Personal mastery

coming. “Being right and ineffective in venture is not worth very much,”

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.

The better route for avoiding chaos in consciousness, of course, is through habits that give control over mental processes to the individual, rather than to some external source of stimulation,

Billie Jean King says it’s all about what you want to look back and say. I agree with her. You can look back and say, “I could have been . . . ,” polishing your unused endowments like trophies. Or you can look back and say, “I gave my all for the things I valued.” Think about what you want to look back and say. Then choose your mindset.

• Permanent On-call: Never having true time off, because work can always reach you (or in the case of very intense jobs, because the work never actually ends). I had always

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

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

We are all prisoners of our past to some extent. We bring our frame of reference, shaped by our unique combination of experiences, into any new role. But the most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a start‐up leader with the organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company. Those who can scale up or scale

young workers who regularly quit their jobs and ended up better for it. “People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years,” one of the co-authors, the economics professor Henry Siu, told me. “Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have