acknowledging and receiving the perceptions of others, while simultaneously empowering yourself not to embrace and adopt those views. You can accept the perceptions of others so that you can consciously address them and confront them—but without embracing and internalizing them.

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

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.

WHEN EVERYONE ELSE SEEKS THE SAME DIMINISHING REWARDS BY following the same formulas in the same way, the real prizes are inevitably elsewhere. There are other veins yet to be mined, and these require a different approach. Different markets. Different values. Different networks. Different mind-sets, informed by different life experiences.

a sense of overpreparation can lead to worse results. It can lull people into complacency,

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

Inverting one’s thinking means recognizing that while sometimes it’s good to start at the beginning, it can be more useful to start at the end. It means thinking about how you will manage and fulfill a big contract before getting the contract, so you can formulate the terms and the discussions.

Know your basic goods or the basic goods of the organizations you are leading, because they are what you will come back to, time and time again. They’re the key elements that will ensure your survival, your subsistence, and your ability to truly enrich.

They didn’t see the five dollars as a crutch, and focused on the opportunity instead of the constraint. That freed them up to think about what other assets they did have, and pushed them to look beyond five-dollar problems to more valuable opportunities. If we let others dictate our constraints—that we must use the five dollars—then we can’t