Personal mastery

but we have at least a shot at getting what we strive, work, and fight for. Pick a field where you have a realistic chance of rising, and turn your less realistic passions—such as playing basketball, sailing, performing music, or painting—into hobbies for your free time.

his book The Folly of Fools, Trivers argues that a contradiction lies at the heart of human intelligence. Our brains are simultaneously designed to seek out information and destroy that information after we acquire it. Specifically, our minds evolved to make sense of the world not in ways that are true, but in ways that help us survive. But once

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

Even the simplest physical act becomes enjoyable when it is transformed so as to produce flow. The essential steps in this process are: (a) to set an overall goal, and as many subgoals as are realistically feasible; (b) to find ways of measuring progress in terms of the goals chosen; (c) to keep concentrating on what one is doing, and to keep

when humans are pressured into forming an opinion, they’ll often react by spouting babble that has little basis in fact or reason. Essentially, people tend not to have an opinion on something until they’re prompted for one, at which point they just hastily make one up. To make matters worse, humans don't like to change their opinion, as they think

Vocabulary gets in the way sometimes. Design is not just a profession. A customer is not only a person who buys something. A product is not just a physical object or software that you sell.

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

some other famous failures: Michael Jordan: cut from his high-school basketball team. Steven Spielberg: rejected from film school thrice. Walt Disney: fired by the editor of a newspaper for lacking ideas and imagination. Albert Einstein: He learned to speak at a late age and performed poorly in school. John Grisham: first novel was rejected by 16