Personal mastery

that my deepest and most important work, professionally and personally, is still to come,

“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

It’s vital that you bring an attitude of nonjudgment and self-compassion to the endeavor of spectating your experience. You’ll hinder your own efforts if you get caught up in self-blame, self-criticism, or self-pity. The irony is that our habit of being hard on ourselves is often the very thing we need to become aware of through self-spectating—and

One man calls another a fool, and at this the other stands up and clenches his fist and lands a blow on his nose. Look at the power of the word! There is a woman weeping and miserable; another woman comes along and speaks

to her a few gentle words, the doubled up frame of the weeping woman becomes straightened at once, her sorrow is gone and she

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.”

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

“The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.”

Yet is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger, to jealousies and a hundred other petty things that must occur every day in human life?

First, tackle them when we’re in a good mood. A 2016 study found that when people are upset, they’re less likely to try to do hard things. When they’re feeling upbeat, however, they’re more likely to take on the hard-but-essential tasks that ultimately make life better. One way we can get ourselves in the right mindset is to do what’s called