In the pursuit of excellence, when facing pressure, we recommend you these two practices.

Text | Ye Xiao-key

Stress in a story

Growth is often accompanied by many stories, and in each story, you may encounter certain things and learn from them, and after reviewing or reflecting on them, valuable experiences are accumulated.
What do you do when you are faced with a problem or an important decision and the pressure seems to overwhelm us?
In his book “Schwarzman: My Experience and Lessons Learned”, Schwarzman, one of the founders of the Blackstone Group, mentions that when he encountered great stress during his entrepreneurial journey, the two approaches he took were to focus and to seek help.
This reminds me of when I personally encountered difficulties during my graduate studies, my senior suggested that we go to our teachers to discuss and ask for advice, looking for guidance to complete our thesis.
When we were enrolled, both our seniors and our teachers mentioned in class that now is the best time to write a thesis without delay and to find a teacher early to determine the topic.
Focus on the task at hand, don’t procrastinate, and be proactive in finding resources and assistance.
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Wanting to be better

Most people have the desire to grow, but not everyone is willing to put in the effort.
Even when he is on vacation, he doesn’t want to refine himself. The time is there, the books are there, and we want to learn, not need to learn.
Need is a driving force, and that driving force, if it is not very strong, we may indulge in swiping our phones in bed or watching TV on the couch, feeling as if we have lost something, but still not caring.
For people who need to be better, growing up is a necessary choice or process, and the stress that comes with that choice is unavoidable.
Growth should be a need, and through reading, we can broaden our thinking and have different approaches to make ideas more feasible. This allows us to gain experience and grow in our lives and work, which makes life better.
While we are enjoying the good things in life, we are also feeling the hope for the future.
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Simple and doable.

Too much stress can interfere with our sleep and can even have an adverse reaction on our bodies.
In his book, “My Experience and Lessons Learned,” Schwarzman, one of the founders of the Blackstone Group, shares two ways to deal with stress: focus and seek help.
Concentration means to focus on completing something before doing it. In the process of concentration, it is the best state to enter the flow of the mind. As Tseng Kuo-fan said, “Success lies in the ability to focus”.
The so-called Multi Tasking (multi-threaded work), not to do many things at the same time, but to do one thing and then do another, pick up fast, put down fast, the fight is still the ability to focus. Accomplishing things: Feng Tang tasting Zeng Guofan’s Jia Yan banknote

The following three methods can lead us into a state of concentration.
1. Breathing
The smoothness of breathing is very important for the control of emotions. The handling of emotions is something worthy of attention and a key moment when we can get different choices.
Exhale, stop for 4 seconds, inhale for 4 seconds, stop for 4 seconds, exhale for 4 seconds, stop for 4 seconds; do this cycle about 4–8 times.
Focus on your breathing, feel the air flowing between your noses, consciously slow down your breathing, relax your shoulders and don’t collapse tightly until your breath becomes deep and long.

2. Copy
Copying is more than just copying the words of a book and keeping them, it is a way to help yourself get focused.
Copying is not only a way to copy the book and keep it, but also a way to make every word in the book pass through the eyes, hands and mind of the copyist. __ The Complete Book of Self-Study
Whether you are copying to organize your daily work process list, or programming to copy proof processes that you do not understand, this process allows you to quickly focus on the events of the moment.
If you don’t have one at the moment, we recommend that you consider short poems or English 15–20 words or short texts in English are suitable for transcription.

3. Tomato Clock
When we encounter complex problems at work or in life, we need to develop a mechanism and process to discipline ourselves, as Feng Tang said in The Golden Thread.
The tomato clock is an effective tool to allow us to allocate time, whether we want to brush our phones to kill time, read novels to relax ourselves, or read to expand our knowledge, we need to have some discipline and self-discipline process, self-discipline is the real freedom.

At the same time, it is also important to seek help, including resources, personnel or personal energy, etc.
1. Communicate with others
In the workplace, effective communication and good collaboration with others is the key to seizing opportunities. As Schwarzman said in “My Experience and Lessons Learned”, silence is not golden, and effective communication is a very important skill to collaborate with others and enter into group life.
Because sometimes speaking dialogue can make a difference in opportunities, learning this skill allows us to speak dialogue and do the right thing when collaborating with others.

2. Writing documents is a way to help yourself grow
Growth requires experience, and with experience comes knowing how to do it. Writing documentation is an effective way to illustrate when experience is not proficient enough. Also, pay attention to what the experts in your field are doing, learn it, and your experience value will rise again. As stated in Research is an Art, experience is the only thing that can tell you what is just right.

3. Sequencing is a guide to yourself in times of confusion
Time is a single thread, but things may be multi-event concurrent. In this case, we may feel confused. We need to sort events by importance and due date, like the sorting function in Excel, in order to have direction in the chaos.
This way, although sometimes in chaos, we can still have direction to do things.
In our life and work, we can apply the function of sorting to deal with various events and tasks.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)