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September 1 - September 2, 2024
If they were singled out by their coaches, it was not for unusual aptitude but unusual motivation. That motivation wasn’t innate; it tended to begin with a coach or teacher who made learning fun.
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.
Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel. We need to focus less on starting points and more on distance traveled.
What counts is not how hard you work but how much you grow. And growth requires much more than a mindset—it begins with a set of skills that we normally overlook.
If personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.
Procrastination is a common problem whenever you’re pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.
Comfort in learning is a paradox. You can’t become truly comfortable with a skill until you’ve practiced it enough to master it. But practicing it before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it.
If we wait until we feel ready to take on a new challenge, we might never pursue it all. There may not come a day when we wake up and suddenly feel prepared. We become prepared by taking the leap anyway.
Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow.
In their quest for flawless results, research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from
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Seeking validation is a bottomless pit: the craving for status is never satisfied.
Research demonstrates that people who are obsessed with their work put in longer hours yet fail to perform any better than their peers. They’re more likely to fall victim to both physical and emotional exhaustion. The monotony of deliberate practice puts them at risk for burnout—and for boreout.
research suggests that the people with the most discipline actually use the least amount of it.
After rising star Luka Doncic showed up to preseason out of shape, he started training with Brandon and dropped weight while gaining speed.
Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.
students learned less from introductory classes taught by experts in every subject.
when people took on serious hobbies at home, their confidence climbed at work—but only if the hobbies were in a different area from their jobs.
The more time they spent tutoring, the more they learned.
The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it’s to improve conditions for our successors.
the key to nurturing hidden potential is not to invest in students who show early signs of high ability. It’s to invest in every student regardless of apparent ability.
Finnish educators assume the most important lesson to teach children is that learning is fun.
Although filling our homes with books might be a start, psychologists find that it’s not enough. If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: where we focus tells them what we prize.
while i read a lot of ebooks, when the grandson comes over, we only read "real" books
The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.
Yes, icebreakers and ropes courses can breed camaraderie, but meta-analyses suggest that they don’t necessarily improve team performance. What really makes a difference is whether people recognize that they need one another
In brainstorming meetings, many good ideas are lost—and few are gained. Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas—and better ideas—if we all work alone. As the humorist Dave Barry quipped, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: ‘meetings.’ ”
Weak leaders silence voice and shoot the messenger. Strong leaders welcome voice and thank the messenger. Great leaders build systems to amplify voice and elevate the messenger.
my second line manager needs to hear this
