Personal Growth

We all love the training montage in movies—those brisk two-minute sequences where the protagonist transforms from novice to expert while upbeat music plays. One minute they're struggling to do a single push-up; the next, they're ready for the championship fight.

Real life doesn't work like that. The actual training—the part where you build the... See more

Carmen Van Kerckhove • Stop pretending you don’t care

In your 20s, you may not really know what your best skills and opportunities are. It’s much better to pursue learning, personal discipline, growth. And to seek out connections with people across the planet.

Timothy Ferriss • Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” So often it seems that we want to work easily at work worth doing. We want our work to be helpful and respected, but we do not want to struggle through our work. We want our stomachs to be flat and our arms to be... See more

James Clear • What I Do When I Feel Like Giving Up

When you learn something new for the first time you flail miserably at it, but eventually you identify your weaknesses and over time the process toward solution becomes almost instinctual. Things get better and easier, and somehow you’ve developed into this whole new person who could do the hard things you once dreaded, now effortlessly. I find... See more

all these things that I've done

Most of the time you see someone do something incredible, with what seems like little effort, and you ask “How did you do that?”, the honest answer is, “I’ve been doing this every day for 10+ years.” Noticing patterns and connecting the subtle dots is something that’s hard to teach in a classroom but becomes obvious when you’ve lived and breathed a... See more

Morgan Housel • Staying Put

Every adult senses that their attention is slipping, that their thinking is flattening, that their world is flooded with noise, no neutrality, and that no institution really exists to protect them. Your brain is for sale, my guy - as your attention goes, so does your cognition, so does your sense of depth and certainty.

Confidence, optimism, and... See more

Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy

“In the movies there’s this idea that you should just go for your dream,” Glass tells them. “But I don’t believe that. Things happen in stages.” Glass emphasizes that it takes time to get good at anything, recounting the many years it took him to master radio to the point where he had interesting options. “The key thing is to force yourself through

Cal Newport • So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

The most fulfilled and effective people I know—world-famous creatives, billionaires, thought leaders, and more—look at their life’s journey as perhaps 25 percent finding themselves and 75 percent creating themselves.