Sharon Lee

Identity capital is our stock of personal assets. It is how we add value to who we are, and it is what we have to show for how we have spent our time. These are the investments we make in ourselves, or the things we do well enough or long enough that they become a part of who we are. Rather than coming from that “lightning bolt of intuition” Helen

My mother raised me to be polite, to be demure. I have long operated under the idea that civility is subservience. But it hasn’t gotten me very far, that type of kindness. The world respects people who think they should be running it.

Not knowing what you want to do with your life—or not at least having some ideas about what to do next—is a defense against that terror. It is a reluctance to admit that the possibilities are not endless. It is a way of pretending there is nothing you can do to improve your situation. It is a resistance against accepting that there are no right ans

Being wanted meant having to satisfy. At least, that was my view of it back then.

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness m

But changing yourself means giving up on, denying, and never again showing the face of “yourself until now,” as if you were sending it to its grave, in effect.

I felt a lot of internal pressure to figure it out, but all the thinking I did was really debilitating and unproductive. The one thing I have learned is that you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do—something.

Twentysomethings who take the time to explore and also have the nerve to make commitments along the way construct stronger identities.

Interesting analogy for creating conditions for 10x work:

• Limit drag. Reduce interruptions by working in extended periods of focus work.

• Maximize thrust. Fill focus time with primarily long-duration tasks.

The reasoning is that the work that is highest impact typically takes a lot of reasoning / requires a lot of implementation detail. Minimizing dist