Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage

There is nothing inauthentic in being dealt a hand and then deciding that you’re not going to let others tell you it’s a weak hand.

Recognize that you can start where it’s less crowded, and take your time going from inexperienced to pro. Take the time to master the basics—your own, not those of everyone around you. Acknowledge that it takes time to get good at anything. Enjoy the process of getting better and better each day, and then you can start to enjoy the result without g

Constraints can be a benefit and source to be leveraged to enrich—so much so that not having them can also create problems, resulting in an even lesser chance of enriching and providing value.

you’re likely to get some dialogue going from a two-sentence pitch. You’re likely to get some questions. That is the point. That is how you move from delight and start to enrich. What you should be doing during the two-sentence pitch is positioning yourself in such a way that it piques some interest in your counterpart and you elicit the types of q

I inverted the problem I was facing. Rather than striving for paper acceptances, I decided to endeavor for rejections—eighteen, to be exact.

Overpreparation deprives us of the ability to bob and weave—to dynamically regulate and calibrate.

the most successful people perceive their personalities and skills as fluid and are able to represent themselves differently and adaptively.

The absence of the very constraints that incubators set out to help start-ups avoid prevents their ability to enrich and create value.

It’s not often that we hear alternative perspectives that drastically differ from our own. We tend to hang out with people who are like us, who share our beliefs, values, and habits. We associate within the bounds of where we belong. So simply being the atypical voice allows you to enrich.