psychology

What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult

If the vertical axis is caring personally and the horizontal axis is challenging directly , you want your feedback to fall in the upper right-hand quadrant. That’s where radical candor lies.

Nature vs Nurture — “the relative importance of an individual’s innate qualities as compared to an individual’s personal experiences in causing individual differences, especially in behavioral traits.”

eliminate the opposing forces. Simplify your life, learn how to say no, change your environment, reduce the number of responsibilities that you take on, and otherwise eliminate the forces that are holding you back.

Your purpose isn’t what you are building, something you find, or a career path that you create.

YOU as a person, are your purpose.

The single most important thing a boss can do, Scott has learned, is focus on guidance : giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it. Guidance, which is fundamentally just praise and criticism, is usually called “feedback,” but feedback is screechy and makes us want to put our hands over our ears. Guidance is something most of us long for.

And feel it all. Feel the anticipation of the risk. Feel the pre-risk cringe. Then, during the risk, and after, take a deep breath and feel that too.

You’ll become familiar with those feelings and, believe it or not, you’ll start to enjoy them. Even the ones you think of as unpleasant. Because feeling is what tells you you’re alive.

You know that

Our jobs have become prisons from which we don’t want to escape