Personal mastery

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

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

Do not grieve over past joys, be sure they will reappear in another form. A child’s joy is in milk and nursing but once weaned, it finds new joy in bread and honey. Joy appears in many different forms it moves from place to place. It may suddenly show in the falling rain or in the rose bed; it comes now as water, now as beauty, or as nourishing

Convinced that the act of writing his diary had contributed to his performance, Soros joked that his profit represented the highest honorarium ever received by an author.32 When the diary was published two years later, as part of Soros’s book The Alchemy of Finance, reviewers mocked its dense prose. But as one commentator said, financial alchemy

Using the SCARF model, you can have a better understanding of what needs aren’t being met and why you’re being triggered. This will help you not scratch the itch or react without thinking.

Status

Certainty

Autonomy

Relatedness

Fairness

The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.

As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing. We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them—to restock the trout pond, so to speak. I call this process filling the well.

“I believe . . . that everyone, of whatever age and circumstance, is capable of self-transformation.”