Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Passion is the thing that will help you create the highest expression of your talent.  Science shows that passion is contagious.  You can’t inspire others unless you are inspired yourself.  Passion is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job.  Our levels of desire, patience, persistence and confidence end up playing a much large role in success than sheer reasoning powers.  Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything.

What makes your heart sing?  Happiness can only come from the long-term cultivation of wisdom, altruism and compassion, and from the complete eradication of mental toxins, such as hatred, grasping and ignorance.  Career, happiness and the ability to inspire people are connected.  Money, status etc. are the wrong reasons to pursue a career.  To have a great career is to do what you love.  Passion defines a person.  Charismatic people exude joy and passion.  How you think – the confidence you have in your expertise, the passion you have changes your brain chemistry.

Tell stories to reach people’s hearts and minds, then they will trust you.  The stories will sync your brain with the listener’s brain.  Stories are just data with a soul.  Stories make concepts and ideas real and tangible.  You have to reach the listener’s heart.  Just hearing “the smell of lavender” activates the part of the brain involved in smell.  Great speakers are mavericks, adventurers and rule-bending rebels who take risks.

When you introduce a new or novel way of solving an old problem, you are tapping into millions of years of adaptations.  By teaching something new that can be used in one’s daily life, you will hook them.  Learning something new activates the same reward area of the brain as do drugs.  That chemical is dopamine.  Dopamine is addictive.  Solitude is a crucial ingredient for creativity to flourish.  Great innovators connect ideas from different fields.  The brain takes shortcuts so it can conserve energy.  Experts tend to get lost in the weeds and aren’t always able to see things with a beginners mind and their perspective.

18 minutes is long enough to be serious and short enough to hold people’s attention.  This brings discipline to your presentation.  A long presentation makes for a cognitive load.  The brain gets tired easily.  Taking in new information sets off millions of neurons firing.  Unrelated activities, resisting chocolate, listening to a presentation, draws energy.  The consumed energy leads to fatigue.

Contrary to popular belief, the main event of the imagination – creativity – does not require unrestrained freedom, rather it relies on limits and obstacles.  When you remove just the right thing in just the right way, something good usually happens.  Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex.  It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.  It takes courage to keep things simple.  Da Vinci said “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

People can remember three pieces of information, more than three and the attention falls off.

The three A’s of Awesome.  Attitude – always move forward no matter how difficult it is.  Awareness – embrace your inner three year old.   Authenticity – be yourself, follow your heart.

The brain craves multisensory experiences.  The brain loves two mental representations, e.g. verbal and visual.  The mental connections are stronger.  Vision and text is much stronger than text.  If you hear information you retain 10%.  Add a picture and your recall is 65%.  Our brains are wired to process visual information.  If you think of something vividly, the same brain areas are activated as if you were seeing the event.  The brain can’t tell the difference between what it sees and what it imagines.

Stay in your cone.  Be who you are and you will gain your audience’s trust.

Categories: Book Summary

ron winnegrad

Ron Winnegrad has been a Perfumer and teacher for 46 years. As a perfumer, Ron has been able to express the world he sees through a rainbow of olfactive and emotive visions. As a teacher, Ron has helped others to see fragrance through his own multi sensorial lens.