Personal mastery

Winston Churchill set up a special department. Others might be in awe of his titanic persona, but the job of this department, Jim Collins reports, was to give Churchill all the worst news. Then Churchill could sleep well at night, knowing he had not been groupthinked into a false sense of security.

As Morgan McCall, in his book High Flyers, points out, “Unfortunately, people often like the things that work against their growth. . . . People like to use their strengths . . . to achieve quick, dramatic results, even if . . . they aren’t developing the new skills they will need later on. People like to believe they are as good as everyone says .

it makes it look like a choice between fun and excellence. However, this point is crucial: The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to love it in the face of difficulties. The growth-minded athletes, CEOs, musicians, or scientists all loved what they did, whereas many of the fixed-minded ones did not.

his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers argues that a contradiction lies at the heart of human intelligence. Our brains are simultaneously designed to seek out information and destroy that information after we acquire it. Specifically, our minds evolved to make sense of the world not in ways that are true, but in ways that help us survive. But once

Even the simplest physical act becomes enjoyable when it is transformed so as to produce flow. The essential steps in this process are: (a) to set an overall goal, and as many subgoals as are realistically feasible; (b) to find ways of measuring progress in terms of the goals chosen; (c) to keep concentrating on what one is doing, and to keep

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.

Jefferson’s uncomfortable dictum “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” applies outside the fields of politics as well; it means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, lest habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities.