Personal mastery

3. Status attended to is the status that matters. Status is most relevant when we try to keep it or change it. For many people, status is upmost in our minds in every interaction. But it only matters when the person we’re engaging with cares about status. 4. Status has inertia. We’re more likely to work to maintain our status (high or low) than we are

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

Vocabulary gets in the way sometimes. Design is not just a profession. A customer is not only a person who buys something. A product is not just a physical object or software that you sell.

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

even if people have a fixed mindset, they’re not always in that mindset. In fact, in many of our studies, we put people into a growth mindset. We tell them that an ability can be learned and that the task will give them a chance to do that. Or we have them read a scientific article that teaches them the growth mindset. The article describes people

Do not grieve over past joys, be sure they will reappear in another form. A child’s joy is in milk and nursing but once weaned, it finds new joy in bread and honey. Joy appears in many different forms it moves from place to place. It may suddenly show in the falling rain or in the rose bed; it comes now as water, now as beauty, or as nourishing

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

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.