Personal mastery

The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in

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 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

The quality of experience of people who play with and transform the opportunities in their surroundings, as Joe did, is clearly more developed as well as more enjoyable than that of people who resign themselves to live within the constraints of the barren reality they feel they cannot alter.

Much as an investor benefits from diversifying their investments, we too benefit from diversifying the sources of meaning and purpose in our lives. The question is: how?

The success of pre-mortems, however, hinges on one key factor—phrasing the question as if the outcome is certain. In our case, that means we have to consider that the product or service did fail, not that it might fail.

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

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.