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.

If we accept that what we see and know is inevitably flawed, we must strive to find ways to heighten that awareness—to fill in the gaps,

but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.

• Permanent On-call: Never having true time off, because work can always reach you (or in the case of very intense jobs, because the work never actually ends). I had always

3. Status attended to is the status that matters. Status is most relevant when we try to keep it or change it. For many people, status is upmost in our minds in every interaction. But it only matters when the person we’re engaging with cares about status. 4. Status has inertia. We’re more likely to work to maintain our status (high or low) than we are

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