You have probably heard of the “10,000-hour rule,” which encapsulates the idea that a person needs 10,000 hours of practice to become world-class at anything, from art to music to sports to zoology. This book is about what to do during hours 1 through 9,999. The magic of the 10,000-hour rule does not happen at the 10,000th hour. The magic is an

If you want to get more out of what you hear or see, force yourself to ask questions—in

creating questions is as important as answering them, if not more so, because framing good questions focuses your attention on the right issues.

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do? Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied. Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you? Hemingway: Getting the words right.

He said that during the job interview with Einstein, he admitted that he did not know much about relativity, to which Einstein replied, “That’s okay. I already know about relativity.”

The defects as well as the strengths of our first effort aren’t available for us to examine until they exist.

Creativity is not a matter of magical inspiration.

You don’t need an army of thousands of individuals to struggle a thousand years to address a challenge. The only person who needs to move forward little by little is you. Engineer your own evolution. Take a homework assignment, essay, or project that you’re facing and quickly just do it; that is, tackle the questions, draft the essay, or move

When the going gets tough, creative problem solvers create an easier, simpler problem that they can solve. They resolve that easier issue thoroughly and then study that simple scenario with laser focus. Those insights often point the way to a resolution of the original difficult problem.