Personal mastery

True self-confidence is “the courage to be open—to welcome change and new ideas regardless of their source.” Real self-confidence is not reflected in a title, an expensive suit, a fancy car, or a series of acquisitions. It is reflected in your mindset: your readiness to grow.

What could the forecasters have done to avoid the conjunction fallacy, without seeing the direct comparison, or even knowing that anyone was going to test them on the conjunction fallacy? It seems to me, that they would need to notice the word “and.” They would need to be wary of it—not just wary, but leap back from it. Even without knowing that

Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

desireless activities, when undertaken and performed in a spirit of dedication, purify us, and the intellect thereby gains a new keenness. Out of such a purified head, a new faculty, as it were, arises. The capacity to observe oneself as an actor on the stage of life, is a capacity divine and noble, inasmuch as it immediately redeems us from our

IN THE VERY early days of Pixar, John, Andrew, Pete, Lee, and Joe made a promise to one another. No matter what happened, they would always tell each other the truth. They did this because they recognized how important and rare candid feedback is and how, without it, our films would suffer. Then and now, the term we use to describe this kind of

There has been a growing understanding about human cognitive biases and how they can affect decision making. Many of these are systematized and explained in Daniel Kahneman’s fascinating book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.4 For senior executives the most important seem to be optimism bias, confirmation bias, and the inside-view bias.

Let Go to Accept. Letting go of old patterns and areas of resistance can sometimes happen in an “aha moment,” especially for everyday matters such as resistance to working on that expense report, to coming back from vacation, or to our email inboxes piling up. In cases like these, just being able to recognize that the expectation to have an empty

Be a Good Citizen As you assemble your network of support, be careful not to adopt a “take” mentality. Wharton professor Adam Grant has explored the roles of “givers” and “takers” in his research.