Personal mastery

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.

“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

We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in

create a Braintrust. Every creative person, no matter their field, can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace. “You can and should make your own solution group,” Andrew Stanton says, adding that on each of his own films, he has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate

When problems are really tough, we need to get drawing. We draw to see what we think, in order to evaluate those ideas.

research has shown that these rituals actually work because they reduce tension and give a player a sense of control and confidence in a high-stakes, anxiety-provoking situation.