happens, we’re quick to adapt. If a close friend or family member gets seriously ill, for example, we often discover previously unknown resources to structure our time and get a huge number of things done.

But what if there was a way of doing that every day, not just in times of crisis? Here’s the good news – there is. Let’s see how.

Power naps are a great way to make up for lost sleep, but they can’t replace it entirely.

Professional success and personal fulfillment are both built on the same foundation stones. One of the most important and often overlooked parts of this structure? Sleep. If you’re struggling to get a proper night’s rest, don’t worry – in this blink, we’ll explore hacks for quality rest.

Let’s start with power naps. When you’re tired, there’s often little point trying to press ahead with your work. You’re guaranteed to be working inefficiently and wind up with something that falls below your usual standards. So here’s the alternative: take a short nap and refuel before returning to the task at hand.

It’s worth investing a lot of energy into a new venture, and keeping track of your time.

It takes a huge amount of energy to get an airplane off the ground, but once it reaches altitude it can cruise while burning minimal amounts of fuel. The momentum achieved by that initial spurt, in other words, is enough to keep it in the air.

What does this have to do with your personal and professional life? Quite a lot, actually. Like an airplane, you need to expend a lot of energy when you launch new projects. Start half-heartedly, by contrast, and you’ll soon find yourself out of runway. That’s when you hit a wall and give up.

Bringing more love into your life and remembering the importance of touch will make you happier.

As the famous Beatles song has it, “All you need is love.” On some level, we all know that love makes our lives happier and fuller. Unfortunately, we often overlook this basic insight and neglect this vital matter. That has to change.

Love is contagious. Spend time around a loving person and you’ll find yourself feeling much more connected and mellow. That’s why it’s so important to surround yourself with loving influences. This can be as simple as spending more time with the folks who love you and make you feel good.

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Best quote from Elevate

Listening is a never-ending journey upon an ever-improving road.

—Joseph Deitch

About the Author

Joseph Deitch is financial expert, author, and the founder of Commonwealth Financial Network, a $150 billion company based in Boston. Deitch also produced nine Broadway hits including adaptations of The Addams Family, A View from the Bridge, and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Elevate is his first book.

Who should read Elevate?

Anyone looking to learn important skills for entrepreneurship
Anyone who wants to feel more motivated
Anyone who wants to enjoy more success and fun in life

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