When to quit your job?

How do you feel Sunday evening? Are you full of enthusiasm for the week ahead? Or, does your heart feel tight with the feeling that Monday is approaching, and you’ll be back to work in another few hours? If latter is the case, it’s time to ask yourself some questions.

According to Jim Kwik, renowned Chinese American memory coach, your job should support you both financially as well as personally. Not one at the expense of the other. He enumerates seven points related to job satisfaction.

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1. Are you growing financially and professionally?

In this regard it is very important to feed your mind, with new things as well as reinforcement of old knowledge. You got to put your old knowledge to the test all the time.

Kwik says, “If you’re not feeding your mind, you’re falling behind”. About the job he further says, “It’s one thing for your job to support you financially. But it should also support your personal and professional growth”.

Kwik believes one should expand year over year. “You can be at a job for seven years, but without new learnings and growth. What you really could have is one year of experience repeated seven times,” is what Kwik say about reinventing the wheel. And he believes your time on earth is far too precious for that.

Jim Kwik, in today’s corporate world, is a giant in speed-reading, memory improvement, brain performance and accelerated learning. His clients include the American blue-chip companies Nike, Zappos, SpaceX, entertainment giant Fox Studios, top-notch universities Harvard and New York University and celebrities Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, Oprah Winfrey,Elon Musk (of SpaceX) and Will smith.

Kwik’s rise to fame is also astonishing. After a childhood brain injury left him learning-challenged, Jim Kwik created strategies to enhance his mental performance. His cutting-edge techniques, entertaining presentation style and impressive brainpower feats have made him what he is today, a highly sought-out motivation trainer. Methods either developed or improved by him include “Kwik Recall” for memory improvement, “Kwik Reading” for speed-reading and “Kwik Thinking” for advanced thinking. Kwik strongly believes memory can be trained to make learning quick and more efficient.

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2. Do you learn new things?

Progress is the joy we feel as we move in the direction of our potential. When we learn, we feel alive. It’s as if our life kicks into a higher level. Education doesn’t end when you leave school. Ongoing education at office is not only challenging to the employees, also will energize them.

According to Kwik, “If there’s one skill to master in today’s fast-paced Information Age, it’s the ability to learn rapidly. The faster you can learn, the more you can earn.”

The famous American business magnate Warren Buffet (of Berkshire Hathaway fame), convinced by Kwik’s methods, once famously confessed, “”I’ve probably wasted 10 years reading slowly.”

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3. Do you experience Sunday

night blues?

Unhappiness or complacency can manifest physically. This even has led to the recognition of the condition termed “Sunday night blues” characterized by anxiety about the week ahead and a sense of helplessness and depression. It is estimated that half of the American work force suffer from some form of this condition.

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4. Is your inner voice getting louder?

Our intuition whispers to us and it increases its volume when we try to silence it. At our core, we are curious, creative and hungry. When we aren’t satisfied at work, our emotions refuse to tolerate it.

Because we’re in an age of outsourcing as Kwik puts it, “your ability to outthink, outlearn, and outperform is your competitive advantage”. “Invest in your unique capacity to be creative and solve problems, so you don’t lose opportunity [to outsourcing], automation, and artificial intelligence.”

Creative problem solvers will always remain the most in demand in the workforce. Cultivating these skills is not only fun, it’s critical to future-proof your career.

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5. Do you Seek relief elsewhere?

This is really disastrous. Some, unhappy at work, find solace in alcohol, drugs or similar indulgences. Are you seeking satisfaction and excitement outside your services because you’re out of alignment—or because your job is simply not enough?

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6. Is there more?

“Is this all there is?” may not be a uncommon question for many. The truth is, the only limits you experience are the ones you create. If you can’t seem to quit your daydream (or think it can only be a dream), you’re underestimating yourself. Career changes are common. Lateral internal moves happen constantly. So is starting a passion-based side hustle—one-third of millennial rock one now. What are you not letting yourself pursue?

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7. Are you betraying yourself?

This commonly happens when you are in someone else’s shoes. In other words, in a job that is not to your liking. You may feel as if you are betraying yourself. You may be continuing in that job for the pecuniary benefits or social glory it brings you. But if it doesn’t satisfy you or if it makes you feel guilty, then that’s not the job for you.

Every great manifestation comes from what we believe to be real about who we are and what we can achieve. And according to Kwik, majority of times we aim too low. We fail to appreciate our unique talents, gifts, and magnificence.

“We are taught a lie that our intelligence, our potential to learn, is fixed like our shoe size,” Kwik says. “We grossly underestimate our own mental power”.

How will you focus on what you can do (instead of what you can’t) right now? How will you seize your power? Then let the possibility unfold is what Kwik prescribes.

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Why Do Your Happy Memories Fade?

According to a new study, people overestimate how much they’ll recall from a good time in their life—but there’s a way to boost your memory.

A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicates that hoping for lifelong memories of a happy time might only be wishful thinking.

While it’s common to anticipate the joys of looking back on something as special as a romantic trip to Paris, for instance, the study finds that we often overestimate how much we will actually think of, or talk about, these pleasant memories. Indeed, it suggests that the more people expect to remember, the higher their overestimation will be.

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Darn those distractions..

Part of the problem is that we forget to remember. We think we will remember this experience forever—but don’t factor in the distractions of everyday life, which render that fond memory harder and harder to access.

Stephanie Tully, assistant professor of marketing at University of South Carolina Marshall, and Tom Meyvis, marketing professor at the New York University Stern School of Business, conducted two experiments. They found that participants who thought about a future experience predicted they would think about and talk about their experience more often than other participants reported actually having done for a past experience.

The authors then demonstrated these effects in longitudinal studies, where they could examine the same participants across time. In one study, participants went to a U.S. Open tennis tournament and one day later predicted they would reminisce much more than they reported doing two months later. Moreover, the more they enjoyed the tennis matches, the more they overestimated.

In other studies, Tully and Meyvis found that this overestimation extended to other forms of retrospection, like looking at photos from an African safari and tweeting about Beyond Wonderland, an expensive music festival.

The studies indicated that this effect isn’t because people lose interest.

“Importantly, the desire to retrospect does not change over time,” Tully said. “Instead, past experiences become less top-of-mind over time, and, as a result, people simply forget to remember.”

Buy a memento

In a final study, the researchers looked at the impact of buying mementos. Specifically, people who purchased merchandise or professional photos of the studied event (a fun run) did not predict they would recall or talk about the race more than others, but two months later they did report talking about the experience and looking at photos more often. Importantly, having access to digital photos was not as effective.

“These results are consistent with the view that actual retrospection is strongly dependent on the accessibility of the experience, which is aided by visible mementos,” Tully and Meyvis wrote.

In other words, if you want a souvenir, go for it. With that miniature Eiffel Tower sitting on your desk, you’ll definitely always remember your Paris trip.

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