Personal mastery

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

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

“What comes first, the compass or the clock? Before one can truly manage time (the clock), it is important to know where you are going, what your priorities and goals are, in which direction you are headed (the compass). Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going. Rather than always focusing on what’s urgent, learn to focus

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

Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improving their sight.

The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.

There’s a cognitive bias that is coming into play when we do this. It’s called the curse of knowledge.55 Once we know something (like we do in this situation, we have a wealth of discovery work that supports our point of view), it’s hard for us to remember what it was like not to have that knowledge. In fact, our conclusions—our roadmaps, our

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