CHOOSE YOURSELF! by James Altucher, Dick Costolo

• The key is to be bold right in this moment.
• If you don’t make courageous choices for yourself, nobody else will.
• We can no longer afford to rely on others and repeat the same mistakes from our pasts.
• For the past five thousand years, people have been largely enslaved by a few select masters who understood how violence, religion, communication, debt, and class warfare all work together to subjugate a large group of people.
• In fact, “the American Dream” comes from a marketing campaign developed by Fannie Mae to convince Americans newly flush with cash to start taking mortgages.
• For our entire lives, we have been fooled by marketing slogans and the Masters of the Universe who created them.
• Prices are always going to go up. The reason is simple: deflation is scarier than inflation. In a deflationary environment, people stop buying things because they say to themselves, why should I buy today when I can buy tomorrow for cheaper? So the government will always institute policies that increase inflation.
• ZERO sectors in the economy are moving toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back, moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers.
• Companies simply don’t need the same amount of people anymore to be as productive as they’ve always been. We are moving toward a society without employees. It’s not here yet. But it will be. And that’s okay.
• In every single industry, the middleman is being taken out of the picture, causing more disruption in employment but also greater efficiencies and more opportunities for unique ideas to generate real wealth.
• In this new era, you have two choices: become a temp staffer (not a horrible choice) or become an artist-entrepreneur.
• Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.
• You can’t hate the people who reject you. You can’t let them get the best of you. Nor can you bless the people who love you. Everyone is acting out of his or her own self-interest.
• The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again.
• And obsessing on the things we can’t control is useless. It takes us out of the game. We have to choose to be in the game.
• We’re taught at an early age that we’re not good enough. That someone else has to choose us in order for us to be…what?
• People are walking around blind. If you are the one who can see, you will be able to navigate through this new world.
• Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically.
• ONLY DO THINGS YOU ENJOY. This might seem obvious to you, but it isn’t to most.
• Ninety-nine percent of meetings don’t turn into money.
• Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again.”
• The only real fire to cultivate is the fire inside of you. Nothing external will cultivate it.
• It’s important to avoid people who bring you down. Not in a cruel way. But avoid engaging or overly dwelling on people who are constantly draining you of energy.
• Think about the things we worry about. How, almost 100 percent of the time when we look back on a particular fear, we realize how useless worrying about it was.
• This is how we form a better society. First we become better as individuals. You can’t help others if you look in the mirror and hate what you see.
• Often when we attach our happiness to external goals: financial success, relationship success, etc., we get disappointed.
• It doesn’t matter where you get your ideas or how you write them, just do it.
• If you have a story to tell or a service to offer (it doesn’t matter what), love yourself enough to choose yourself. Take control of your work, your life, your art.
• You can find the tools to be happy right now.
• Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.
• Cubicles have become commodities. Whoever sits in a cubicle becomes replaceable.
• The opportunities are there, you just need to be flexible and fluid enough to take advantage of them.
• There’s the myth that entrepreneurs work twenty-four hours a day. This is horseshit. Most people, entrepreneurs or not, waste time.
• Much more value is created when I do the things I enjoy, when I work on my own creativity and continue to build the foundation for health.
• Never forget sales rule #1: Your best future clients are your current clients.
• Creation is art.
• The reality is there’s no such thing as competition. The world is big enough for two people in the same space.
• When you start a business and you have a service or product that is good enough for people to use over other similar products or services, then you are now an expert in your space. Even if you are new to the space, you’re an expert.
• Most jobs that existed twenty years ago aren’t needed now. Maybe they never were needed.
• studies show that an increase in salary only offers marginal to zero increase in “happiness” above a certain level. Why is that? Because of this basic fact: people spend what they make.
• The only real retirement plan is to Choose Yourself. To start a business or a platform or a lifestyle where you can put big chunks of money away.
• The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.
• Be an entrepreneur at work. An “entre-ployee.” Take control of who you report to, what you do, what you create.
• Deliver some value—any value—to somebody, anybody, and watch that value compound into a career.
• Abundance will never come from your job.
• Rule #1: Take out the middleman.
• Rule #2: Pick a boring business.
• You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else.
• Rule #3: Get a customer! This is probably the most important rule for any entrepreneur.
• Rule #4: Build trust while you sleep.
• Rule #5: Blogging is not about money. Blogging is about trust.
• Rule #6: Say YES!
• Rule #7: Customer Service. You can treat each customer, new and old, like a real human being.
• When you are a small business, there’s no excuse for having poor customer service.
• Don’t forget: the best new customers are current customers.
• Every company is for sale. Every company has a price.
• Remember: when you write a book, it’s not all about book sales. Books give you credibility in your area of expertise or interest.
• Corporate America doesn’t solve problems. These companies are machines that keep churning out the same product, with minor tweaks, forever.
• the only way to get anywhere is to come up with ideas and then have a strong ability to sell them.
• If you want to create $1 billion in value, you need to find a problem that nobody has solved.
• To succeed at something: Know every product in the industry Know every patent Try out all the products Understand how the products are made Make a product that YOU would use every single day. You can’t sell it if you personally don’t LOVE it
• If you have something that’s worthwhile, you can’t be afraid to cold-call. They need you more than you need them.
• If you have an idea, don’t focus on the money. Don’t focus on how you will make a living. Do this: Build your product Sell it to a customer Start shipping Then quit your job.
• Never ask permission, ask for forgiveness later.
• Nobody questions anything if you have confidence, intelligence, and you are proud of your product.
• Take advantage of all publicity.
• If you don’t promote yourself, nobody else will.
• Don’t be a hater! Ninety-nine percent of people are haters.
• If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success and make it that much harder to get there. Never be jealous. Never think someone is “lucky.” Luck is created by the prepared. Never think that someone is undeserving of the money they have. That only puts you one more step removed from the freedom you aspire to.
• No amount of schooling will teach you how to choose yourself.
• Everyone has a “yes” buried inside of them. A good salesman knows how to find where that “yes” is buried and then how to tease it out. Great salesmen know it instinctively.
• NEGOTIATION IS WORTHLESS. SALES ARE EVERYTHING.
• Only negotiate with people you really want to sell to.
• Do the first project cheap. And whatever was in the spec, add at least two new cool features. This BLOWS AWAY the client. Don’t forget the client is a human, not a company.
• Don’t forget to always give extra. A simple effort will get you a customer for life.
• Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product, but for you.
• The idea muscle must be exercised every day.
• To become an idea machine takes about six to twelve months of daily practice with the idea muscle.
• If you think you can do something, if you have confidence, if you have creativity (developed by building up your idea muscle), the big ideas become smaller and smaller. Until there is no idea too big. Nothing you can’t at least attempt.
• The purpose is not to come up with a good idea. The purpose is to have thousands of ideas over time. To develop the idea muscle and turn it into a machine.
• The best ideas come from collisions between newer and older ideas.
• We only ever remember the things we are passionate about.
• By default, everyone gives the minimum amount of attention required to complete tasks.
• Don’t underestimate the power of being social.
• But the reality is, most ideas are bad. Most of my ideas are bad. I want you to feel comfortable coming up with hundreds of bad ideas.
• Studies show that it’s better to be around positive people than negative people. Positive people uplift you, negative people bring you down.
• The reality is, most people should not be at work. Why? Other than the many reasons already elucidated in this book, it’s simply because most people are bad at their jobs. It’s rare that someone is actually good at what they do. I know maybe ten people who are good at their jobs. This is not a criticism. It’s just a fact. And basically, robots are better.
• Robots are the new middle class. And everyone else will either be an entrepreneur or a temp staffer.
• Only worry about your own happiness, which doesn’t have to be limited by anyone else’s stupidity unless you allow it to be.
• Opinions are like money. No matter how much you know, there’s always someone who knows more. And they aren’t afraid to flaunt it.
• The point is, don’t focus on those things in the material world that you cannot control or possibly ever change, when you can focus on inner health, on your inner world, on the things that matter.
• Procrastination is your body telling you that you need to back off a bit and think more about what you are doing.
• There’s only so many seconds in a row you can think about something before you need to take time off and rejuvenate the creative muscles.
• Often, the successful mediocre entrepreneur should strive for excellence in ZERO-tasking. Do nothing. We always feel like we have to be “doing something” or we (or, I should say “I”) feel ashamed. Sometimes it’s better to just be quiet, to not think of anything at all.
• But again, by definition, most of us are pretty mediocre. We can strive for greatness but we will never hit it. That means we will often fail. Not ALWAYS fail. But often.
• Ultimately, life is a sentence of failures, punctuated only by the briefest of successes. So the mediocre entrepreneur learns two things from failure: First he learns directly how to overcome that particular failure. He’s highly motivated to not repeat the same mistakes. Second, he learns how to deal with the psychology of failure.
• The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the bastard, ugly child that results. The child who was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it.
• “I thought being mediocre is supposed to be bad?” one might think. Shouldn’t we strive for greatness? And the answer is, “Of course we should! But let’s not forget that nine out of ten motorists think they are ‘above average drivers.’” People overestimate themselves. Don’t let overestimation get in the way of becoming fabulously rich, or at least successful enough that you can have your freedom, feed your family, and enjoy other things in life.
• Being mediocre doesn’t mean you won’t change the world. It means being honest with yourself and the people around you. And being honest at every level is really the most effective habit of all if you want to have massive success.
• Subtraction, and not addition, is what makes the window to the brain more clear, wipes away the smudges, and opens the drapes.
• Paranoia will destroy you.
• We ultimately have no way to predict the future. But our mind does one thing over and over that leaves us less intelligent: it constantly puts us in a fantasy world that includes our worst-case scenario.
• If we truly want to learn, we never learn when we are talking. We only learn when we are listening.
• Honesty is the only way to make money in today’s world.
• Dishonesty works…until it doesn’t. Everyone messes up. And when you are dishonest, you are given only one chance and then it’s over.
• HONESTY COMPOUNDS. It compounds exponentially. No matter what happens in your bank account, in your career, in your promotions, in your startups. Honesty compounds exponentially, not over days or weeks, but years and decades. More people trust your word and spread the news that you are a person to be sought out, sought after, given opportunity, given help, or given money. This is what will build your empire.
• To choose yourself you must first be fearless.
• The value of your network goes up exponentially when you view your contacts and resources not as a list but as a network of nodes on a graph.
• The way you create the network effect is by encouraging people in your network to connect to each other and to help each other.
• Nobody is perfect. It’s a lie to expect the people around you to be perfect.
• Excuses are easy lies we tell ourselves to cover up our failures.
• At heart, everyone wants to be perceived as special. That’s because everyone is special but are often never acknowledged that way.
• DO WHAT YOU SAY YOU ARE GOING TO DO. Be that guy.
• Always help people grow into their own potential.
• The world has changed, become different.
• Everyone will say you CAN’T.
• I’ve seen it in action repeatedly: no matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care. Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.
• Nobody can tell you what to do. No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them.
• Nothing is more important than the cultivation of yourself.
• To be creative and stand out in today’s world, you must always be diversifying the artistic experience you put out.
• In general, all relationships in general shift and change.
• Probably the most productive schedule is to wake up early—do your work before people start showing up at your doorstep, on your phone, in your inbox, etc., and leave off at the point right when you are most excited to continue. Then you know it will be easy to start off the next day.
• Nothing comes out exactly how we want it. But we have to learn to roll with it and move to the next work.
• In other words: master the form you want to operate in, get experience, be willing to be imperfect, and then develop the confidence to play within that form, to develop your own style.
• up.As Allen famously stated, 80 percent of success is “showing up.” Nothing more really needs to be added there except it might be changed to “Ninety-nine percent of success for the entrepreneur is showing up.”
• Study the history of the form you want to master. Study every nuance.
• Despite our attempts to climb away from the worst fears of our childhood, success only magnifies those fears.
• Competent people move forward and do what they do.
• A creator can’t ever rest. No matter what you do, no matter what your creation is. Every moment is the audition.
• Every day, in all aspects of our lives, we are rejected. Rejection is probably the most powerful force in our lives.
• You’re going to be rejected all your life. In every way. It never hurts to understand why.
• The NORMAL thing is to be rejected.
• So acknowledge that it’s perfectly normal to feel rejected over something. And it’s perfectly normal to fear it for the future. In fact, to do otherwise would be to reject reality.
• When you’re a kid, everything has a question mark at the end of it. Only later do they turn into periods.

STARTUP PLAYBOOK by Sam Altman, Gregory Koberger

• Your goal as a startup is to make something users love.
• To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea (including a great market), a great team, a great product, and great execution.
• It’s important to be able to think and communicate clearly as a founder—you
• complex ideas are almost always a sign of muddled thinking or a made up problem.
• The way to test an idea is to either launch it and see what happens or try to sell it (e.g. try to get a letter of intent before you write a line of code.)
• For most biotech and hard tech companies, the way to test an idea is to first talk to potential customers and then figure out the smallest subset of the technology you can build first.
• We like it when major technological shifts are just starting that most people haven’t realized yet—big companies are bad at addressing those.
• Most really big companies start with something fundamentally new (one acceptable definition of new is 10x better.)
• it’s easier to do something new and hard than something derivative and easy.
• learn about a lot of different things.
• Practice noticing problems, things that seem inefficient, and major technological shifts.
• Mediocre teams do not build great companies.
• Communication is a very important skill for founders—in fact, I think this is the most important rarely-discussed founder skill.
• Tech startups need at least one founder who can build the company’s product or service, and at least one founder who is (or can become) good at sales and talking to users. This can be the same person.
• Here is the secret to success: have a great product. This is the only thing all great companies have in common.
• You want to start with something very simple—as little surface area as possible—and launch it sooner than you’d think.
• In fact, simplicity is always good, and you should always keep your product and company as simple as possible.
• The only universal job description of a CEO is to make sure the company wins.
• Growth and momentum are the keys to great execution.
• The company does what the CEO measures.
• A good rule of thumb is to only think about how things will work at 10x your current scale.
• get growth the same way all great companies have—by building a product users love, recruiting users manually first, and then testing lots of growth strategies (ads, referral programs, sales and marketing, etc.) and doing more of what works.
• As a general rule, don’t let your company start doing the next thing until you’ve dominated the first thing.
• A very, very common cause of startup death is doing too many of the wrong things.
• When you find something that works, keep going. Don’t get distracted and do something else.
• A CEO has to 1) set the vision and strategy for the company, 2) evangelize the company to everyone, 3) hire and manage the team, especially in areas where you yourself have gaps 4) raise money and make sure the company does not run out of money, and 5) set the execution quality bar.
• A surprising amount of our advice at YC is of the form “just ask them” or “just do it”.
• Just be direct, be willing to ask for what you want, and don’t be a jerk.
• Hiring is one of your most important jobs and the key to building a great company (as opposed to a great product.)
• Be generous with equity, trust, and responsibility.
• Don’t compromise on the quality of people you hire.
• Value aptitude over experience for almost all roles. Look for raw intelligence and a track record of getting things done.
• 99% of startups die from suicide, not murder.
• 99% of the time, you should ignore competitors.
• Remember that at least a thousand people have every great idea. One of them actually becomes successful. The difference comes down to execution.

SMARTER FASTER BETTER by Charles Duhigg

• There are some people who pretend at productivity, whose résumés appear impressive until you realize their greatest talent is self marketing.
• Productivity, put simply, is the name we give our attempts to figure out the best uses of our energy, intellect, and time as we try to seize the most meaningful rewards with the least wasted effort. It’s a process of learning how to succeed with less stress and struggle. It’s about getting things done without sacrificing everything we care about along the way.
• Motivation is more like a skill, akin to reading or writing, that can be learned and honed.
• Scientists have found that people can get better at self-motivation if they practice the right way. The trick, researchers say, is realizing that a prerequisite to motivation is believing we have authority over our actions and surroundings.
• To motivate ourselves, we must feel like we are in control.
• When people believe they are in control, they tend to work harder and push themselves more. They are, on average, more confident and overcome setbacks faster. People who believe they have authority over themselves often live longer than their peers.
• One way to prove to ourselves that we are in control is by making decisions. “Each choice—no matter how small—reinforces the perception of control and self-efficacy,” the Columbia researchers wrote. Even if making a decision delivers no benefit, people still want the freedom to choose.
• The first step in creating drive is giving people opportunities to make choices that provide them with a sense of autonomy and self-determination.
• As long as we feel a sense of control, we’re more willing to play along.
• Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. The specific choice we make matters less than the assertion of control. It’s this feeling of self-determination that gets us going.
• Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence.
• People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.
• In contrast, having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“is correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,” the team of psychologists wrote.
• Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback.
• Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.
• Complimenting students on their intelligence activates an external locus of control.
• “Internal locus of control is a learned skill,”
• We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
• When things are at their most miserable, their drill instructors had said, they should ask each other questions that begin with “why.”
• If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier,
• Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.
• If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower.
• Once people know how to make self-directed choices into a habit, motivation becomes more automatic.
• Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals.
• An internal locus of control emerges when we develop a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives.
• “Any group, over time, develops collective norms about appropriate behavior,
• Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards, and unwritten rules that govern how we function. When a team comes to an unspoken consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate, that’s a norm asserting itself.
• There is strong evidence that group norms play a critical role in shaping the emotional experience of participating in a team.
• On the best teams, for instance, leaders encouraged people to speak up; teammates felt like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another; people said they could suggest ideas without fear of retribution; the culture discouraged people from making harsh judgments.
• For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don’t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard. “The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader,” as Amy Edmondson, who is now a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. “It seems like fairly minor stuff, but when the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel listened to, or starts a meeting by saying ‘I might miss something, so I need all of you to watch for my mistakes,’ or says ‘Jim, you haven’t spoken in a while, what do you think?,’ that makes a huge difference.”
• This is how psychological safety emerges: by giving everyone an equal voice and encouraging social sensitivity among teammates.
• “The biggest thing you should take away from this work is that how teams work matters, in a lot of ways, more than who is on them,” he said.
• Teams need to believe that their work is important. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful. Teams need clear goals and defined roles. Team members need to know they can depend on one another. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.
• Leaders should not interrupt teammates during conversations, because that will establish an interrupting norm. They should demonstrate they are listening by summarizing what people say after they said it. They should admit what they don’t know. They shouldn’t end a meeting until all team members have spoken at least once. They should encourage people who are upset to express their frustrations, and encourage teammates to respond in nonjudgmental ways. They should call out intergroup conflicts and resolve them through open discussion.
• Teams succeed when everyone feels like they can speak up and when members show they are sensitive to how one another feels.
• And the unwritten rules that make teams succeed or fail, it turns out, are the same from place to place.
• In general, the route to establishing psychological safety begins with the team’s leader. So if you are leading a team—be it a group of coworkers or a sports team, a church gathering, or your family dinner table—think about what message your choices send. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening? Are you demonstrating a sensitivity to what people think and feel, or are you letting decisive leadership be an excuse for not paying as close attention as you should?
• There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues. But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time.
• When people come together in a group, sometimes we need to give control to others. That’s ultimately what team norms are: individuals willingly giving a measure of control to their teammates. But that works only when people feel like they can trust one another. It only succeeds when we feel psychologically safe.
• As a team leader, then, it’s important to give people control.
• Our attention span is guided by our intentions. We choose, in most situations, whether to focus the spotlight or let it be relaxed. But when we allow automated systems, such as computers or autopilots, to pay attention for us, our brains dim that spotlight and allow it to swing wherever it wants. This is, in part, an effort by our brains to conserve energy.
• Our brains automatically seek out opportunities to disconnect and unwind.
• Cognitive tunneling can cause people to become overly focused on whatever is directly in front of their eyes or become preoccupied with immediate tasks.
• Reactive thinking is at the core of how we allocate our attention, and in many settings, it’s a tremendous asset.
• Reactive thinking is how we build habits, and it’s why to-do lists and calendar alerts are so helpful: Rather than needing to decide what to do next, we can take advantage of our reactive instincts and automatically proceed. Reactive thinking, in a sense, outsources the choices and control that, in other settings, create motivation.
• But the downside of reactive thinking is that habits and reactions can become so automatic they overpower our judgment. Once our motivation is outsourced, we simply react.
• All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not.
• It’s always been difficult to learn how to focus. It’s even harder now.”
• People who know how to manage their attention and who habitually build robust mental models tend to earn more money and get better grades.
• By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes.
• If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head.
• If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.
• “Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous,”
• Mental models help us by providing a scaffold for the torrent of information that constantly surrounds us. Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.
• To become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.
• Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next.
• The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. People who have a strong urge for closure are more likely to be self-disciplined and seen as leaders by their peers.
• When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.
• Decisive people have an instinct to “seize” on a choice when it meets a minimum threshold of acceptability. This is a useful impulse, because it helps us commit to projects rather than endlessly debating questions or second-guessing ourselves into a state of paralysis.
• However, if our urge for closure is too strong, we “freeze” on our goals and yearn to grab that feeling of productivity at the expense of common
• goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.
• “Making yourself break a goal into its SMART components is the difference between hoping something comes true and figuring out how to do it,”
• People respond to the conditions around them. If you’re being constantly told to focus on achievable results, you’re only going to think of achievable goals. You’re not going to dream big.”
• Stretch goals “serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking,” a group of researchers wrote in Academy of Management Review business journal in 2011.
• There is an important caveat to the power of stretch goals, however. Studies show that if a stretch goal is audacious, it can spark innovation. It can also cause panic and convince people that success is impossible because the goal is too big. There is a fine line between an ambition that helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale. For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.
• The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims. People who know how to build SMART goals have often been habituated into cultures where big objectives can be broken into manageable parts, and so when they encounter seemingly outsized ambitions, they know what to do. Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.
• Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.
• What matters is having a large ambition and a system for figuring out how to make it into a concrete and realistic plan. Then, as you check the little things off your to-do list, you’ll move ever closer to what really matters.
• Toyota Production System—which in the United States would become known as “lean manufacturing”—relied on pushing decision making to the lowest possible level.
• Engineering-focused cultures are powerful because they allow firms to grow quickly.
• Hands down, a commitment culture outperformed every other type of management style in almost every meaningful way.
• The main problem with Sentinel, Fulgham believed, was that the bureau—like many big organizations—had tried to plan everything in advance. But creating great software requires flexibility. Problems pop up unexpectedly and breakthroughs are unpredictable. The truth was, no one knew exactly how FBI agents would use Sentinel once it was functional, or how it would need to change as crime-fighting techniques evolved. So instead of meticulously predesigning each interface and system—instead of trying to control from above—they needed to make Sentinel into a tool that could adapt to agents’ needs. And the only way to do that, Fulgham was convinced, was if developers were unfettered themselves.
• Employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success. A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and innovations, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored, that their mistakes won’t be held against them. And they need to know that everyone else has their back.
• Many of our most important decisions are, in fact, attempts to forecast the future.
• Good decision making is contingent on a basic ability to envision what happens next.
• Probabilities can help you forecast likelihoods, but they can’t guarantee the future.
• The paradox of learning how to make better decisions is that it requires developing a comfort with doubt.
• “If you have no basis for treating one variable as more important than another, use equal weighting.
• Contradictory futures can be combined into a single prediction.
• The future isn’t one thing. Rather, it is a multitude of possibilities that often contradict one another until one of them comes true. And those futures can be combined in order for someone to predict which one is more likely to occur.
• Learning to think probabilistically requires us to question our assumptions and live with uncertainty. To become better at predicting the future—at making good decisions—we need to know the difference between what we hope will happen and what is more and less likely to occur.
• Our assumptions are based on what we’ve encountered in life, but our experiences often draw on biased samples.
• Many successful people, in contrast, spend an enormous amount of time seeking out information on failures.
• “The best entrepreneurs are acutely conscious of the risks that come from only talking to people who have succeeded,”
• Making good choices relies on forecasting the future. Accurate forecasting requires exposing ourselves to as many successes and disappointments as possible.
• You’ll never know with 100 percent certainty how things will turn out. But the more you force yourself to envision potential futures, the more you learn about which assumptions are certain or flimsy, the better your odds of making a great decision next time.
• All we can do is learn how to make the best decisions that are in front of us, and trust that, over time, the odds will be in our favor.”
• How do we learn to make better decisions? In part, by training ourselves to think probabilistically. To do that, we must force ourselves to envision various futures—to hold contradictory scenarios in our minds simultaneously—and then expose ourselves to a wide spectrum of successes and failures to develop an intuition about which forecasts are more or less likely to come true.
• The people who make the best choices are the ones who work hardest to envision various futures, to write them down and think them through, and then ask themselves, which ones do I think are most likely and why?
• “The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations.”
• “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.”
• This method is worth studying because it suggests a way that anyone can become an idea broker: by drawing on their own lives as creative fodder. We all have a natural instinct to overlook our emotions as creative material. But a key part of learning how to broker insights from one setting to another, to separate the real from the clichéd, is paying more attention to how things make us feel.
• “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996.
• “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
• People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel.
• When strong ideas take root, they can sometimes crowd out competitors so thoroughly that alternatives can’t prosper. So sometimes the best way to spark creativity is by disturbing things just enough to let some light through.
• Creativity can’t be reduced to a formula. At its core, it needs novelty, surprise, and other elements that cannot be planned in advance to seem fresh and new. There is no checklist that, if followed, delivers innovation on demand. But the creative process is different. We can create the conditions that help creativity to flourish. We know, for example, that innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways. We know the odds of success go up when brokers—people with fresh, different perspectives, who have seen ideas in a variety of settings—draw on the diversity within their heads. We know that, sometimes, a little disturbance can help jolt us out of the ruts that even the most creative thinkers fall into, as long as those shake-ups are the right size.
• If you want to become a broker and increase the productivity of your own creative process, there are three things that can help: First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel.
• Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own experiences into the wider world.
• Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.
• Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, without tension, one idea can quickly crowd out competitors. But we can regain that critical distance by forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different perspective, by changing the power dynamics in the room or giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before.
• There’s an idea that runs through these three lessons: The creative process is, in fact, a process, something that can be broken down and explained. That’s important, because it means that anyone can become more creative; we can all become innovation brokers.
• “Creativity is just problem solving,” Ed Catmull told me. “Once people see it as problem solving, it stops seeming like magic, because it’s not.
• People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”
• Unfortunately, however, our ability to learn from information hasn’t necessarily kept pace with its proliferation.
• This inability to take advantage of data as it becomes more plentiful is called “information blindness.”
• Information blindness occurs because of the way our brain’s capacity for learning has evolved. Humans are exceptionally good at absorbing information—as long as we can break data into a series of smaller and smaller pieces.
• “Our brains crave reducing things to two or three options,” said Eric Johnson, a cognitive psychologist at Columbia University who studies decision making. “So when we’re faced with a lot of information, we start automatically arranging it into mental folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders.”
• This ability to digest large amounts of information by breaking it into smaller pieces is how our brains turn information into knowledge. We learn which facts or lessons to apply in a given situation by learning which folders to consult. Experts are distinguished from novices, in part, by how many folders they carry in their heads.
• One way to overcome information blindness is to force ourselves to grapple with the data in front of us, to manipulate information by transforming it into a sequence of questions to be answered or choices to be made. This is sometimes referred to as “creating disfluency” because it relies on doing a little bit of work: Instead of simply choosing the house wine, you have to ask yourself a series of questions (White or red? Expensive or cheap?).
• It might seem like a small effort at the time, but those tiny bits of labor are critical to avoiding information blindness.
• This is how learning occurs. Information gets absorbed almost without our noticing because we’re so engrossed with it.
• We’re often too close to our own experiences to see how to break that data into smaller bits.
• “Our brain wants to find a simple frame and stick with it, the same way it wants to make a binary decision,” Eric Johnson, the Columbia psychologist, told me.
• One of the best ways to help people cast experiences in a new light is to provide a formal decision-making system—such as a flowchart, a prescribed series of questions, or the engineering design process—that denies our brains the easy options we crave.
• The people who are most successful at learning—those who are able to digest the data surrounding them, who absorb insights embedded in their experiences and take advantage of information flowing past—are the ones who know how to use disfluency to their advantage. They transform what life throws at them, rather than just taking it as it comes. They know the best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information. They take data and transform it into experiments whenever they can.
• Writing is more disfluent than typing, because it requires more labor and captures fewer verbatim phrases.
• No matter what constraints were placed on the groups, the students who forced themselves to use a more cumbersome note-taking method—who forced disfluency into how they processed information—learned more.
• In our own lives, the same lesson applies: When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data.
• When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend—and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.
• Every choice we make in life is an experiment. Every day offers fresh opportunities to find better decision-making frames.
• Motivation becomes easier when we transform a chore into a choice. Doing so gives us a sense of control.
• General Krulak had told me something that stuck with me: “Most recruits don’t know how to force themselves to start something hard. But if we can train them to take the first step by doing something that makes them feel in charge, it’s easier to keep going.”
• Self-motivation becomes easier when we see our choices as affirmations of our deeper values and goals.
• Forcing ourselves to explain why we are doing something helps us remember that this chore is a step along a longer path, and that by choosing to take that journey, we are getting closer to more meaningful objectives.
• Something as simple as jotting down a couple of reasons why I am doing something makes it much simpler to start.
• Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate (to ourselves) that we are in control—and that we are moving toward goals that are meaningful. It’s that feeling of self-determination that gets us going.
• TO GENERATE MOTIVATION
• Make a choice that puts you in control. If you’re replying to emails, write an initial sentence that expresses an opinion or decision. If you need to have a hard conversation, decide where it will occur ahead of time. The specific choice itself matters less in sparking motivation than the assertion of control.
• Figure out how this task is connected to something you care about. Explain to yourself why this chore will help you get closer to a meaningful goal. Explain why this matters—and then, you’ll find it easier to start.
• TO SET GOALS:
• Choose a stretch goal: an ambition that reflects your biggest aspirations.
• Then, break that into subgoals and develop SMART objectives.
• We aid our focus by building mental models—telling ourselves stories—about what we expect to see.
• TO STAY FOCUSED:
• Envision what will happen. What will occur first? What are potential obstacles? How will you preempt them? Telling yourself a story about what you expect to occur makes it easier to decide where your focus should go when your plan encounters real life.
• Envision multiple futures, and then force myself to figure out which ones are most likely—and why.
• TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS:
• Envision multiple futures. By pushing yourself to imagine various possibilities—some of which might be contradictory—you’re better equipped to make wise choices.
• We can hone our Bayesian instincts by seeking out different experiences, perspectives, and other people’s ideas. By finding information and then letting ourselves sit with it, options become clearer.
• TO MAKE TEAMS MORE EFFECTIVE:
• Manage the how, not the who of teams. Psychological safety emerges when everyone feels like they can speak in roughly equal measure and when teammates show they are sensitive to how each other feel.
• If you are leading a team, think about the message your choices reveal. Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you showing you are listening by repeating what people say and replying to questions and thoughts? Are you demonstrating sensitivity by reacting when someone seems upset or flustered? Are you showcasing that sensitivity, so other people will follow your lead?
• TO MANAGE OTHERS PRODUCTIVELY:
• Lean and agile management techniques tell us employees work smarter and better when they believe they have more decisionmaking authority and when they believe their colleagues are committed to their success.
• By pushing decision making to whoever is closest to a problem, managers take advantage of everyone’s expertise and unlock innovation.
• A sense of control can fuel motivation, but for that drive to produce insights and solutions, people need to know their suggestions won’t be ignored and that their mistakes won’t be held against them.
• TO ENCOURAGE INNOVATION:
• Creativity often emerges by combining old ideas in new ways—and “innovation brokers” are key. To become a broker yourself and encourage brokerage within your organization:
• Be sensitive to your own experiences. Paying attention to how things make you think and feel is how we distinguish clichés from real insights. Study your own emotional reactions.
• Recognize that the stress that emerges amid the creative process isn’t a sign everything is falling apart. Rather, creative desperation is often critical: Anxiety can be what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways.
• Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to alternatives. By forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from different perspectives, by giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before, we retain clear eyes.
• TO ABSORB DATA BETTER:
• When we encounter new information, we should force ourselves to do something with it. Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend. Every choice we make in life is an experiment—the trick is getting ourselves to see the data embedded in those decisions, and then to use it somehow so we learn from it.
• Productivity is about recognizing choices that other people often overlook. It’s about making certain decisions in certain ways.
• Productive people and companies force themselves to make choices most other people are content to ignore. Productivity emerges when people push themselves to think differently.
• Productivity doesn’t mean that every action is efficient. It doesn’t mean that waste never occurs.
• Sometimes a misstep is the most important footfall along the path to success.

PEAK by Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool

• But since the 1990s brain researchers have come to realize that the brain—even the adult brain—is far more adaptable than anyone ever imagined, and this gives us a tremendous amount of control over what our brains are able to do. In particular, the brain responds to the right sorts of triggers by rewiring itself in various ways. New connections are made between neurons, while existing connections can be strengthened or weakened, and in some parts of the brain it is even possible for new neurons to grow.
• We can’t yet identify exactly which circuits those are or say what they look like or exactly what they do, but we know they must be there—and we know that they are the product of the training, not of some inborn genetic programming.
• This loss is part of a broader phenomenon—that is, that both the brain and the body are more adaptable in young children than in adults, so there are certain abilities that can only be developed, or that are more easily developed, before the age of six or twelve or eighteen. Still, both the brain and the body retain a great deal of adaptability throughout adulthood, and this adaptability makes it possible for adults, even older adults, to develop a wide variety of new capabilities with the right training.
• Over my years of studying experts in various fields, I have found that they all develop their abilities in much the same way that Sakakibara’s students did—through dedicated training that drives changes in the brain (and sometimes, depending on the ability, in the body) that make it possible for them to do things that they otherwise could not.
• But the clear message from decades of research is that no matter what role innate genetic endowment may play in the achievements of “gifted” people, the main gift that these people have is the same one we all have—the adaptability of the human brain and body, which they have taken advantage of more than the rest of us.
• But we now understand that there’s no such thing as a predefined ability. The brain is adaptable, and training can create skills—such as perfect pitch—that did not exist before. This is a game changer, because learning now becomes a way of creating abilities rather than of bringing people to the point where they can take advantage of their innate ones.
• Learning isn’t a way of reaching one’s potential but rather a way of developing it. We can create our own potential.
• The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.
• More than two decades ago, after studying expert performers from a wide range of fields, my colleagues and I came to realize that no matter what the field, the most effective approaches to improving performance all follow a single set of general principles. We named this universal approach “deliberate practice.”
• Today deliberate practice remains the gold standard for anyone in any field who wishes to take advantage of the gift of adaptability in order to build new skills and abilities, and it is the main concern of this book.
• There are some inherited physical characteristics, such as height and body size, that can influence performance in various sports and other physical activities and that cannot be changed by practice.
• Some genetic factors may influence a person’s ability to engage in sustained deliberate practice—for instance, by limiting a person’s capability to focus for long periods of time every day.
• And after several decades of studying these best of the best—these “expert performers,” to use the technical term—I have found that no matter what field you study, music or sports or chess or something else, the most effective types of practice all follow the same set of general principles.
• The answer is that the most effective and most powerful types of practice in any field work by harnessing the adaptability of the human body and brain to create, step by step, the ability to do things that were previously not possible.
• There are various sorts of practice that can be effective to one degree or another, but one particular form—which I named “deliberate practice” back in the early 1990s—is the gold standard. It is the most effective and powerful form of practice that we know of, and applying the principles of deliberate practice is the best way to design practice methods in any area.
• We all follow pretty much the same pattern with any skill we learn, from baking a pie to writing a descriptive paragraph. We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic. And there’s nothing wrong with that. For much of what we do in life, it’s perfectly fine to reach a middling level of performance and just leave it like that.
• But there is one very important thing to understand here: once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance—your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies—you have stopped improving.
• But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.
• Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what we might call “naive practice,” which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.
• Purposeful practice is, as the term implies, much more purposeful, thoughtful, and focused than this sort of naive practice. In particular, it has the following characteristics:
• Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals.
• Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.
• Break it down and make a plan:
• The key thing is to take that general goal—get better—and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.
• Purposeful practice is focused.
• You seldom improve much without giving the task your full attention.
• Purposeful practice involves feedback.
• You have to know whether you are doing something right and, if not, how you’re going wrong.
• Generally speaking, no matter what you’re trying to do, you need feedback to identify exactly where and how you are falling short. Without feedback—either from yourself or from outside observers—you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.
• Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice.
• This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve.
• Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. Sometimes you may find it relatively easy to accomplish that new thing, and then you keep pushing on. But sometimes you run into something that stops you cold and it seems like you’ll never be able to do it. Finding ways around these barriers is one of the hidden keys to purposeful practice.
• Generally the solution is not “try harder” but rather “try differently.” It is a technique issue, in other words.
• The best way to get past any barrier is to come at it from a different direction, which is one reason it is useful to work with a teacher or coach. Someone who is already familiar with the sorts of obstacles you’re likely to encounter can suggest ways to overcome them.
• And sometimes it turns out that a barrier is more psychological than anything else.
• Whenever you’re trying to improve at something, you will run into such obstacles—points at which it seems impossible to progress, or at least where you have no idea what you should do in order to improve. This is natural. What is not natural is a true dead-stop obstacle, one that is impossible to get around, over, or through.
• One caveat here is that while it is always possible to keep going and keep improving, it is not always easy. Maintaining the focus and the effort required by purposeful practice is hard work, and it is generally not fun.
• Generally speaking, meaningful positive feedback is one of the crucial factors in maintaining motivation. It can be internal feedback, such as the satisfaction of seeing yourself improve at something, or external feedback provided by others, but it makes a huge difference in whether a person will be able to maintain the consistent effort necessary to improve through purposeful practice.
• So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.
• There is an important lesson here: Although it is generally possible to improve to a certain degree with focused practice and staying out of your comfort zone, that’s not all there is to it. Trying hard isn’t enough. Pushing yourself to your limits isn’t enough. There are other, equally important aspects to practice and training that are often overlooked.
• You don’t develop a six-pack on your forehead. And because you can’t see any changes in your brain, it’s easy to assume that there really isn’t much going on.
• In short, the human body is incredibly adaptable. It is not just the skeletal muscles, but also the heart, the lungs, the circulatory system, the body’s energy stores, and more—everything that goes into physical strength and stamina. There may be limits, but there is no indication that we have reached them yet.
• occurs. If you practice something enough, your brain will repurpose neurons to help with the task even if they already have another job to do.
• The human body has a preference for stability.
• This is the general pattern for how physical activity creates changes in the body: when a body system—certain muscles, the cardiovascular system, or something else—is stressed to the point that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the body responds with changes that are intended to reestablish homeostasis.
• This is how the body’s desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do.
• If you don’t keep pushing and pushing and pushing some more, the body will settle into homeostasis, albeit at a different level than before, and you will stop improving.
• This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body’s compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.
• One major difference between the body and the brain is that the cells in the adult brain do not generally divide and form new brain cells.
• Even in the case of what we usually think of as purely “physical skills,” such as swimming or gymnastics, the brain plays a major role because these activities require careful control of the body’s movements, and research has found that practice produces brain changes.
• Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.
• A second detail worth noting is that developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area.
• Finally, the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they start to go away.
• Strength fades. Speed diminishes. Endurance wilts. And something similar is true with the brain.
• The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “good enough.”
• “Good enough” is generally good enough. But it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.
• The traditional approach is not designed to challenge homeostasis. It assumes, consciously or not, that learning is all about fulfilling your innate potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone.
• With deliberate practice, however, the goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt.
• Anyone who is serious about developing skills on the chessboard will do it mainly by spending countless hours studying games played by the masters. You analyze a position in depth, predicting the next move, and if you get it wrong, you go back and figure out what you missed. Research has shown that the amount of time spent in this sort of analysis—not the amount of time spent playing chess with others—is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability.
• A master who examines a chess position sees a collection of chunks that are interacting with other chunks in still other patterns.
• there is no such thing as developing a general skill.
• What exactly is being changed in the brain with deliberate practice? The main thing that sets experts apart from the rest of us is that their years of practice have changed the neural circuitry in their brains to produce highly specialized mental representations, which in turn make possible the incredible memory, pattern recognition, problem solving, and other sorts of advanced abilities needed to excel in their particular specialties.
• In pretty much every area, a hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well developed mental representations. In other words, experts see the forest when everyone else sees only trees.
• Again, better mental representations lead to better performance.
• For the experts we just described, the key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it. The same is true for all experts—and most of us are experts at something, whether we realize it or not.
• The more you study a subject, the more detailed your mental representations of it become, and the better you get at assimilating new information.
• More generally, mental representations can be used to plan a wide variety of areas, and the better the representation, the more effective the planning.
• The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations, and, as we will discuss shortly, mental representations in turn play a key role in deliberate practice.
• The key change that occurs in our adaptable brains in response to deliberate practice is the development of better mental representations, which in turn open up new possibilities for improved performance.
• Indeed, any expert in any field can be rightly seen as a high-achieving intellectual where that field is concerned.
• In every area, some approaches to training are more effective than others.
• if there is no agreement on what good performance is and no way to tell what changes would improve performance, then it is very difficult—often impossible—to develop effective training methods.
• If you don’t know for sure what constitutes improvement, how can you develop methods to improve
• The improvement of skills and the development of training techniques move forward hand in hand, with new training techniques leading to new levels of accomplishment and new accomplishments generating innovations in training.
• Everyone from the very top students to the future music teachers agreed: improvement was hard, and they didn’t enjoy the work they did to improve.
• The other crucial finding was that there was only one major difference among the three groups. This was the total number of hours that the students had devoted to solitary practice.
• you generally find that the best performers are those who have spent the most time in various types of purposeful practice.
• No matter which area you study—music, dance, sports, competitive games, or anything else with objective measures of performance—you find that the top performers have devoted a tremendous amount of time to developing their abilities.
• The improvement in performance generally has gone hand in hand with the development of teaching methods, and today anyone who wishes to become an expert in these fields will need an instructor’s help.
• In short, we were saying that deliberate practice is different from other sorts of purposeful practice in two important ways: First, it requires a field that is already reasonably well developed—that is, a field in which the best performers have attained a level of performance that clearly sets them apart from people who are just entering the field.
• Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
• With this definition we are drawing a clear distinction between purposeful practice—in which a person tries very hard to push himself or herself to improve—and practice that is both purposeful and informed.
• Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.
• In short, deliberate practice is characterized by the following traits: Deliberate practice develops skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been established. The practice regimen should be designed and overseen by a teacher or coach who is familiar with the abilities of expert performers and with how those abilities can best be developed. Deliberate practice takes place outside one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable. Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement. Once an overall goal has been set, a teacher or coach will develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change. Improving some aspect of the target performance allows a performer to see that his or her performances have been improved by the training. Deliberate practice is deliberate, that is, it requires a person’s full attention and conscious actions. It isn’t enough to simply follow a teacher’s or coach’s directions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for his or her practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice. Deliberate practice involves feedback and modification of efforts in response to that feedback. Early in the training process much of the feedback will come from the teacher or coach, who will monitor progress, point out problems, and offer ways to address those problems. With time and experience students must learn to monitor themselves, spot mistakes, and adjust accordingly. Such self-monitoring requires effective mental representations. Deliberate practice both produces and depends on effective mental representations. Improving performance goes hand in hand with improving mental representations; as one’s performance improves, the representations become more detailed and effective, in turn making it possible to improve even more. Mental representations make it possible to monitor how one is doing, both in practice and in actual performance. They show the right way to do something and allow one to notice when doing something wrong and to correct it. Deliberate practice nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically; over time this step-by-step improvement will eventually lead to expert performance. Because of the way that new skills are built on top of existing skills, it is important for teachers to provide beginners with the correct fundamental skills in order to minimize the chances that the student will have to relearn those fundamental skills later when at a more advanced level.
• This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an option, you should take that option. If not, apply the principles of deliberate practice as much as possible. In practice this often boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.
• In determining who the experts are, the ideal is to use some objective measure to separate the best from the rest.
• subjective judgments are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases.
• In many fields, people who are widely accepted as “experts” are actually not expert performers when judged by objective criteria.
• Research has shown that the “experts” in many fields don’t perform reliably better than other, less highly regarded members of the profession—or sometimes even than people who have had no training at all.
• Contrary to expectations, experience doesn’t lead to improved performance among many types of doctors and nurses.
• The lesson here is clear: be careful when identifying expert performers. Ideally you want some objective measure of performance with which to compare people’s abilities. If no such measures exist, get as close as you can.
• Remember that the ideal is to find objective, reproducible measures that consistently distinguish the best from the rest, and if that ideal is not possible, approximate it as well as you can.
• Lesson: Once you have identified an expert, identify what this person does differently from others that could explain the superior performance. There are likely to be many things the person does differently that have nothing to do with the superior performance, but at least it is a place to start.
• If you find that something works, keep doing it; if it doesn’t work, stop.
• This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers.
• Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities—usually done alone—that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.
• altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.
• As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, to raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop.
• Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline.
• If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way. Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the “right way” is.
• One benefit of “learning while real work gets done” is that it gets people into the habit of practicing and thinking about practicing.
• One of the major challenges facing anyone trying to apply the principles of deliberate practice is figuring out exactly what the best performers do that sets them apart.
• In the early days of the Top Gun project, no one stopped to try to figure out what made the best pilots so good. They just set up a program that mimicked the situations pilots would face in real dogfights and that allowed the pilots to practice their skills over and over again with plenty of feedback and without the usual costs of failure. That is a pretty good recipe for training programs in many different disciplines.
• One of the implicit themes of the Top Gun approach to training, whether it is for shooting down enemy planes or interpreting mammograms, is the emphasis on doing. The bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know, although it is understood that you need to know certain things in order to be able to do your job.
• This distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach.
• Traditionally, the focus is nearly always on knowledge.
• Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it.
• When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.
• It is not just the medical profession that has traditionally emphasized knowledge over skills in its education. The situation is similar in many other professional schools, such as law schools and business schools. In general, professional schools focus on knowledge rather than skills because it is much easier to teach knowledge and then create tests for it.
• The general argument has been that the skills can be mastered relatively easily if the knowledge is there.
• But over the long term I believe the best approach will be to develop new skills-based training programs that will supplement or completely replace the knowledge-based approaches that are the norm now in many places. This strategy acknowledges that because what is ultimately most important is what people are able to do, training should focus on doing rather than on knowing—and, in particular, on bringing everyone’s skills closer to the level of the best performers in a given area.
• Once you have identified people who consistently perform better than their peers, the next step is to figure out what underlies that superior performance.
• Given the expense of private instruction, people will often try to make do with group lessons or even YouTube videos or books, and those approaches will generally work to some degree. But no matter how many times you watch a demonstration in class or on YouTube, you are still going to miss or misunderstand some subtleties—and sometimes some things that are not so subtle—and you are not going to be able to figure out the best ways to fix all of your weaknesses, even if you do spot them.
• one of the most important things you can do for your success is to find a good teacher and work with him or her.
• First, while a good teacher does not have to be one of the best in the world, he or she should be accomplished in the field. Generally speaking, teachers will only be able to guide you to the level that they or their previous students have attained.
• If you’re a flat-out beginner, any reasonably skilled teacher will do, but once you’ve been training for a few years, you’ll need a teacher who is more advanced.
• Many accomplished performers are terrible teachers because they have no idea how to teach.
• you may need to change teachers as you yourself change.
• If you find yourself at a point where you are no longer improving quickly or at all, don’t be afraid to look for a new instructor. The most important thing is to keep moving forward.
• If you want to improve in chess, you don’t do it by playing chess; you do it with solitary study of the grandmasters’ games.
• Remember: if your mind is wandering or you’re relaxed and just having fun, you probably won’t improve.
• This is a key to getting the maximum benefit out of any sort of practice, from private or group lessons to solitary practice and even to games or competitions: whatever you are doing, focus on it.
• Learning to engage in this way—consciously developing and refining your skills—is one of the most powerful ways to improve the effectiveness of your practice.
• Focus and concentration are crucial, I wrote, so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster.
• Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.
• The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do—that takes you out of your comfort zone—and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better.
• Some of the most challenging skills to practice, for instance, are those that involve interacting with other people.
• It does no good to do the same thing over and over again mindlessly; the purpose of the repetition is to figure out where your weaknesses are and focus on getting better in those areas, trying different methods to improve until you find something that works.
• To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
• We can only form effective mental representations when we try to reproduce what the expert performer can do, fail, figure out why we failed, try again, and repeat—over and over again.
• Successful mental representations are inextricably tied to actions, not just thoughts, and it is the extended practice aimed at reproducing the original product that will produce the mental representations we seek.
• When you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid—or at least steady—improvement, and when that improvement stops, it is natural to believe you’ve hit some sort of implacable limit. So you stop trying to move forward, and you settle down to life on that plateau. This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.
• the best way to move beyond it is to challenge your brain or your body in a new way.
• Most typists can increase their typing speed by 10–20 percent simply by focusing and pushing themselves to type faster.
• Any reasonably complex skill will involve a variety of components, some of which you will be better at than others. Thus, when you reach a point at which you are having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back.
• This, then, is what you should try when other techniques for getting past a plateau have failed. First, figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness. Once you’ve figured out what the problem is, you may be able to fix it yourself, or you may need to go to an experienced coach or teacher for suggestions. Either way, pay attention to what happens when you practice; if you are not improving, you will need to try something else.
• So that’s the problem in a nutshell: purposeful practice is hard work. It’s hard to keep going, and even if you keep up your training—you go to the gym regularly, or you practice the guitar for a certain number of hours every week—it’s hard to maintain focus and effort, so you may eventually stop pushing yourself and stop improving.
• In fact, if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute. People generally find it much easier to push themselves in some areas than in others.
• Both willpower and natural talent are traits that people assign to someone after the fact:
• once you assume that something is innate, it automatically becomes something you can’t do anything about:
• Motivation is quite different from willpower. We all have various motivations—some stronger, some weaker—at various times and in various situations. The most important question to answer then becomes, What factors shape motivation?
• As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration.
• When you quit something that you had initially wanted to do, it’s because the reasons to stop eventually came to outweigh the reasons to continue. Thus, to maintain your motivation you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.
• For purposeful or deliberate practice to be effective, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone and maintain your focus, but those are mentally draining activities.
• Expert performers do two things—both seemingly unrelated to motivation—that can help.
• The first is general physical maintenance: getting enough sleep and keeping healthy.
• The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour.
• If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.
• The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it’s not as hard to keep going.
• In order to push yourself when you really don’t feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and—particularly for people shooting to become expert performers—that you can rank among the best.
• if you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.
• One of the strongest forms of extrinsic motivation is social motivation.
• One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors.
• One of the best bits of advice is to set things up so that you are constantly seeing concrete signs of improvement, even if it is not always major improvement. Break your long journey into a manageable series of goals and focus on them one at a time—perhaps even giving yourself a small reward each time you reach a goal.
• There is no reason not to follow your dream. Deliberate practice can open the door to a world of possibilities that you may have been convinced were out of reach.
• One of the hallmarks of expert performers is that even once they become one of the best at what they do, they still constantly strive to improve their practice techniques and to get better.
• Simply by interacting strongly with their children, parents motivate their children to develop similar interests.
• Parents of small children can motivate them with praise and rewards, among other things, but eventually that will not be enough. One way that parents and teachers can provide long-term motivation is to help the children find related activities that they enjoy.
• Helping children develop mental representations can also increase motivation by increasing their ability to appreciate the skill they are learning.
• expertise in some fields is simply unattainable for anyone who doesn’t start training as a child. Understanding such limitations can help you decide which areas you might wish to pursue.
• In the general population physical performance peaks around age twenty. With increasing age we lose flexibility, we become more prone to injury, and we take longer to heal. We slow down.
• Athletes typically attain their peak performance sometime during their twenties.
• Much of the age-related deterioration in various skills happens because people decrease or stop their training; older people who continue to train regularly see their performance decrease much less.
• The human body is growing and developing through adolescence up to the late teens or early twenties, but once we hit twenty or so, our skeletal structure is mostly set, which has implications for certain abilities.
• The body and the brain both are more adaptable during childhood and adolescence than they are in adulthood, but in most ways they remain adaptable to some degree throughout life.
• The general lesson is that we can certainly acquire new skills as we age, but the specific way in which we acquire those skills changes as we get older.
• research on the most successful creative people in various fields, particularly science, finds that creativity goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches of time—exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities in the first place.
• Creativity will always retain a certain mystery because, by definition, it generates things that have not yet been seen or experienced. But we do know that the sort of focus and effort that give rise to expertise also characterize the work of those pioneers who move beyond where anyone has been before.
• That’s how it always is. The creative, the restless, and the driven are not content with the status quo, and they look for ways to move forward, to do things that others have not. And once a pathfinder shows how something can be done, others can learn the technique and follow. Even if the pathfinder doesn’t share the particular technique, as is the case with Richards, simply knowing that something is possible drives others to figure it out.
• Progress is made by those who are working on the frontiers of what is known and what is possible to do, not by those who haven’t put in the effort needed to reach that frontier.
• Expert performers develop their extraordinary abilities through years and years of dedicated practice, improving step by step in a long, laborious process. There are no shortcuts. Various sorts of practice can be effective, but the most effective of all is deliberate practice.
• People do not stop learning and improving because they have reached some innate limits on their performance; they stop learning and improving because, for whatever reasons, they stopped practicing—or never started.
• There are always obvious differences in how quickly different people pick something up.
• In the long run it is the ones who practice more who prevail, not the ones who had some initial advantage in intelligence or some other talent.
• Deliberate practice is all about the skills. You pick up the necessary knowledge in order to develop the skills; knowledge should never be an end in itself. Nonetheless, deliberate practice results in students picking up quite a lot of knowledge along the way.
• Generally speaking, in almost any area of education the most useful learning objectives will be those that help students develop effective mental representations.
• The most important gifts we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job.

GET SMART! by Brian Tracy

• By using your brain—your ability to think, plan, and create—with greater precision and accuracy, you can solve any problem, overcome every obstacle, and achieve any goal you can set for yourself.
• Most people have enormous reserves of mental capacity that they fail to use, that they are apparently saving up for some good reason.
• Ignorance is not bliss. The failure to use the appropriate thinking tools and styles in a particular area or situation can be disastrous—and often leads to overwhelming failure.
• Perhaps your biggest problem today is not a problem at all. Perhaps it is an opportunity.
• Your beliefs, either positive or negative, helpful or hurtful, largely determine everything you do and how you do it.
• As your inner life changes, your outer life changes to reflect this new thinking.
• THE BETTER YOU THINK, the better results you will get and the more successful you will be in every area.
• The most important measure, the only measure of the quality of your thinking, is the results you get, the consequences of what you decide to do as a result of the decisions you make.
• Consequences are everything! The only question is, “Did your idea work or not?”
• Your ability to accurately foresee and predict the consequences of your decisions and actions is the true measure of your intelligence.
• An intelligent act is something you do that moves you closer to something you really want. A stupid act is something you do that does not move you closer to something you want or, even worse, moves you away from it.
• It is not what people say, wish, hope, or intend that counts. It is only what they do, and especially what they do when faced with temptation or put under pressure.
• People always seek the fastest and easiest way to get the things they want as soon as possible, with little consideration of secondary consequences.
• All action is focused on improvement of some kind.
• It turns out that successful people are intensely future oriented. They think about the future most of the time.
• Peter Drucker said that the primary job of the leader, especially in business, is to think about the future; no one else is tasked with that responsibility.
• The very act of thinking long term sharpens your perspective and dramatically improves the quality of your short-term decision making.
• When you have clear future intent, future orientation, it becomes much easier for you to think with greater clarity, to make those decisions today that will enable you to achieve your long-term goals.
• The critical word in long-term perspective is “sacrifice.”
• Successful people are willing to sacrifice, to delay immediate gratification in the present, in the short term, to enjoy greater rewards in the future—in the long term. Without the willpower and discipline to engage in “short-term pain for long-term gain,” little success is possible.
• Many millionaires and multimillionaires today are average middle-class earners, living in average homes in average neighborhoods.
• Peter Drucker said, “People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year. But they greatly underestimate what they could accomplish in five years.”
• Once you are clear about what your ideal career and income would be five years in the future, look back to the present, and decide the steps you will have to take to get from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. Then take the first step.
• The good news is that you can always see the first step. You don’t have to see every step on the staircase to begin climbing. You just have to take the first step. And when you take the first step, the second step will appear. And when you take the second step, the third step will appear. You will always be able to see one step ahead, and that’s all you need. But you must take the first step.
• The first step is always the hardest. It requires tremendous determination and willpower for you to do something more than and different from what you have ever done before.
• Learn to live on 85–90 percent of your income and save or invest the balance.
• Resolve today to develop long-time perspective. Become intensely future oriented. Think about the future most of the time.
• Practice self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-control. Be willing to pay the price today in order to enjoy the rewards of a better future tomorrow.
• Resolve today to think long term, to consider the likely consequences of a decision before you act. Project forward three to five years, and imagine that your life was ideal in every way. How would it be different from today? Decide upon one action that you are going to take immediately to create your ideal future. And then take the first step.
• By properly focusing the powers of your mind on any goal or desire you have, you can accomplish extraordinary things and often far faster than you realize.
• It takes tremendous discipline and willpower for you to control and constrain this onrushing river of thought and to channel it in such a way as to enable you to accomplish all that is possible for you.
• Whatever you do repeatedly becomes a habit.
• The very act of stopping to think before you say or do anything almost always improves the quality of your ultimate response.
• Good thinking is hard work. It must be learned and practiced over and over if you are going to truly plumb the depths of your mental powers.
• One of the best habits you can develop is to practice thinking slowly in those areas where slow thinking is required.
• Almost all of the mistakes we make in life come from not carefully considering the consequences of our actions beforehand.
• The more important a decision can be to you in the long term, the more important it is that you slow down, call a time-out, and carefully consider both the facts and your options.
• Think on paper. One of the most powerful thinking tools of all is a sheet of paper upon which you write down every detail of the problem or decision.
• The people you choose to work with or for, to socialize with or marry, to invest through or go into business with, will determine about 85 percent of your success and happiness in your personal life.
• One of the most powerful of all ways to practice slow thinking is for you to practice solitude on a regular basis.
• Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident, either. The more carefully you think and plan before taking action, the faster you take control over your success in the future.
• Resolve today to put a space where you think slowly between the stimulus, the problem or idea, and your response. Select one important area of your business or personal life and practice the GOSPA model to help you think clearly and at your very best in planning your future. Plan today to take thirty to sixty minutes for solitude, where you sit in complete silence and listen to your intuition. Do this regularly.
• The best decisions we make are almost invariably based on having acquired complete knowledge of the issue before we act. We “look before we leap.”
• In business, according to Forbes magazine, the number one reason for failure is that there is no demand for the product or service.
• According to McKinsey & Company, a leading business consultancy, the major reason for business success is high sales. The major reason for business failure is low sales.
• “The most important elements in business are facts. Get the real facts, not the obvious facts or assumed facts or hoped-for facts. Get the real facts. Facts don’t lie.”
• One of the most important words in business today is “validation.” Never assume. When you get a good idea, immediately take action to validate it, to gather proof that it is really as good as you think it is.
• One thought or observation can change your perspective completely.
• Create a hypothesis—a yet-to-be-proven theory. Then seek ways to invalidate this hypothesis, to prove that your idea is wrong. This is what scientists do. This is exactly the opposite of what most people do. They come up with an idea, and then they seek corroboration and proof that their idea is a good one. They practice “confirmation bias.” They only look for confirmation of the validity of the idea, and they simultaneously reject all input or information that is inconsistent with what they have already decided to believe.
• Be prepared to try and fail, to propose and be rejected, over and over. Failure, trial, and error are absolutely essential to your ultimate success.
• Be tough on yourself in becoming informed. Don’t let yourself off the hook or ask yourself softball questions.
• Keep gathering information until the proper course of action becomes clear, as it eventually will. Check and double-check your facts. Assume nothing on faith. Ask, “How do we know that this is true?”
• Nothing replaces experience in a fast-moving, rapidly changing business or industry.
• Experienced people develop what is called pattern recognition.
• Perhaps the most common advice given by wealthy people is “Don’t lose money.” In business and in life, your goal, too, must be to not lose money.
• The more information you gather before you make a decision, the more likely it is that you will make the right decision that leads to the success you desire.
• Your goal should be to become better informed than anyone else in those areas of business and life that are most important to you. You do this by continually gathering information and comparing different ideas. You remain skeptical and proceed slowly toward your decisions.
• “Success is goals, and all else is commentary.”
• Throughout your life, you will have a series of turning points. These are moments, insights, or experiences that can take a few seconds or a few months. But after one of these turning points, your life is never the same again. Sometimes you recognize one of these turning points when it takes place. In most cases, you only recognize that it was a turning point in retrospect.
• Only about 3 percent of people have clear, specific, written goals and plans that they work on each day. The other 97 percent have hopes, dreams, wishes, and fantasies, but not goals. And the great tragedy is that they don’t know the difference.
• The fact is that when you have clear, specific goals and clear plans to achieve those goals and you work on them every day, you save an enormous amount of time. You accomplish more in a few months or years than many people accomplish in a lifetime.
• Perhaps the very best way for you to develop the “big three” of superior thinking—clarity, focus, and concentration—is for you to develop clear goals for every part of your life.
• Fully 95 percent of success is developing clarity in the first place.
• You must become completely clear about who you are—your strengths, your weaknesses, your special talents and abilities—and what you want to do with your life. Then you must focus single-mindedly on one thing at a time, without diversion or distraction.
• According to both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the ability to focus on one thing at a time is more responsible for success in our fast-moving, turbulent times than any other mental ability.
• Goals enable you to develop the qualities of clarity, focus, and concentration much faster than anything else you could do or decide for your life. Goals are the best antidote to “fuzzy thinking,” which is probably more responsible for frustration and failure than any other factor.
• Those who do not have goals are doomed forever to work for those who do.
• Perhaps the most important factor affecting your life today is the speed of change.
• One new piece of knowledge, one new idea or insight, can upset or overturn an entire industry, causing failure and bankruptcy.
• Your competition is continually scouring the world of new information and technology, seeking opportunities to serve your customers with what they want better, faster, and cheaper than you are today.
• And the only thing we know is that the rate of change is going to be faster and faster in the months and years ahead.
• Goals enable you to control the direction of change, to assure that your life and work are self-determined rather than being dictated by outside events.
• Goal setting requires long-term thinking, slow thinking, and informed thinking. A key success principle is for you to “think on paper.” The very act of writing down what you want dramatically increases your probability of achieving it. Remember, you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. You can’t hit a target unless you can clearly describe it on paper.
• The quality of your thinking is greatly enhanced by the quality of the questions that you ask yourself, especially in the areas of goal setting and goal achieving.
• Most problems in human life, most confusion, can be resolved by a return to values. Your values make up your core.
• Don’t be satisfied with your first answer. Your first answer will always be something simple, obvious, and admirable to other people. But keep asking the question. “What is my most important value in life?” You may be surprised at the answer you eventually come up with.
• What one great goal would you dare to set for yourself if you knew you could not fail?
• The fear of failure is the greatest single obstacle to success and the primary cause of failure in adult life.
• Your ability to think clearly about who you are and what you really want is central to your living a high-performance life.
• Find out what other successful people do over and over, and then do the same things that they do.
• Decide exactly what you want. Most people never do this.
• A major reason for failure in adult life is that most people think they already have goals. But what they have are not goals. They are merely wishes, hopes, and fantasies. A real goal, on the other hand, is something clear and specific.
• Write it down. A goal that is not in writing is merely a wish or a hope.
• Only 3 percent of adults have clear, written goals, and everyone else works for them. They earn and accomplish ten times as much as the average person over the course of their working lifetimes. People with written goals often accomplish more in one year than the average person accomplishes in five or ten years.
• Each goal you write down, and each time you write it, you are actually writing and programming into your subconscious mind.
• Written goals are very powerful.
• Set a deadline. A deadline acts as a “forcing system” for your subconscious mind. It gives your subconscious and superconscious powers a target to aim at.
• What happens if you don’t achieve your goal by the deadline? Simple—set another deadline. Many things can happen over which you have no control that can set back the accomplishment of your goal. No problem. Just set another deadline.
• Remember, there are no unrealistic goals, merely unrealistic deadlines.
• The first way you organize the list is by sequence. Create a checklist, a list of all the steps, one after the other, that you will have to take to achieve your goal. Working from a written checklist will increase the speed at which you achieve your goal by perhaps five or ten times.
• The second way you organize your list is by priority. What is more important, and what is less important? Twenty percent of the items on your list will account for 80 percent of your success. What are they?
• Take action immediately on your plan. Do something. Do anything. Take the first step.
• Do something every day to move you toward the achievement of your most important goal, whatever it is at that time. Never miss a day, seven days a week.
• When you do something every day, you trigger the “momentum principle” of success.
• It seems that goals you want to achieve within one year are more motivational than goals that reach five or ten years into the future, even though you will eventually set these goals as well.
• When you write down your goals, use the three Ps. Make them present tense, personal, and positive. Your subconscious mind can only work on a goal that is properly phrased this way.
• Take action immediately on one task, the first item on your list, and complete this one task as soon as possible.
• Remember the great truth: You become what you think about most of the time. Each morning when you get up, think about your goal. All day long, think about your goal. In the evening, review your progress on your major goal.
• The more you think, plan, and work on your major goal, the faster you move toward it, and the faster it moves toward you.
• Your earning ability is your ability to get results that people will pay you for.
• All success in the world of work boils down to one simple result: task completion. In the final analysis, your ability to complete your tasks consistently and dependably is what makes you a valuable and indispensable resource to your organization.
• The 80/20 rule seems to apply to the world of work. Twenty percent of people are on the fast track, continually increasing their value, moving up, and earning more money. Eighty percent of working people in all fields are timeservers. They come to work at the last possible minute and leave at the first possible minute. While they are there, they use their time poorly in comparison with the people on the fast track.
• According to Robert Half International, fully 50 percent of working time is wasted.
• Here, then, is the rule: Work all the time you work. When you go to work, work. Do not play with your friends, check your e-mail every five minutes, read the newspaper, or take care of personal business. Work all the time you work.
• Your goal, known only to you, is to develop the reputation for being the hardest-working person in your company. Work all the time you work.
• Many people think that because they are at work, they are actually working. But you are only working when you are starting and completing important tasks. You are only working when you are getting results that your company wants and needs to generate revenues and create value.
• To manage your time effectively and get maximum results, you begin with clear goals to which you are committed.
• The most powerful time management tool is a list. You start with your major goal or goals and then make checklists of everything you will need to do to achieve that goal. In your work, you begin with a list of everything you want to accomplish that day.
• The very act of working from a list will increase your productivity by 25–50 percent the very first day.
• You can double and triple your productivity by breaking the addiction to electronic interruptions, especially e-mail.
• Practice the 70 percent rule. If anyone else can do this 70 percent as well as you, delegate and pass off this task to that person.
• Because of the comfort zone, we become accustomed to doing things of no or low value that we once did in the past but that are no longer important to the results we are expected to achieve.
• One of the most powerful and productive time management tools is contained in the Law of Three. This law states that there are only three tasks that you do that account for 90 percent of the value of your contribution to your company and to yourself. Everything else you do falls in the other 10 percent.
• It is impossible for you to be highly productive unless you are crystal clear about the most valuable thing you could possibly be doing.
• It is not unusual for you to conclude that one task is more important, but to your boss and co-workers something else you do is vastly more important.
• Do fewer things. The fact is that you will never get caught up. You will never be able to do all the things that you have to do. The only way that you can get control of your life is by stopping doing things of low value.
• Do more important things. Work on one or more of your three most important tasks.
• Do your most important tasks more of the time. Spend your entire day on them if you possibly can.
• Get better at each of your most important tasks. Continuous learning and personal improvement are essential to your success, but in what areas? Answer: Get better at achieving results at those tasks that are more important than anything else.
• One of the best of all time management questions is this: “What one task, if I were to do it especially well, would make the greatest positive difference in my work?”
• Your ability to overcome procrastination and get started on your most important task is one of the most valuable disciplines that you can develop.
• The key to success in your work is task completion. For this, perhaps the single most powerful time management technique is “single-handling.”
• The habit of starting and completing your most important task first thing each morning will transform your life.
• Think on paper. Write things down. Always work from a list or, even better, a checklist. Determine your “big three,” those tasks that represent 90 percent of the value of your contribution to your company and to yourself. Discipline yourself to start immediately each morning on the most valuable use of your time, and then persist until that task is 100 percent complete.
• The true measure of how successful you are in life is how happy you are—most of the time.
• Successful people practice positive thinking most of the time. As a result, they are happier, more genial, more popular and derive more real pleasure from life than the average person.
• The main obstacle between each person and the happiness that he desires is negative emotions. Negative emotions lie at the root of virtually all problems in human life.
• Thinking positively actually requires effort and determination until it becomes a habitual response to life and circumstances. Fortunately, you can become a purely positive thinker through learning and practice.
• The most powerful and profound way to distort the adult personality is rooted in “love deprivation” or the giving and then withholding of love when the child is young.
• Negative emotions are created when we attempt to explain away a situation or a behavior in our lives that is unpleasant for us.
• As a result of continually rationalizing away our negative behaviors, we become unhappier and more dissatisfied and fail to make progress in our lives.
• Another major source of negative emotions comes about when we justify our negative behaviors by explaining them away in some fashion.
• Many of our negative emotions come from our tendency to judge other people.
• We are hypersensitive to what we think other people might be thinking and feeling about us. We are so concerned with not incurring the displeasure or disapproval of others that we are often paralyzed or held back from taking actions that are in our best interests.
• Because your mind can only hold one thought at a time—positive or negative—you can cancel any negative thought at any time by simply repeating to yourself, over and over again, “I am responsible! I am responsible! I am responsible!”
• The key to self-esteem, self-confidence, self-reliance, and self-respect is for you to accept 100 percent responsibility for everything you are and all that you will become in life.
• The fact is that your parents are normal people just like you who made all kinds of mistakes because of ignorance and inexperience.
• You must set yourself free by forgiving yourself for every mistake that you have ever made.
• There is a direct relationship between the amount of responsibility that you accept and the amount of control that you feel in your life.
• Acceptance of responsibility is the mark of a leader, an achiever, and a self-actualizing man or woman.
• IN TIMES OF TURBULENCE and rapid change, your ability to think flexibly, to consider every aspect of a situation and then to respond effectively to change, can have an enormous impact on your business and your career.
• Your cherished ideas from a year or two ago, or even a month ago, are no longer valid or relevant in the turbulent markets of today.
• We are living in the fastest-changing, most disruptive, and most turbulent period in all of human history, except for tomorrow and next week and next year.
• Businesses get into trouble when customer tastes and demands change.
• To survive and thrive today, you must be on the cutting edge, as an individual or an organization, of the changes taking place around you.
• Today, many people have obsolete skills; they are being replaced by people with better and more appropriate skills that are in higher demand.
• People in the top 20 percent bought all the books, attended all the courses, listened to all of the audio programs, and continually sought ways to do their jobs better, cheaper, and faster.
• People in the bottom 80 percent were exactly the opposite. They seldom read a book, took a course, or made any effort to upgrade their skills.
• Many people today, at all income levels and in all career categories, are unaware of this pressing need to continually upgrade their skills.
• No one stays in the same place for very long. If you are not continually upgrading your knowledge and skills, you are not staying even. You are actually falling further and further behind, while people who are aggressive about continuous learning are moving further and faster ahead.
• Three enemies of change and flexibility must be countered head-on.
• The first and worst is the “comfort zone.” People start doing or working at something and quickly become comfortable. They then resist any change, even positive change that requires them to do something new or different.
• The second major obstacle to flexibility, to challenging and questioning the status quo, is fear of all kinds, but especially the fear of failure.
• The third reason that people fear and resist change is “learned helplessness.” The individuals responsible know that change is essential, but they feel that they are helpless, caught up in the complexities of the current situation and unable to change.
• The all-around champion tool to change your perspective and to develop higher levels of flexibility is “zero-based thinking.”
• In zero-based thinking, you ask the brutal question, “Is there anything that we are doing today that, knowing what we now know, we wouldn’t start up again if we had to do it over?”
• Look around you at your situation, and especially at those areas that are causing you stress, dissatisfaction, or unhappiness, and be willing to admit that you were wrong.
• Sometimes, people think that by admitting they are wrong, they are demonstrating weakness. They think people will not respect them if they admit that a decision they made and defended in the past was wrong. But it is exactly the opposite. In times of turbulence and rapid change, having the courage and character to admit you were wrong, when the mistake is probably clear to everyone around you, actually increases their respect for you and their willingness to be influenced by you in the future.
• Because of ego, many people find it difficult to admit that they have made a mistake, even when they obviously have, and it is clear to everyone around them.
• Because you are going to be wrong and make mistakes fully 70 percent of the time, don’t wait for everyone else to figure it out. Instead, jump ahead of the curve and quickly admit, “I was wrong. I made a mistake.” And then rectify the situation as rapidly as you can.
• Again, changing your mind when you get new information is a mark of courage, character, and flexibility, not of weakness.
• The more readily you can say the words “I was wrong, I made a mistake, I changed my mind,” the better you will think and the more respected you will be by all the people around you.
• The skill of zero-based thinking is absolutely essential if you want to realize your full potential in your work and personal life. And the more you practice it, the better you get at it.
• Sometimes, the simplest ideas can jar your thinking and cause you to see your situation in a completely different way. The key is for you to always be open to the possibility that whatever you are doing, you could be completely wrong. There could be a completely different and better way to do almost anything, and there usually is.
• There are seven tools you can use to increase your flexibility and your mental agility.
• Rethinking: This requires that you stop the clock, take a time-out, and stand back to look at your situation objectively.
• Reevaluating: Practice zero-based thinking, and consider the possibilities of doing things completely differently.
• Reorganizing: Look for ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations by moving people and resources around and by deploying them in different ways.
• Restructuring: This involves moving your people and resources into the 20 percent of activities that can account for 80 percent of your results.
• In business, your primary concern should be revenue generation. Move your very best people into those areas where they can have the greatest positive effect on generating more revenue for your company.
• Reengineering: Continually seek ways to simplify your work and life by delegating, outsourcing, downsizing, or eliminating certain activities.
• Reinventing: Continually imagine what you would do differently if you were starting over again today.
• One good idea can be enough to change the entire direction of your life.
• What gets inspected gets done.