To be a leader, you must be able to look at the details and make a decision. You cannot govern with principles, only practicalities.

Shortly before the first Taliesin fire, Wright started working in Japan from 1913 to 1922. Like Taliesin and Europe, this transformed his view of architecture.

Behavioural scientists Jerker Denrell and Gaël Le Mens call this the competency trap.39 Being good at one thing can stop us from becoming good at something else. Once you have committed to a career and become expert, it gets harder to revert to a period of being bad at something new while you learn. Once we are competent we know how unpleasant it

Had he died at forty, he would have left behind a few poems and some journalism, read only by specialists. And it would have been difficult to see how he could have become anything greater. Before he was famous, he was a failure.

Wang was a near-Olympic figure skater as a teenager. Aged nineteen, she changed tracks when she realized she wasn’t going to make it to the top. ‘I really lost my way when my figure-skating career ended. I was nineteen, and I was in a panic because nothing had played out the way I’d hoped, after years of hard work.’12

a five-part model where the work phase starts with a phase of exploration and where periods of work (involving challenge and growth) are then punctuated with periods of transition.18

Just as believing in your own cognitive decline is a major impediment to staying productive, simply accepting your circumstances is a barrier to midlife transformation.

‘The feeling of being in a great culture isn’t smoothness – it’s the feeling of solving hard problems with people you admire.’8

Knowledge was to be acquired for its own sake. This was not careerism. For one thing, Johnson found it impossible to stick to any plan of study. ‘I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together.’39 Rather, knowledge was sought for its ability to improve our character: ‘A man always makes himself greater as he increases his