Personal mastery

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

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.

In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow.

Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.

To improve the quality of life through work, two complementary strategies are necessary. On the one hand jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities—as do hunting, cottage weaving, and surgery. But it will also be necessary to help people develop autotelic personalities like those of Serafina, Joe, and

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

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

When physical vigor fails with age, for example, it means that one will be ready to turn one’s energies from the mastery of the external world to a deeper exploration of inner reality.

We need to be strong in a moment of crisis by saying, yes, it can be done. And if we’re in a race between bad catastrophe and some kind of beginning prosperity for all — when you’re in a race that intense, you don’t want to sit down on the ground and start crying. Oh, we’ve lost already.