Personal mastery

We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in

The roots of the word “compete” are the Latin con petire, which meant “to seek together.” What each person seeks is to actualize her potential, and this task is made easier when others force us to do our best. Of course, competition improves experience only as long as attention is focused primarily on the activity itself. If extrinsic goals—such as

his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers argues that a contradiction lies at the heart of human intelligence. Our brains are simultaneously designed to seek out information and destroy that information after we acquire it. Specifically, our minds evolved to make sense of the world not in ways that are true, but in ways that help us survive. But once

Jefferson’s uncomfortable dictum “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” applies outside the fields of politics as well; it means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, lest habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities.

research has shown that these rituals actually work because they reduce tension and give a player a sense of control and confidence in a high-stakes, anxiety-provoking situation.

when humans are pressured into forming an opinion, they’ll often react by spouting babble that has little basis in fact or reason. Essentially, people tend not to have an opinion on something until they’re prompted for one, at which point they just hastily make one up. To make matters worse, humans don't like to change their opinion, as they think

After the ’98 Masters tournament, Woods was disappointed that he did not repeat his win of the previous year, but he felt good about his top-ten finish: “I squeezed the towel dry this week. I’m very proud of the way I hung in there.” Or after a British Open, where he finished third: “Sometimes you get even more satisfaction out of creating a score

If you find out that you were wrong, correct it immediately. Build a reputation as a rapid course corrector. You don't need to be right all the time to succeed if you can admit quickly when you're wrong. This will set you apart from the majority of people who get wedded to narratives too quickly and then refuse to revisit the analysis for fear of