Personal mastery

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

Stories that do carry some element of truth can actually be the most troublesome, because we put a lot of stock in ‘truth’, no matter how selective and partial it may be. Perhaps, as your classmates years ago never failed to point out during P. E. lessons, you were ‘bad’ at sports. Okay, but maybe you were bad at sports because you preferred

In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow.

Winston Churchill set up a special department. Others might be in awe of his titanic persona, but the job of this department, Jim Collins reports, was to give Churchill all the worst news. Then Churchill could sleep well at night, knowing he had not been groupthinked into a false sense of security.

Let Go to Accept. Letting go of old patterns and areas of resistance can sometimes happen in an “aha moment,” especially for everyday matters such as resistance to working on that expense report, to coming back from vacation, or to our email inboxes piling up. In cases like these, just being able to recognize that the expectation to have an empty

One former client, who is now the CEO of a health-care company, said if he had to identify one key element of his career success, it was realizing early on that every new role in his career carried its own particular purpose. Whether the new role came from a promotion or from a move to a different organization, his first task was always to get very

learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

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.

Great thinkers don’t harbor doubts because they’re impostors. They maintain doubts because they know we’re all partially blind and they’re committed to improving their sight.