Personal mastery

For burst taskers like Thomas, I often recommend two tactics. One is to see the benefits that greater predictability can bring. When you’re working toward more steady-as-she-goes goals, you, your team, and your loved ones at home can count on knowing when you’ll deliver and when you’ll be available. As one colleague described, it’s like a squirrel

young workers who regularly quit their jobs and ended up better for it. “People who switch jobs more frequently early in their careers tend to have higher wages and incomes in their prime-working years,” one of the co-authors, the economics professor Henry Siu, told me. “Job-hopping is actually correlated with higher incomes, because people have

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.

even after all the obvious levels of skill and craft (chi) have been mastered, the Yu still depends on the discovery of new challenges (the “complicated place” or “difficulties” in the above quotation), and on the development of new skills ... In other words, the mystical heights of the Yu are not attained by some superhuman quantum jump, but

When physical vigor fails with age, for example, it means that one will be ready to turn one’s energies from the mastery of the external world to a deeper exploration of inner reality.

We are all prisoners of our past to some extent. We bring our frame of reference, shaped by our unique combination of experiences, into any new role. But the most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a start‐up leader with the organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company. Those who can scale up or scale

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 roots of the word “compete” are the Latin con petire, which meant “to seek together.” What each person seeks is to actualize her potential, and this task is made easier when others force us to do our best. Of course, competition improves experience only as long as attention is focused primarily on the activity itself. If extrinsic goals—such as