Maximize Your Potential: Grow Your Expertise, Take Bold Risks & Build an Incredible Career (99U Book 2)

Dunbar’s surprising discovery was that most insights didn’t actually occur when the researchers were alone in the lab. In fact, the majority actually occurred during regularly scheduled lab meetings where individual researchers revealed their latest findings and shared their most difficult setbacks with the rest of the team.

Ultimately, Uzzi and Spiro found collaborations built from a combination of close connections and fresh perspectives enhance the creative potential of everyone involved.

it’s possible for nearly anyone to reach excellence in nearly anything, given sufficient persistence and expert feedback along the way.

Ericsson subsequently posited that four and a half hours is the natural human limit for the highest level of focus on a single task in any given day.

the best way to practice is in time-limited sprints, rather than for an unbounded number of hours.

Taken together, Dunbar’s and Uzzi and Spiro’s findings imply that the most successful creative projects are generated by teams that include a healthy mix of pre-existing connections, shared experiences, and totally new perspectives. If you’re looking to enhance your creative potential, then being on a team helps. But it’s not enough to be on any ol

You can’t get better on autopilot. One thing that experts in field after field tend to do is use strategies to keep themselves out of that autonomous stage and under their conscious direction. That’s how you conquer those OK Plateaus.

when people are allowed to make mistakes, they are significantly less likely to actually make them.

rest is a critical component of achieving sustainable excellence over time.

The kind of feedback we get from parents, teachers, and mentors when we are young has a major impact on the beliefs we develop about our abilities—including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable or as capable of developing through effort and practice.