Personal mastery

Be a Good Citizen As you assemble your network of support, be careful not to adopt a “take” mentality. Wharton professor Adam Grant has explored the roles of “givers” and “takers” in his research.

Just ‘going with the flow’ drains the purpose from your work and life, makes personal and professional relationships seem tenuous and uncertain, and almost guarantees that you’ll fail to live with intention. All this means you may not accomplish things you’d really like to accomplish.

learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

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

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,

the coping mechanisms used by Pixar and Disney Animation’s directors, producers, and writers draw heavily on visualization. By imagining their problems as familiar pictures, they are able to keep their wits about them when the pressures of not knowing shake their confidence.

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.