Personal mastery

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.

As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them—to restock the trout pond, so to speak. I call this process filling the well.

A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective. They’ll loan you some of their hard-fought advice so you can discover your own solution.

Stories that do carry some element of truth can actually be the most troublesome, because we put a lot of stock in ‘truth’, no matter how selective and partial it may be. Perhaps, as your classmates years ago never failed to point out during P. E. lessons, you were ‘bad’ at sports. Okay, but maybe you were bad at sports because you preferred

It’s vital that you bring an attitude of nonjudgment and self-compassion to the endeavor of spectating your experience. You’ll hinder your own efforts if you get caught up in self-blame, self-criticism, or self-pity. The irony is that our habit of being hard on ourselves is often the very thing we need to become aware of through self-spectating—and

The midlife-crisis phenomenon has taken on almost mythic proportions in the American psyche over the past century. The term was first coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who noticed a pattern in the lives of “great men” in history: Many of them lost productivity—and even died—in their mid-to-late-30s, which was midlife in past

The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.

Know when to move on. And then, finally, there’s the one about knowing when something that’s meant a great deal to you – like writing this column – has reached its natural endpoint, and that the most creative choice would be to turn to what’s next.

Convinced that the act of writing his diary had contributed to his performance, Soros joked that his profit represented the highest honorarium ever received by an author.32 When the diary was published two years later, as part of Soros’s book The Alchemy of Finance, reviewers mocked its dense prose. But as one commentator said, financial alchemy