Personal mastery

IN THE VERY early days of Pixar, John, Andrew, Pete, Lee, and Joe made a promise to one another. No matter what happened, they would always tell each other the truth. They did this because they recognized how important and rare candid feedback is and how, without it, our films would suffer. Then and now, the term we use to describe this kind of

“What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?” - via Chip and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard

One former client, who is now the CEO of a health-care company, said if he had to identify one key element of his career success, it was realizing early on that every new role in his career carried its own particular purpose. Whether the new role came from a promotion or from a move to a different organization, his first task was always to get very

sometimes it’s best not to know what you are up against; if you are acutely aware of the challenges involved, you’d never do a damn thing. Being clueless is weirdly empowering. You can’t worry about the things that you don’t yet know you should be worried about. You end up doing wonderful things that you never would have had you been the least bit

Hixon and Swann’s rather bold conclusion was that “Thinking about why one is the way one is may be no better than not thinking about one’s self at all.”

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 .

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” Keynes famously declared. Being early and right is the same as being wrong, as investors have repeatedly discovered.