Personal mastery

there are three tools you can use to unlock your creative genius. Run an energizer. This is a quick exercise that can get you (or anyone who wants to participate) to laugh and relax. This frees your brain up from tiresome “executive functions” like weekly meetings and reports, and gives you access to the unrelated knowledge and experience that can

create a Braintrust. Every creative person, no matter their field, can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight, and grace. “You can and should make your own solution group,” Andrew Stanton says, adding that on each of his own films, he has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate

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

The midlife-crisis phenomenon has taken on almost mythic proportions in the American psyche over the past century. The term was first coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who noticed a pattern in the lives of “great men” in history: Many of them lost productivity—and even died—in their mid-to-late-30s, which was midlife in past

the coping mechanisms used by Pixar and Disney Animation’s directors, producers, and writers draw heavily on visualization. By imagining their problems as familiar pictures, they are able to keep their wits about them when the pressures of not knowing shake their confidence.

Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.