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July 13 - July 17, 2021
Your ability to realize your potential will depend upon your willingness to hone your skills, to take bold risks, and to put your ego on the line in pursuit of something greater.
To build a career, the right question is not “What job am I passionate about doing?” but instead “What way of working and living will nurture my passion?”
Keeping yourself in “permanent beta” makes you acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s more testing to do on yourself, and that you will continue to adapt and evolve. It means a lifelong commitment to continuous personal growth.
Entrepreneurs proactively yet prudently take on intelligent risk. Because the flip side of every opportunity is risk, if you’re not taking risks, you’re not finding the breakout opportunities you’re looking for.
It means that when you have an opportunity to learn and interact with something new, you should be running toward it instead of running away from it.
people who love what they do are much better at it. They’re more successful, are constantly adding new skills, and continue to drive themselves forward. The more passion you can find around what you’re doing, the more voracious you’ll be in adding and building the skills that will be useful for you in the long run.
If you want a new challenge at work or more responsibility, it’s on you to pitch your boss or your client on what needs to be done, why it’s a good idea, why you’re the best person to do it, and why everyone will benefit. Lead the way with your own creativity and initiative, and back it up with enthusiasm and a strong business case.
Aside from lots of hard work, great creative careers are powered by an intersection of three factors: interest, skill, and opportunity. The same thinking applies to successful creative projects. The magic happens when you find the sweet spot where these three factors intersect.
When you make choices that will affect your career, aim for the intersection of your genuine interests, skills, and opportunities.
Change really is always possible—there is no ability that can’t be developed with effort. So the next time you find yourself thinking, “But I’m just not good at this,” remember: you’re just not good at it yet.
Ericsson subsequently posited that four and a half hours is the natural human limit for the highest level of focus on a single task in any given day.
If we spend energy when we wake up deciding what to wear that day, or completing a difficult task in the morning, or resisting a chocolate chip cookie following lunch, we’re left with less energy to complete any subsequent task. A ritualized approach to practice helps conserve our precious and finite reserves of energy.
Sleep not only serves a restorative purpose but also allows the brain to more effectively consolidate and retain daytime learning.
set aside one uninterrupted period of, say, sixty minutes each working day to build the skill you’ve chosen, preferably first thing in the morning.
When you’re working, give it everything you’ve got, for relatively short periods of time. When you’re recovering, let go and truly refuel.
Mastery is about regularly pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, while also learning how to deeply restore and take care of yourself. Make rhythmic waves and you’ll not only get better at what you practice, you’ll also feel more in control of your life.
Something experts in all fields tend to do when they’re practicing is to operate outside of their comfort zone and study themselves failing.
But expert musicians tend to focus on the parts that are hard, the parts they haven’t yet mastered. The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.
Experts crave and thrive on immediate and constant feedback.
When I was training my memory, I kept meticulous spreadsheets to track my performance. They allowed me to see what was working and what wasn’t. Numbers don’t lie.
Your health, your productivity, and the growth of your career are all shaped by the things you do each day—most by habit, not by choice.
This is one of the most important reasons to keep a diary: it can make you more aware of your own progress, thus becoming a wellspring of joy in your workday. In
Give yourself permission to screw up. Once you stop trying to be good (and look smart), you can focus on tackling the exciting challenges that will help you get better.
Focus on practicing the hard stuff when you’re developing new skills. As with weight lifting, you know you’re making headway when you feel the burn.
In any case, the first step is to ask. The worst that can happen is that someone will say no or will offer suggestions that are not especially helpful and can be ignored.
Articulate, if you can, the unilateral actions you take when things start going wrong. Do you retreat into silence? Rage on? Try to take control and start to micromanage? Dump and run? See also if you can summarize your own “hot buttons.”
Building a network is like cultivating a botanical garden: You don’t want everyone in your network to be one color or one species. You want a variety of ages and stages and professions and passions, and to tend them carefully.
You want to focus on pulling in people whom you respect, people who you believe will have your interests in mind for the long haul, and also people across a wide enough range
Total strangers forced to work together can have problems exchanging ideas, but best friends aren’t that good for creativity, either. In the latter case, the collaborators are often so close, and share such a common background, that they end up with the same ideas—a kind of creative groupthink.
Keep your “hand in,” even if you move into a management role.
From now on, make a conscious effort to build rather than block. Start by asking “What’s already working? How can we build on it?”
Don’t be too proud to listen to others. Ask a lot of questions and pay attention to the answers, not out of politeness but out of respect for their expertise and the knowledge that you can achieve more together than alone. Give them credit and praise for their contributions.
ACT LIKE A MASTER BUILDER, NOT A MASTER MIND Build on—and improvise with—others’ ideas and skill sets. If you let everyone shine in his or her area of expertise, your projects will thrive.
Caving to our fears of short-term regret is shortsighted. Ultimately, we serve ourselves better by fearing a failure to act more than fearing failure itself.
We are not powerless in the face of risk. After a decision has been made, we always have the ability to affect our situations to increase the probability of success. This is agency, or the ability to take actions that influence our destiny.
The worst-case scenario in many of the risks we now face is not serious injury or death; it is a financial setback, a blow to the reputation, a ding to the ego.
All of our paths are riddled with small and enormous failures. The key is being able to see these experiences as experiments that yield valuable data and to learn what to do differently next time.
There are five primary types of risks: physical, social, emotional, financial, and intellectual.
Data and experience begin to replace intuition and leaps of faith. Freedom begins to yield to constraint, the variables and possibilities that created great uncertainty begin to become fact, creating more certainty about what the process will yield and whether it will succeed. The venture and its outcome begin to take form.
In other words, success is more serendipitous and random than we think.
Success, it turns out, has far less to do with figuring out exactly what the right next move is and far more to do with serendipity and randomness.
The more times you try, the more likely that you will create successful designs, start-ups, or pieces of art.
In an increasingly unpredictable world, you have to leverage the statistical advantage of randomness by placing many bets.
The world is random and unpredictable, which means that it is close to impossible to outline exactly what your next best move is. But you can explore it—by doing and trying. Just make sure you don’t go all in before you’ve figured out that it works.
The Better You springs new from each moment, is born and dies with each action you take. Each action creates a new set of possibilities. The Better You is an alternate dynamic present, rather than a fixed, static past.
But the Better You knows, just as you know, that the thrill is in the chase, that happiness is motion, and that fulfillment is the constant striving for that which is just beyond our reach.
