Syllabus: 100 Day Challenge
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” ~ Aristotle
Be sure to bookmark this page.
The full Syllabus is below, but there is some important information you will need to “make sense” of it all! This is a fun, fast, highly engaging program that requires just 2 things:
- About 15-20 minutes each day to read, watch, listen, and follow the directions…
- An open mind and an inspired sense of inner challenge and motivation.
We cannot make you want to improve or succeed or produce better results. If you want to get ahead faster and reach higher, you will find great joy in this program.
If you do not want to achieve a higher level of performance… a bigger paycheck… more responsibility and opportunities… or even the possibility of working smarter and retiring rich… well, you can dismiss this all as sheer folly and let your competitors steal your thunder.
No, we are not talking about physical, hand-to-hand competition. But remember, your job is always at stake and in this economy, your survival is far from guaranteed. Regardless of your occupation, age, education, or track record, you are competing with the person in the next cubical… office… building… city… state… country… or folks you have never heard of that woke up this morning and decided to out-smart… out-hustle… out-perform… and out-produce you.
Somebody out there wants to eat YOUR lunch. Maybe not positive enough motivation, but maybe this little story will set the stage for your challenge…
“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle—when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” ― Born to Run
Our job is to help you quickly, easily, and in a highly condensed format, learn, remember, and master the skills for a radical improvement in your success potential. This requires no magic, AI, or even higher education. It does require an unconditional commitment to excellence and a complete rejection of mediocrity.
After your 100-day challenge is complete, you will be ready for phase 2—anything and everything you need to sharpen your edge even further.
So, please start by taking your Actual TQ Test and reading your copy of The Power of TQ™. You might want to listen to the Secrets of The Time Prism audio, go to your App store and download our TimePrism App. Just search TimePrism, install, and use it as your daily touchstone. It has a way of extending and reinforcing what you already know, what you will learn, and give you additional tools in your daily battle against the clock.
The Power of TQ™ and 10 Choices of Intentional Excellence…
Maybe you have already read The Power of TQ™, maybe not but it is important that you clearly understand the road ahead! We invite you to acquaint yourself with the key principles of the journey you are about to embark upon.
The objective of your 100-Day Excellence Habit Challenge is to achieve a complete rewiring of your brain—don’t worry, this is a good thing—so that both halves of your brain are fully engaged in Systematically Higher Achievement. You will immediately, one day at a time, produce significantly better results… up-skill your productivity… and move beyond mere effort to systematically higher effectiveness.
Click Cover to Return to Your TQ Download Center
and get your eBook edition + Secrets of The Time Prism
Systematic Self-Measurement… Self-Evaluation… and Self-Improvement…
As you now know, success is a function of High Expectations over Brilliant Execution.
Which is based on your TQ… your power to produce Results over Time. This is, unquestionably, the formula for enduring success.
Produce greater RESULTS and do it in less TIME… you get ahead.
Produce fewer RESULTS and do it in more TIME… you fall behind.
So, the Challenge is to maximize your TQ, your Results, and of course, greatly expand your success potential.
Which, of course, is what this 100-day quick start Master Class is really about!
The DNA Discipline…
This Crash Course is not about INFORMATION… it is about ACTION.
There is no question that success is in your DNA… your D)o it N)ow A)ctions!
Over the next 100 days, you will be sent a DNA file each morning that tells you exactly what to do!
This gives you tremendous focus and direction and will lead to big performance changes in a very short period of time.
All of these DNA’s are explicit to a given Factor. In just 10-20 minutes a day, over 100 days, you will train your brain to take in some 1,244 new Key Ideas… respond to 2,100 TQ IQ’s… and drive all this success-critical information into both your conscious and subconscious mind.
About The Invisible Billionaire…
You will receive these DNAs each morning in place of your normal Today’s TQ, Daily Lessons In Excellence. (They will automatically begin again once your 100-day Challenge is complete.)
These DNAs are highly concentrated training for each of the 100 TQ Factors—coming at you once a day.
To build a bit of interest, inspiration, and motivation, we created a storyline around a man we call Mr. Tommy TQ Quinn, AKA The Invisible Billionaire.
Think of this series as a very broad conversation regarding the power any given Factor has over your life and the futures of everyone around you.
They take about 3-4 minutes to read. If you don’t like them, simply download the PDF containing the day’s DNA and follow it from Step 1 on!
But you might try giving Tommy a chance. He has a lot of information you just might find useful, especially if wealth creation is interesting to you!
Each DNA takes about 20 minutes, plus or minus, to complete during the day. The links we want you to use are built-in so all you need to do is open the PDF and follow the directions. Each element is fully integrated, so the information you enter can be saved to a file on your computer. It is not your answers or responses that are important. It is the discipline to build The Excellence Habit— one day at a time over the next 100 days.
Do this and you will gain a tremendous amount of self-confidence, inspiration, resilience, internal motivation, and a command of the tools available to you. Much of TQ is currently hidden from you. Here we dose out vital instruction on how to use the tools and have you actively participate in this immersive process of total engagement.
The Excellence Habit eBook…
During these 100 days, we will be discussing many different approaches to Maximum Personal and Professional Success. In fact, we wrote a wonderful new book giving you the basics of real transformation.
This book approaches excellence, success, results, performance, passion, etc. from a completely different perspective. Be sure to download it, skim it for now, but plan on digging deep later on.
This book contains a vast amount of information about habits, brain-based training, and makes the case why EVERYTHING matters… probably more than you can even begin to imagine right now. It is set up so you can grab the concept and use it right away… or Google it for more depth and detail.
Right Click to Save to Your Computer…
A Very Simple Syllabus!
With all the background information out of the way, WELCOME!
This will be a completely unique experience for you.
It is work… but fun work.
It is work… but tremendously revealing work.
It is work… but there is really no other way to accomplish our objective…
Rewire your brain for SUCCESS
not just SURVIVAL.
To prove my point, I want you to take 10 seconds to burn this image from the wonderful book, Mind Sculpture, into your mind. Kind of stare at it or scan from side to side… top to bottom.
Most people instantly see the tree, some see the snake through the dot patterns.
Which do you see? Tree? Snake? Both? None?
Once you see the pattern below, you will get it.
But for now, let’s talk about your Syllabus!
BACKSTORY: I found the following article/book by accident while doing principle research for our new Marriage With Purpose initiative. I know, “nothing happens by accident!”
What I was interested in was, why do some people get along and correctly combine Chemistry, Compatibility and Adaptability into a happy marriage, where others permit their relationships to die a slow agonizing death from indifference and loathing?
Hundreds of sources reported that when we experience a Negative in our relationships, it takes 5 Positives to partially offset the hurt and pain. The Negatives, which are far more easily stored in the brain than the Positives, just naturally stay at top of mind. WOW… a cause and effect if ever there was one.
It was a short intellectual leap back to the main tenant of TQ and the concept of achieving excellence in everything we do — INTENTIONALLY:
Intentional Excellence: When you see a Negative entering your performance, you take immediate Positive Action to eliminate it.
Intentional Mediocrity: When you see a Negative entering your performance, you do nothing.
Ultimately, I found the source of all the random articles, Dr. Rick Hanson, out of Berkeley. In part, he explains his “Taking in the Good” hypothesis:
“The simple idea is that we all want to have good things inside ourselves: happiness, resilience, love, confidence, and so forth. The question is, how do we actually grow those, in terms of the brain? It’s really important to have positive experiences of these things that we want to grow, and then really help them sink in because if we don’t help them sink in, they don’t become neural structure very effectively. So what my book’s about is taking the extra 10, 20, 30 seconds to enable everyday experiences to convert to neural structure so that increasingly, you have these strengths with you wherever you go.”
(See the connection between this and developing positive core competencies via creating new TQ “neural nets”?)
Ultimately, the visible takeaway from this work is a bigger, brighter, better brain that permits you to “take in the good” a bit more frequently. By making it harder for Negatives to permeate your thinking in the first place, and easier to take in the thousands of great ideas contained in the color-coded TQ library… well, you get the idea!
As you will see, the subtitle says it all: A neuropsychological approach to happiness, by meeting core needs (safety, satisfaction, and connection) and training neurons to overcome a negativity bias.
Click Here >> How to build a happier brain…
Finally, there is a big point in this article that is completely missing. FEAR.
All fears… fear of failure… fear of the future… fear of success… fear of change… all have as their root cause the FEAR OF LOSS.
Fears are natural and keep us from losing our life, limbs… or time and money.
BUT, if you have a natural bias towards loss, all you are doing is stoking the self-fulfilling prophecy of turning gloom into doom… and your brain simply will not permit you to move forward to a position of opportunity-driven risk.
Why?
Because if you are locked in SURVIVAL thinking, how much do you believe you can afford to LOSE? The correct answer is not much. If you constantly believe you are in survival mode, you will risk little of what you already have, no matter how sweet the prospect of getting more. Survival thinking is all about preserving what you have, not risking it to get more.
Consequently, you will never even THINK about the risk to reward matrix, because your brain is silently telling you “NO… NO… HELL NO” from the get-go.
You can’t risk spending your time on this: Survive.
You can’t risk the leap of faith on this opportunity: Survive.
You shouldn’t even dream about a better future because it is not going to happen anyway: Survive.
By displacing this “Negative Bias” that fosters Survival Thinking, we open you up to a little more risk… a lot more reward… and a steady movement towards getting what you actually want… by installing success-critical ideas into your brain.
Remember the picture I asked you to fixate on (above?)
Here’s a little more detail. What do you see now?
Pretty clear that is neither a tree or a snake… or a snake in a tree for that matter!
Stare at this image for about 5 seconds, then scroll back up and look at the first picture.
Totally obvious now, right! (Less than 2% can see the rhino in the picture, to begin with… now, 95% will see it jump out at them… and some will never see the pattern!)
What actually happened is that we forever reprogrammed your brain to see through the blur… to the “animal within.”
As researchers have found while doing rehab on stroke victims, it is indeed possible to rewire our brains on the fly. And as Dr. Hanson observed, you can change your very thinking when you purposefully “Take in the Good.”
NOW: About 36 months ago we completed a major upgrade to TQ, adding a whole host of features people have been clambering for over the years.
Perhaps the most difficult was in making every TQ Color Factor a Success Journal of sorts… engaging you through a continuous series of simple, but life-changing questions.
Once we started to use this new tool internally, we began to see amazing improvements in our ability to not just remember the material but found that we were actually thinking differently each day. (After all, if you rarely THINK about planning, your personal energy level, your goals, and priorities, or your team-building skills, how can you increase your power to produce tangible RESULTS? Total immersion floods your brain with new ideas that ultimately take the form of coherent thoughts that you can act on!)
Rather than just following the procedures, we started to notice big shifts in our connection with a great idea and saw many routes for applying it to our day to day actions.
It became clear that something was happening — not at the logical brain level — but far deeper. We were not just processing information, we were actually seeing options that had remained hidden due to what neuroscientists call “Negative Bias”.
We will discuss this a bit over the next few weeks, but the concept is very simple.
Our brain is not currently optimized for success or happiness. It is optimized for survival.
To overcome this natural brain state, they found that we must intentionally stop the flutter of Negatives (put there to protect us) by increasing the flow of Positives by a factor of 5:1.
TQ is the perfect positive reinforcement system, and as we worked through all 100 Factors, we were bombarded with some 1,200 great ideas — from the best minds in the world — and engaged with some 2,100 easy to answer IQ’s (Integrating Questions.)
As we stepped back a bit, we saw that this experience was exactly like reading… extracting… condensing… and distilling the timeless wisdom from 3-5 books each day! But, we do it in just 20 minutes — something that would be virtually impossible for even the fastest reader/editor to do.
Finally, because of the highly indexed, Color-coded content, we have the ability to zoom in on a single area of your performance each day and get you to respond. It is in this response pattern that you start to think way outside the box. It also becomes your Daily Success Journal.
Even better, the purely random, yet Color-controlled material in Today’s TQ offers us the perfect jumping-in platform to do a quick 5 minute hit in the morning to GRAB the idea, ACTUATE it in your brain (a psychologist term) and INSTALL it into your actions. At the end of your day, you will return for a short “debriefing” session, filling in the missing blanks in the rest of the Integrating Questions.
The result is a fun, get to know YOU process in about 20 minutes a day… which leads you to discover your true, Authentic Self.
The Question IS The Answer…
No question, the question IS the answer… and when you answer each IQ over time, you will start to pick up a replacement for your Negative Bias. You will, each day, be rewiring your brain… a little bit at a time… by flooding it with life-affirming questions that MUST be answered. Either now, or 20 years down the line.
Now is better.
To keep it very simple here’s all we want you to do:
- First thing each morning, read the Invisible Billionaire’s story, then open your DNA as a live PDF and follow the steps. This file has hot links built-in, so just click the link and you will be taken where we want you to go. (You will notice that you are not getting the normal Today’s TQ each morning as we do not want to confuse you with too many options!)Many of the DNAs have entry blocks. You may fill in these forms and save your results to your computer. These blocks have been put there to engage you on a spontaneous level. Do not overthink your responses. Just go with what comes at top of mind. In most cases, the first link asks you to quickly spot-check your TQ Color Score. Take no more than 60 seconds to scan and if you feel like changing a number do so. This gets you in the habit of staying connected to your performance on a granular level.
- The second link normally takes you to your full Lesson Plan for a given Factor where you will find the TQ Key Ideas and enter your TQ IQ’s (Integrating Questions.) Many people do this step first thing in the morning. Others wait until later to complete their IQ’s (see below-3.)To always know where you are in the TQ Time Prism System, you will see an image like this on your Lesson Plan…
- Sometime towards the END of your day — dog-tired, cranky, and whipped — we want you to return to TodaysTQ.com, drop down to the “Debrief Button”, quickly scan your TQ IQ’s and update them if you feel so compelled. Yes, this is important even if you are burned out, stressed out, or had a day from hell. Remember, passion doesn’t punch a time clock! Think of this routine like you are in Navy Seal training where the point is to teach you WHILE exhausted — a wonderful way to quickly expand your COMFORT ZONE. With this Crash Course, you have been given deep linking permission, so you will be taken directly to the correct Factor page. (You must be signed in under the same email address you used to purchase this course.)
- Press the button to listen to the Factor recording as you scroll down to the TQ Key Ideas. Read each slowly, so you “get” what is being communicated. You might think this is a bit counter-intuitive, as there are a lot of good ideas for action… why did we not give them to you earlier in the day?
Because we want to get you to think about the TQ IQ’s in light of the big ideas on the page. These are GREAT ideas, so, let’s connect the dots between you and them!
- Now, simply fill in all the IQ’s with as much detail as you can think of. Do not stare at them and say, “Hmm, that’s a good question… why am I having a problem coming up with something here?” This is exactly where we want you!
- Put in ANYTHING that comes to mind. The idea is to confront you in context to the Key Ideas and how your day actually worked out — good, bad, or indifferent. All we expect is your best answer possible in less than 15 minutes total. This is an open book, essay test describing YOUR life. Some of the questions will ask you about your feelings… or when can you find time to make a list. Think of these in very broad terms. During the first few days, you might not feel you have a lot to say. This will change! We are looking for throw-aways and toss-outs at first. It takes a while for you to get engaged in facing the REAL you… the Authentic You.
- Over time, you will start to realize that the reason you have few answers to offer is that you have never done the “remedial” work of discovering your values, visions, and key roles… or that what you thought were goals were nothing but a list of wishes lacking any clear definition and direction.
- BOOM! This is when you will discover the TRUTH about yourself… the truth about WHO you are and WHY you are doing what you are doing. Don’t worry, nothing to fear here. You are going to love the emerging picture of you being confident, competent, and just plain fun. Become THAT person and you will truly LOVE your life.
- This is when you will be on the edge of a major BREAKTHROUGH IN YOUR THINKING. You will BECOME your POSITIVE thoughts. I am going to say this again: You will BECOME your POSITIVE thoughts.
Summary…
Enough negatives hit us each day that cause us to lose focus and to lose hope. The world is, in fact, a very scary place.
BUT… success is built around the notion of progress and accomplishment… not doomsday, survival thinking.
After all, have you ever seen a monument erected to honor a pessimist?
No, and neither have we!
TQ itself is based on the concept of Continuous Personal Improvement through Continuous Personal Inspiration. Here, we are going to move from INSPIRED THINKING to INSPIRED ACTION… one day at a time.
No one can cure all your bad habits — or mine — with a snap of the finger. IMPOSSIBLE.
However, given a little time and effort, you can start to think like the most successful people in the world. In fact, you will have the same library of great ideas that have made people great over time.
It’s not that the most successful person in the room is really any smarter than you… they just THINK DIFFERENTLY.
In these 100 days, we want you to get accustomed to this new way of thinking. Do what we advise, no more, and you will — even if you don’t think so yet — start to emerge as a whole new person.
So much of our lives are wasted when we just sit and wonder what’s happening around us, wishing for things to change.
You can desperately want things to change… need things to change… but in the end, YOU MUST BECOME THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE HAPPEN.
Look at this grid closely. It drives your future.
Because of the way the TQ Success Crash Course is structured — total immersion in a constant flood of great ideas over a short 100-day regimen — you will move quickly from Stage I directly to Stage IV.
Remember, while our brains are hardwired and optimized for SURVIVAL, it is easy to change the brain’s wiring on the fly. All it takes is a ratio of 5 great, POSITIVE ideas to overcome the effect of a single NEGATIVE. Do this, and you automatically start moving up towards SUCCESS and quickly move away from FAILURE… because you are now conditioned to come up with new solutions to the problems you face!
This is a very big deal.
Putting yourself to the test every day starts to create hooks for your brain to quietly operate on. This might even be the hidden secret to helping you go from Stage-I, Unconscious Incompetence to Stage-IV, Unconscious Competence.
At the end of the day, if you inject enough good ideas into your thought processes, you will start to think differently about your choices and actions. But, nothing even comes close to YOU FINDING YOUR AUTHENTIC SELF by engaging in our Integrating Questions (IQs.)
If you don’t MAKE the time to really discover what makes you tick… really understand the basis of your desires… really come face to face with WHO you are and WHY you do things, you will never — let me says this with full force — NEVER achieve up to your full potential.
This is, without doubt, the conditioning you need to not just raise your level of efficiency and effectiveness, but even more importantly… to BECOME A WHOLE NEW YOU.
Measurability and Accountability…
We do not want you to get ahead of this process, but we do need to make sure you understand that this Teaching Through Testing regime does require you to periodically update your TQ Scores.
It is good to have a series of monthly baseline reviews of your Color Chart. The idea here is that your numbers will start to come up naturally as you fully engage in this work. At the very least, we always see a 30-40 point improvement when people stick with this system.
This is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, as what we are systematically measuring is your ability to produce exceptional RESULTS over TIME.
Ultimately, you are measured by the results you produce… your family lives on the results you produce… time judges you by the results you produce.
The thousands of ideas, IQ’s, and directives you will encounter will help your brain latch onto ideas faster, and help you retain them longer.
Thus, our claim that this is, indeed, the fastest and easiest way to greatly expand your power to produce tangible results!
Since we want this to be highly personal, we want to answer YOUR questions. Directly and forthrightly. Please send any questions to Answers@ThinkTQ.com and we will work your questions into the seminar.
E. R. Haas, CEO
