THE ART OF THE START 2.0 by Guy Kawasaki, Lindsey Filby

• Learning by anecdote is risky, but waiting for scientific proof is too.
• Entrepreneurship is about doing, not learning to do.
• It’s much easier to do things right from the start than to fix them later.
• my observation is that great companies began by asking simple questions:
• THEREFORE, WHAT? This question arises when you spot or predict a trend and wonder about its consequences.
• ISN’T THIS INTERESTING? Intellectual curiosity and accidental discovery power this method.
• IS THERE A BETTER WAY? Frustration with the current state of the art is the hallmark of this path.
• WHY DOESN’T OUR COMPANY DO THIS? Frustration with your current employer is the catalyzing force in this case.
• IT’S POSSIBLE, SO WHY DON’T WE MAKE IT? Markets for big innovations are seldom proven in advance, so a what-the-hell attitude characterizes this path.
• WHERE IS THE MARKET LEADER WEAK? Three conditions make a market leader vulnerable: First, when the leader is committed to a way of doing business.
• Second, when the customers of the leader are dissatisfied.
• Third, when the market leader is milking a cash cow and stops innovating.
• Call me idealistic, but the genesis of great companies is answering simple questions that change the world, not the desire to become rich.
• There are two kinds of opportunities: an existing market and a potential one.
• Successful companies are usually started, and become successful, with the contributions of at least two soul mates.
• Founders should share the same level of commitment.
• At a minimum, a startup needs at least one person to make the product (Steve Wozniak) and one person to sell it (Steve Jobs
• It’s better to have too few founders than too many.
• make everyone (including yourself) vest his stock over time to prevent people who leave in less than four years from owning large amounts of equity.
• if you make meaning, you’ll probably also make money.
• All employees should understand that a startup either makes money or dies.
• A good business model forces you to answer two questions: Who has your money in their pockets? How are you going to get it into your pocket?
• The more precisely you can describe your customer, the better.
• If you can’t describe your business model in ten words or fewer, you don’t have a business model.
• The five most important milestones are: Working prototype Initial capital Field-testable version Paying customer Cash-flow breakeven
• everything is theoretical until you start testing them:
• Essential tasks include: Recruiting employees Finding vendors Setting up accounting and payroll systems Filing legal documents
• In the United States, if your goal is to create the next Google, you want to form a Delaware C corporation.
• If your goal is to create a small business that isn’t going to seek venture capital and you don’t aspire to go public, then consider an S corporation, limited-liability corporation, or sole proprietorship.
• A startup should unequivocally own or unequivocally have licensed its intellectual property.
• Also, the intellectual property and licenses should belong to the startup, not the founders.
• If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
• People who started their own company or worked at a company before an IPO can probably provide good advice. People who have not started a company or joined a company after it went public probably cannot.
• Experienced, successful, and savvy business executives at large companies don’t necessarily understand the particulars of startups and venture capital.
• If you aren’t scared, something is wrong with you, and your fears are not a sign that you don’t have the right stuff.
• Ideas are easy; implementation is hard.
• Start right away. By doing so you’ll be constantly mulling over your idea—as both a foreground and background task.
• This is why you need a cofounder—until you’ve convinced other people about your idea, you may be a nutcase.
• What you should worry about is a working prototype.
• A real business is one with something to sell—not one where people have business cards and letterhead.
• It’s better to spend two years in the trenches getting the shiitake kicked out of you than mastering business administration.
• Don’t wait for perfection. Good enough is good enough. There is time for refinement later.
• Entrepreneurship is at its best when it alters the future, and it alters the future when it jumps curves:
• What are the qualities of curve-jumping products?
• DEEP. Curve-jumping products provide features and functionality that customers might not appreciate or realize at first.
• INTELLIGENT. A curve-jumping product shows people that the company who created it understood their pain or problem.
• COMPLETE. Curve-jumping products are not isolated gizmos, online downloads, or web services. They include presales and after-sales support, documentation, enhancements, and complementary products.
• EMPOWERING. Curve-jumping products make people better by increasing their productivity and creativity. You don’t fight great products—they become one with you.
• ELEGANT. Elegance is the combination of power and simplicity. Elegance is what is not there, not what is. It cuts through the noise, captures our attention, and engages our hearts. Companies that create curve-jumping products obsess about design and user interface.
• Two websites are your best friends in the naming process: the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Network Solutions WHOIS database
• In a perfect world your name enters the mainstream vernacular and becomes a verb.
• Names that work as verbs are short (no more than two or three syllables) and simple.
• your next step is to build a prototype of your product and get it to customers.
• Worry About Adoption, Not Scaling
• In the early days of starting up, the ability to scale is overrated.
• Your priority, in short, is proving that people will use your product at all.
• it. In the end, it’s not so much what you say as much as what people hear.
• Today brands are built on what people are saying about them on social media—not on what companies are saying about themselves.
• People want more than information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith—faith in you, your product, your success, and in the story you tell. Faith, not facts, moves mountains.
• Meaningful stories inspire faith in you and your product.
• Once you have people started and converted, the next step is to ensure that they can use and even master your product.
• Go and see for yourself how people are using them.
• The final action to take during the launch of your product is to file a provisional patent application for your technology, practices, and secrets.
• The gist is that the United States is a “first to file”—as opposed to “first to invent”—country, so you need to move fast. Once you file a provisional patent, you have twelve months to decide if you’re going to take it to the next level and seek a nonprovisional patent. It can take five years and $10,000 to finish the process.
• Incubators focus on providing office space and shared services. Accelerators focus on mentorship, training, and helping you make connections to customers, partners, and sources of capital.
• The difference between working in an incubator or accelerator versus in your garage is the difference between going away for college versus commuting from home.
• Incubators and accelerators are useful for first-time entrepreneurs who don’t know where to start, but the decision to join one is not simple.
• Demoing is an essential skill to launch a product, raise capital, make a sale, garner press, and recruit employees, so you must get good at it.
• If you want to be a demo god, create a great product to demo.
• Start with “shock and awe”—the absolute coolest stuff that your product can do. The goal is to blow people’s minds right up front.
• Few people are funny enough to pull off jokes in a demo.
• The ability to speak simply and succinctly is the best way to go.
• you should always take questions at the end because you never know what people will ask you—their
• Innovation often originates outside existing organizations, in part because successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it.
• When you have a good idea for a product, it will attract a large number of your fellow employees, from the bottom up. They will support you if you’re doing it for the company but not if it’s for your personal gain.
• If you don’t kill your cash cows, someone else will.
• Two guys in a garage should try to get as much attention as they can.
• However, the opposite is true for intrapreneurs. You want management to leave you alone until your project is too far along to ignore or the rest of the company realizes that it’s needed.
• The day will arrive when a bean counter or lawyer is going to notice you and question the reasons for your project’s existence. If you’re lucky, this will happen later rather than sooner, but it will happen. Prepare for that day by (1) collecting data about how much you’ve spent and how much you’ve accomplished, and (2) then sharing it openly.
• The beauty of intrapreneurship is that it can develop new products in less time than mainstream engineering.
• launch when you have enough functionality to show how you’ve jumped curves and you have eliminated enough bugs for your product to be stable.
• The right attitude is to prototype now, seek forgiveness later.
• The easy stuff is finance, manufacturing, operations, and accounting.
• The hard stuff is managing, motivating, and leading people.
• Above all, leaders cannot have a bad day.
• As the leader of the organization, you are responsible for results, and results are the product of a culture of execution.
• The simple act of setting goals and communicating them increases the likelihood that your startup will achieve them.
• Goals only work if you measure progress in achieving them.
• Good people accept accountability. Great people ask for it.
• A person who knows he is being measured and held accountable is highly motivated to succeed.
• As a leader, you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem.
• The people you reward in a startup are the ones who deliver.
• Fixing bugs is tedium to you, but it’s not to the customer who recently bought your product.
• If you want to succeed, take the red pill and determine how deep the rabbit hole goes.
• What is our top priority?
• A Morpheus and a devil’s advocate are not the same thing. A Morpheus tells you the truth—good or bad. A devil’s advocate tells you what’s bad even if he doesn’t believe it himself.
• Devil’s advocacy isn’t necessary on every decision—just the strategic ones.
• Steve Jobs had a saying that A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire D players. Using his logic, it doesn’t take long to get to Z players, and then you wind up with what’s called the Bozo Explosion.
• If there is one thing a CEO must do, it’s hire managers that are better than she is. If there is one thing managers must do, it’s hire employees who are better than they are.
• Many entrepreneurs don’t realize this, but startups need three kinds of A+ players depending on the stage of the organization: Kamikazes who are willing to work eighty hours a week to launch. Implementers who come in after the kamikazes and create infrastructure. Operators who are happy to run an ongoing system.
• If you wait until you have the perfect product or person, it may be too late. So you hire minimum viable people, and much like improving your minimum viable product, you improve your minimum viable employee.
• one of the key tasks of the art of leading is giving people a chance and making employees better.
• Hiring better than yourself means that you hire for strengths as opposed to hiring on the basis of the lack of weaknesses.
• A great leader hires people for their strengths and then assigns them tasks that take advantage of those strengths.
• Good leaders address their shortcomings before they criticize others.
• Don’t Ask Employees to Do What You Wouldn’t Do
• When leaders publicly change their minds, it shows that they’re smart enough to realize they made a mistake, secure enough to admit the mistake, and willing to risk their reputation to do the right thing.
• the three most important words during the recruitment process are “We want you.”
• The better the leader, the more she doesn’t hesitate to use these phrases: “I don’t know.” “Thank you.” “Do what you think is right.” “It’s my fault.”
• you should create a board when you accept other people’s money in order to establish high fiduciary standards.
• “The odds that you don’t need oversight because you know what you’re doing and it’s ‘your’ company are zero.”
• Less paper is better than more paper.
• The ideal length and frequency of board meetings is two to three hours once per month.
• Board meetings are the time and place for discussing strategic issues—not for conveying the factual information contained in reports. You should spend little time in the meeting communicating the facts—and a lot of time figuring out how to improve them in the future. Thus, it’s useful to send your reports in advance.
• Usually a leadership role is thrust upon you, and you grow into it.
• The most potent form of marketing is also the cheapest: social media.
• Entrepreneurs can bootstrap almost any business—especially if they have no choice in the matter.
• “Bootstrapping involves managing for cash flow, not profitability.”
• Bootstrapping involves managing for cash flow, not profitability.
• If you’re bootstrapping, forget about recruiting well-known industry veterans and building a dream team. Focus instead on affordability—that is, inexperienced young people with bushels of talent, energy, and curiosity.
• ignorance is not only bliss; it’s empowering.
• One of the advantages of a service business is that cash starts flowing within weeks.
• Positioning against the leaders or standard ways of doing business can save lots of marketing, PR, promotion, and advertising dollars, so pick the gold standard in your industry and identify an important point of differentiation in your own product,
• Bootstrapping goes awry when entrepreneurs focus on saving pennies to the detriment of the Big Picture.
• Here is a list of the big stuff and small stuff entrepreneurs must manage. BIG STUFF Developing your MVVVP Selling your product Enhancing your product SMALL STUFF Business cards and letterhead Office supplies Furniture Office equipment
• So take care of the small stuff in rapid, good enough—not perfect—ways.
• If you want to bootstrap your organization, then understaff it.
• To spend money wisely, focus on the function you need, not the form it takes.
• Everything is negotiable:
• This logic of focusing on function, not form, applies to almost every element of a startup.
• There’s greater danger of screwing up because of too much money than because of too little.
• The goal is to build something great, no matter how you raise capital.
• entrepreneurship is the art of doing whatever it takes.
• Fund-raising is a necessary evil of starting an organization.
• Crowdfunding is a good test of viability.
• The best kind of story is a personal one.
• One of the most valuable services a current investor can provide is to help find additional investors.
• Generally, investors are looking for a proven team, proven technology, and proven market.
• A moderate level of competition is a good thing because it validates the possibility of a genuine market and shows that you’ve done your homework.
• It’s your job to show how you are superior to the competition, not that it doesn’t exist.
• “When people see that they can believe you about bad stuff, they are more willing to believe you about good stuff.”
• Be bold: openly discuss your strengths and weaknesses. When people see that they can believe you about bad stuff, they are more willing to believe you about good stuff.
• You need a lawyer, and not just any lawyer, but one who routinely does venture capital and early-stage financing deals.
• The best mentality is to assume that you’ll never be able to raise money again.
• Anyone can survive when everything is going right. Great entrepreneurs can survive when everything is going wrong.
• Whatever the first offer, ask for a 25 percent higher valuation because you’re expected as part of the negotiation to push back—
• the CEO should not be paid more than four times the lowest-paid full-time employee.
• Investors are looking for people who can implement ideas, not only come up with them. Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard—and where the money is.
• Pareto’s Principle is that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes.
• Metcalfe’s Law is that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.
• The 10/20/30 Rule of Presentations is that you should use ten slides in twenty minutes with a minimum of thirty-point text.
• The purpose of a pitch is to stimulate interest, not to cover every aspect of your startup and bludgeon your audience into submission. Your objective is to generate enough interest to get a second meeting.
• “‘If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth ten thousand slides.’”
• Describe the technology, secret sauce, or magic behind your product. The less text and the more diagrams, schematics, and flowcharts the better.
• Explain how you make money: who pays you, your channels of distribution, and your gross margins.
• Because people can read faster than you talk, if you put too much detail on the slide, the audience will read ahead of you and not listen to what you’re saying.
• If you have to use a small font to accommodate your material, you’re putting too much detail on the slide.
• Never read your slides.
• Use your body, not PowerPoint effects and animations, to communicate expressiveness, emotion, and enthusiasm.
• Use only one level of bullets.
• In a pitch the CEO should do 80 percent of the talking. The rest of the team (and there should be no more than two others) can present the one or two slides pertaining to their specific area of expertise. They can also provide detailed answers if any questions arise.
• Simply provide enough detail to prove you can deliver and enough aerial view to prove you have a plan.
• Twenty-five repetitions are what it takes for most people to reach this point.
• Generally venture capitalists want three to five years of projections to help them do three things: first, understand the scale of your business; second, examine the assumptions of your business model; and third, determine how much capital you’ll require.
• One way to improve your forecasts is to build them from the bottom up instead of from the top down.
• “The visible act of taking notes says, ‘I think you’re smart. You’re saying something worth writing down. I’m willing and anxious to learn. I’m conscientious.’”
• Shutting up, taking notes, and listening for ways to improve are good things to do in a pitch because even the smallest actions can create a big impression.
• My recommendation is that after five or so pitches you throw away your pitch and start with a clean slate.
• Cut the industry jargon. Tell people what you do, how you do it, and who your customer is in the simplest language possible.
• Practice until you’re sick of your presentation. Few people can wing it. The probability that you’re one of them is zero.
• Explain what your product does in the first thirty seconds. Explain the problem or pain that it addresses in the second thirty seconds. You’re going to win or lose in the first minute or so.
• Screenshots are also powerful because they make your idea seem more real.
• By all means, file for patents if you can, but don’t depend on them for much more than impressing your parents unless you have the time (years) and money (millions) to go to court.
• As a rule of thumb, if you’re doing something good, five other startups are doing the same thing.
• The problem is that pitches all begin to sound alike because they all make the same claims. You can make yours memorable by adhering to the basics: a short (ten-slide, twenty-minute) presentation with a compelling story of how you aim to solve real pain or tap an attractive opportunity.
• there are few factors that are more critical to success than great people.
• There is a shortage of great employees in the world.
• Hiring employees:
• 1. Can the candidate do what you need?
• 2. Does the candidate believe in what you’re doing?
• 3. Is the candidate likeable and trustworthy?
• Employment in big organizations is not a reliable predictor of success in a startup environment. The skills needed in each context are different.
• You want smart people, not necessarily degreed people. The two are not the same.
• Find the candidate who has major strengths (even though he has major weaknesses).
• Performing well in one area is tough enough; trying to find people who can do everything is Mission: Impossible.
• A team of people with major and diverse strengths is what you want in the early days when head count is low and there’s little room for redundancy. High achievers tend to have major weaknesses. People without major weaknesses tend to be mediocre.
• A realistic description is that startups take four to five years of long hours at low pay with incredible highs and depressing lows with the constant fear of running out of money.
• “You should use reference checking as a means to decide whether the candidate is good, and not as a confirmation of a choice that you’ve already made.”
• “Life is too short to work with people you don’t like—especially in a startup.”
• Life is too short to work with people you don’t like—especially in a startup.
• However, if there’s one thing that’s harder than firing someone you don’t want it’s laying off people you do want.
• Recruiting doesn’t stop when a candidate accepts your offer, or when he resigns from his current employer, or on his last day at his current employer—not even after he starts at your organization. Recruiting never stops.
• Reference checking is a crucial part of recruiting a great team.
• The goal of referencing is not to disqualify a candidate but to look for consistency in how the candidate represented himself and what his references have to say.
• Always tell it like it is.
• Remember: entrepreneurship is a parallel process.
• There may come a time when you should step aside. Deal with it.
• The longer you wait, the harder it’s going to get to put a legal agreement in place. Difficulty will peak around the time you need it the most.
• Customers don’t care if you want to destroy the competition. They want to know what benefits they derive from using your product.
• If you’re an engineer, you should be thinking about how to make a product that is valuable that no other company can make.
• The difference between evangelists and most people is that evangelists have the best interests of others at heart. They believe in their product so much that they want others to use it too.
• No matter who buys your product, targeting young people forces you to build a human brand.
• Most companies are incapable of making fun of themselves.
• position your product in a personal way.
• Positioning is more powerful when it’s personal, because it’s easier for potential customers to imagine how a product fills a need.
• “No one is more fascinating than a good listener.”
• No one is more fascinating than a good listener.
• Follow up within twenty-four hours of meeting someone.
• The ideal length for e-mail is five sentences.
• Don’t be picky about how evangelists help you. Let them help in any way they can.
• Have something interesting to say. This is 80 percent of the battle. It’s much easier to give a great speech if you have something to communicate.
• The technique that has helped me the most in public speaking is customizing the first three to five minutes of every speech. This demonstrates that you’ve done your homework and have made an effort to craft a speech that is a valuable and special experience.
• My theory is that the goal of a speech is to entertain.
• never dress beneath the level of the audience.
• The best way to relax when giving a speech is to tell stories.
• Good speakers are good storytellers; great speakers tell stories that support their message.
• The way to heighten your audience’s concern for your success is to circulate with the audience before the speech.
• It is better to have two hundred people in a two-hundred-person room than five hundred people in a thousand-person room.
• You need to give a speech at least twenty times in order to get good at it.
• If you’re invited to a panel about a subject that you don’t know, decline the invitation.
• The funnier you are, the more people will think you’re smart because it takes intelligence to be funny.
• Reduce the most complex and technical issues to something plain, simple, and short, and you’ll stand out.
• Never look at the moderator. The moderator is a proxy for the audience. When you answer, look at the audience because the audience doesn’t want to see the side of your head.
• Social media is the trifecta of marketing: fast, free, and ubiquitous.
• Social media is the best thing that ever happened to entrepreneurs.
• What’s more important than planning is grinding—that is, working long and hard and experimenting.
• Optimize for five seconds. People do not study profiles. They spend a few seconds looking at them and then make a snap decision.
• So the most important test of anything you do in social media is: Will people reshare your posts?
• The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding content to share.
• Most companies define too narrowly what they believe will be relevant and interesting to their followers, which hinders their ability to feed the Content Monster.
• Brevity beats verbosity in social media.
• Every post—literally every post—should contain eye candy in the form of a picture, graphic, or video. According to a study from Skyword, “On average, total views increased by 94 percent if a published article contained a relevant photograph or infographic when compared to articles without an image in the same category.”
• Using tools to automate and schedule posts isn’t cheating. It’s what smart companies do to optimize sharing.
• you are either building a brand by adding followers and racking up reshares, or you’re not.
• “You can never go wrong by taking the high road, because winning the war for class and credibility is more important than winning the battle with one commenter.”
• You can never go wrong by taking the high road, because winning the war for class and credibility is more important than winning the battle with one commenter.
• Life is too short to fight all the time, and most battles are not worth the trouble.
• My suggestion is to embrace the rules of amateur boxing and fight for only three rounds.
• The opening bell is when you share a post. Ding-ding.
• Round 1: commenter comments.
• Round 2: you respond.
• Round 3: commenter responds to the response. End of fight.
• A good rule of thumb is to never take the advice of someone who has fewer followers than you.
• Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, “Make me feel important.” Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.
• Unfortunately, many companies freak out when unintended people use their product in unintended ways. They react by trying to reposition the product so that the intended customers use it in intended ways. This is dumb—first of all, on a tactical level, take the money!
• One of the most effective ways to make it rain is to educate people about the use of your product.
• My experience is that sales prospects who are willing to buy your product will often tell you what it will take to close a deal. All you have to do is shut up and listen.
• The most difficult barriers that startups face are inertia and a reliance on the status quo.
• “It’s easy to know where you’ve been—it’s harder and more valuable to know where you’re going.”
• Rainmakers are expensive, but if they can deliver, they’re worth it.
• Good partnerships should accelerate cash flow, increase revenue, and reduce costs.
• The lopsidedness of many partnerships is not born of necessity but occurs because the larger entity can muscle the smaller one into accepting an unfavorable deal.
• Do favors before you need favors back.
• Don’t hesitate to ask for a favor in return when you need it.
• You know your product has arrived when you’re big enough to hold a conference for it.
• Once again, the key to evangelism, sales, presentations, and now ecosystems is a great product.
• The bottom line is that you should do everything you can to foster an ecosystem around your product. It is a powerful tool to increase the satisfaction of your believers and to attract new believers with greater ease—in short, making your product endure.
• Underpromise and overdeliver for great support.
• Underpromise and overdeliver for great support.
• Mensches help people who cannot reciprocate. They don’t care if the recipient is poor or powerless. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t help rich, famous, or powerful people (indeed, they may need the most help), but you shouldn’t help only rich, famous, and powerful people.
• Mensches do what’s right. This means taking the high and, sometimes, difficult road. For mensches, “situational ethics” is an oxymoron. Right is right, and wrong is wrong. A mensch does the right thing—not the easy thing, the expedient thing, the money-saving thing, or the I-can-get-away-with-it thing.
• The Top Ten Mistakes of Entrepreneurs
• MISTAKE: MULTIPLY BIG NUMBERS BY 1 PERCENT.
• FIX: CALCULATE FROM THE BOTTOM UP.
• MISTAKE: SCALE TOO FAST.
• FIX: EAT WHAT YOU KILL.
• MISTAKE: FORM PARTNERSHIPS.
• FIX: FOCUS ON SALES.
• MISTAKE: FOCUS ON FUND-RAISING.
• FIX: FOCUS ON PROTOTYPING.
• MISTAKE: USE TOO MANY SLIDES.
• FIX: OBEY THE 10/20/30 RULE.
• MISTAKE: PROCEED SERIALLY.
• MISTAKE: RETAIN MATHEMATICAL CONTROL.
• FIX: MAKE A BIGGER PIE.
• MISTAKE: USE PATENTS FOR DEFENSIBILITY.
• FIX: USE SUCCESS FOR DEFENSIBILITY.
• MISTAKE: HIRE IN YOUR IMAGE.
• FIX: HIRE TO COMPLEMENT.
• MISTAKE: BEFRIEND YOUR INVESTORS.
• FIX: EXCEED EXPECTATIONS.
• Unless a partnership enables you to alter your spreadsheet, it’s bullshiitake. Most partnerships are a PR exercise and a waste of time.
• Instead of spinning your wheels with partnerships, focus on sales.
• “Sales fix everything.”
• Building a prototype is the most important goal in the early days of your startup.
• The optimal number of slides is ten. You should be able to give your presentation in twenty minutes. The ideal font size is thirty points.
• The way to make money is to increase the size of the pie, not to hold on to as much of the pie as possible.
• Patent protection is a game for big companies with lots of lawyers and money.
• A startup needs a variety of skills, perspectives, and backgrounds to succeed.

THE ART OF NON-CONFORMITY by Chris Guillebeau

• Think for yourself instead of following the crowd.
• Whenever you find yourself confronted by a request, obligation, or expectation you don’t like, it helps to look carefully for the motivations and rationale behind what you hear.
• It’s your own life, so why not set your own rules?
• Bullshit is work that is done merely to complete requirements, make you look good, or otherwise fill up the hours of the day.
• Just as faking it can be an effective way to get through higher education, mediocrity is the standard by which much work is judged once you get out of school.
• “Always look carefully for someone’s motivations and agenda.”
• You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.
• Whether it’s this book or any other resource, almost nothing you encounter will ever be 100 percent relevant to your situation. The goal is to focus on what is relevant and apply those key ideas to your life.
• 11 WAYS TO BE UNREMARKABLY AVERAGE
• 1. Accept what people tell you at face value.
• 2. Don’t question authority.
• 3. Go to college because you’re supposed to, not because you want to learn something.
• 4. Go overseas once or twice in your life, to somewhere safe like England. 
• 5. Don’t try to learn another language; everyone else will eventually learn English.
• 6. Think about starting your own business, but never do it.
• 7. Think about writing a book, but never do it.
• 8. Get the largest mortgage you qualify for and spend 30 years paying for it.
• 9. Sit at a desk 40 hours a week for an average of 10 hours of productive work.
• 10. Don’t stand out or draw attention to yourself.
• 11. Jump through hoops. Check off boxes.
• You must take responsibility for what happens in your future, good or bad. Our past may be somewhat responsible for defining who we are at present, but it does not need to define our future.
• Many people believe that the key to an improved lifestyle is less work. I think it’s better work. I believe that most of us want to work hard, but we want to do the kind of work that energizes us and makes a positive impact on others. That kind of work is worth working for, and the other kind of work is worth letting go of, finished or not.
• Instead of being easy, the most memorable times in our lives are often the most challenging.
• Almost everyone says they are open-minded, but when it comes down to it, most of us are deeply uncomfortable with change.
• Most people accept the status quo without question, sleepwalking through life, looking in from the outside. When other people manage to escape, sleepwalkers find ways to marginalize or ignore them by pointing out something wrong with their escape plan.
• The time to leave the best job in the world is right before you get tired of it.
• the choice of an unremarkably average life represents a life of sleepwalking.
• If the sleepwalking life is the “real world” of the unremarkably average, the clear alternative is the living world of adventure.
• We need money to live in a modern world, and we should find a way to get what we need without harming anyone else. However, by itself, money has no value—the value is produced only when we exchange money for other things. The reason why this is important is because many people don’t know how much money they really need to do the things they want. They often wildly overestimate or underestimate how much money they need to exchange for their desired life.
• According to near-unanimous scientific research, pursuing wealth for wealth’s sake won’t get you very far. A certain amount of money produces happiness, and a bit more produces a bit more happiness, but beyond that, the correlation between money and life satisfaction is null.
• Give yourself permission to dream, and then get to work planning.
• Never forget that changing the world is not always a practical endeavor. Throughout history, most people who have made fundamental shifts in science, humanities, or the arts have been frequently accused of being impractical.
• There’s nothing wrong with thinking ahead, but life does not begin at age 65. Planning for tomorrow is good, in other words, but it doesn’t have to affect every decision you make today.
• As a final note, don’t waste time in taking action toward assuming control of your life.
• As a general rule, it’s usually better to do something than not do it. This may not always be the case—if you’re on the fence about robbing a bank to buy donuts, it might be good to think of another way to acquire the donuts—but speaking generally, we tend to regret what we haven’t done more than what we have.
• No, in the end it is not all about you—but there is also nothing wrong with doing things entirely for yourself.
• Your dreams and big ideas belong to no one but you, and you never need to apologize for or justify them to anyone.
• when it comes down to it, most of us do not want to sit on the beach and take it easy every day for the rest of our lives.
• Life planning begins with an unfortunate fact: many people have no idea what they really want to do or accomplish over the course of their time on earth. Instead of moving toward a destination, they become mired in “life avoidance” by ambling around without a clear sense of objective or purpose.
• To break out of the sleepwalking pattern, we have to define what we want and then find a way to make it happen.
• “Whatever your dreams are, start taking them very, very seriously.”
• I tend to think if something is worth doing, you might as well do it all the way—so
• Radical goal-setting begins with a “life list” of things you’d like to do at some point in your life. A life list, also called a “bucket list,” is composed of a long list of anything and everything you’d like to accomplish before you die.
• The interesting thing about setting big goals is that once we get serious about planning for them, they tend to be achieved much more quickly than we initially expect. This is because we tend to overestimate what we can complete in a single day, and underestimate what we can complete over longer periods of time.
• we’re not as super-disciplined as you think.
• As long as what you want does not cause harm to others, you never need to apologize for pursuing your own dreams and big ideas.
• As a general rule, if you don’t know what to do on any given day, spend at least some of your time helping someone else.
• There is almost always more than one way to accomplish something.
• Granted, the specific expectations and job positions vary by industry—but almost all industries follow a similar pattern of apprentice, beginner, mid-level, and executive.
• The alternative path (also called the “unconventional choice” throughout the book) is not only more efficient; it’s also often more effective.
• When faced with a choice between abundance and scarcity, choose abundance.
• Scarcity involves hoarding, and abundance involves sharing.
• When faced with uncertainty about taking a leap of faith, take the leap.
• You’ll regret the things you didn’t do much more than anything you did, so you might as well try new things.
• Intelligence is not a prerequisite, but determination is.
• To take over the world, or do whatever you want to do, you don’t need to be especially intelligent.
• You can have unlimited dreams and goals, but not unlimited priorities.
• Many people are uncomfortable with change and different ideas, and they’ll work hard at rationalizing their own choices when they come across someone who has made different ones.
• If you get a few things in order, the stages of growth are exponential.
• “It is not the decision you make that is most important; it is the degree of commitment with which you make the decision.”
• You can create the life you want, you can make the world a better place at the same time, and you can have it all. Just be prepared to work for it.
• The pathway to world domination, or whatever it is you want to do, begins with clearly understanding what you want to get out of life.
• Once you begin taking your ambitions seriously, you can usually accomplish most things in less time than you initially expect.
• In the end, it’s not all about you. Most of us want a life that leaves a positive impact on others.
• When you start doing what you really want, not everyone will understand. This is okay.
• When you choose to defy convention, you’ll run up against all kinds of people who are resentful of your decision to chart your own path. With preparation and courage, you can usually find a way to stand up to those people, and other times you can just do your own thing and ignore them.
• Be forewarned, though: the toughest obstacles most of us have to overcome are the direct result of our own fears and insecurities.
• When we really get serious about our insecurities, we usually find that three specific fears emerge: the fear of failure, the fear of success, and the fear of change. The greatest of these is the fear of change itself.
• All things being equal, we generally resist change until the pain of making a switch becomes less than the pain of remaining in our current situation.
• To break the cycle, the fear of the unknown has to become less than the stale acceptance of the current situation. There are two ways to make this happen:
• Increase the pain of the current situation
• Decrease the fear of the desired situation
• Typically, the people who are ready to change want the change more than almost anything.
• Conquering fear begins with acknowledging fear. Because our fears and insecurities are often illogical, it helps to break them down to the most basic level. You can do this by making a list of all the things you’re afraid of at any given time.
• Apply the “no regrets” mind-set. After acknowledging fear, you then need to change your mind-set and prepare for making a change.
• Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.
• Take the worst case scenario. Asking yourself, “What’s the absolute worst thing that could happen?” if something goes wrong can be very empowering. It helps you put things in their proper perspective.
• Create mass accountability. You can also create mass accountability to help you smash through the wall.
• We have big dreams and ideas, but we also have big fears. The quest to overcome fear is lifelong, and almost no one is truly fearless. Instead of pretending it doesn’t exist, you have to be willing to smash through the brick wall of fear. You won’t be the first to do it, and what you find on the other side might surprise you.
• Fear is normal! The goal is to conquer the fear, not to avoid it or pretend it doesn’t exist.
• The pain of making a change must become less than the pain of staying in the current situation.
• Most remarkable people are not remarkable by nature. Instead, they made a few key choices along the way that helped them overcome their fears.
• Asking yourself “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” helps to put big decisions in perspective.
• The question is not who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me.
• People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional.
• Nearly all people who choose unconventional careers or lifestyles, or who otherwise wish to challenge conventional beliefs, will encounter opposition from authority and the status quo.
• sometimes people fall in line because authority figures are very skilled at keeping them in their place.
• Gatekeeper. n.
• 1. A person or group with a vested interest in limiting the choices of other people.
• 2. An obstacle that must be overcome to achieve unconventional success.
• Gatekeepers are especially effective at telling you which choices you have, thus giving you the illusion of freedom while simultaneously blocking access to what really matters.
• In reality, very few opportunities are open to everyone—in
• Understanding that few opportunities are truly democratic is the first step toward successfully challenging authority.
• Gatekeepers are “no” people. They are skilled at swatting down ideas and coming up with all kinds of reasons why a request should be denied or why a particular strategy won’t work. Many organizations have an entire Department of No, which usually goes by a disguised title such as Legal or Human Resources.
• Gatekeepers maintain their hold on power by convincing people that their roles are necessary.
• When someone threatens tradition or asks questions, gatekeepers will appeal to a logic based on history, even if their recollection of history is incorrect.
• Change the way the game is played.
• In other encounters with authority, you can simply nod your head, smile, and then go out and do what you intended.
• As mentioned, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, but thankfully, you don’t really need to ask for either one very often.
• Authority figures don’t know it all. You know that, and I know that—but many of them devote a great deal of their time to convincing us that they are the experts who must be listened to.
• Either way, keep the words of an old Chinese proverb in mind: the person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it.
• If you’re not happy with the way something is done, you don’t have to accept it.
• Gatekeepers are authority figures who seek to limit the choices of others—you can do a or b, but not c, d, or e.
• Gatekeepers are good at justifying their actions through circular reasoning. A typical argument involves the phrase “Everyone else is doing this, so why shouldn’t you?”
• When challenging authority, direct confrontation is not always the best way. Instead, use the underdog strategy to change the rules of the game.
• Whatever has led you to where you are today is good enough to launch you into where you need to go next.
• You can’t outsource the responsibility for planning the course of your life.
• If you don’t feel passionate about anything, chances are you haven’t discovered what you’re really good at yet.
• When you let go of all the things you don’t need, a lot of other things become much easier.
• when times are tough, you’d better get creative.
• No one else can be responsible for your success or well-being but you.
• Of all of the things that are difficult to accept, this is definitely one of the most difficult of all. Here it is: your own competence is your best security.
• The gap between ignorance and knowledge is much less than the gap between knowledge and action.
• Paradoxically, when you manage to survive a crisis that had “deathblow potential,” you’ll often end up stronger than you were before the walls fell down.
• When you focus on escaping the humdrum of the cubicle (or wherever you spend your workdays), you also need to have something to escape to. Otherwise you may end up no happier than you were prior to the escape.
• the most important thing is to take the control of your career into your own hands.
• No one else will be responsible for you or care about your well-being as much as you.
• You can create your own security in a regular job or by working for yourself. (I think working for yourself is easier, but it’s not the only way.)
• Like Allan Bacon’s “Life Experiments,” slow and steady change can produce big improvements when done consistently over time.
• Some people think self-employment is risky, but the real risk lies in deriving your security from an external source
• Don’t just escape from something; escape to something
• If the goal of graduate school is to prepare students for a more advanced career, it’s fair to measure that goal against alternative methods.
• Personally, I value learning, but formal education and learning do not always go hand in hand. If your primary goal is to learn instead of to prepare for a career, you may be better off going it alone.
• When you consider investing large amounts of time and money in something, you should think carefully about what you’ll get out of it.
• Relate your education to what you actually want to do when you finish.
• Don’t use graduate school, or any other course of study, as a form of life avoidance. Pursue the course only if there’s a good reason.
• Much of higher education consists of learning to make yourself look good. It’s an essential skill, but you might as well learn something else while you’re there too.
• Regardless of how you feel about college or university, consider some form of alternative learning to increase your knowledge.
• No matter the goal, you’ll likely discover that you’re going to need some help along the way.
• The price of greatness is responsibility. —WINSTON CHURCHILL
• Leadership has little to do with titles and everything to do with influence.
• Most recruitment and maintenance activities for your small army fit into these three steps:
• Step 1: Recruit Your Small Army
• Step 2: Train and Reward Your Army
• Step 3: Ask Your Army for Help
• To stand out from the crowd, you’ll need a platform to speak from, a good reason why people should pay attention to you, and a welcoming environment that encourages prospects to get involved.
• A personal note, especially one that is unexpected, will almost always create a real impact on the recipient.
• One of the most interesting facts about social networking is that most people love to introduce and connect other people.
• Strong Ties = People you know directly
• Weak Ties = People known to your network (friends of friends)
• If you want to destroy the relationship between you and your followers, all you need to do is abuse their trust. To defeat your own small army, simply don’t do what you say you’re going to do, and don’t apologize when you make a mistake.
• In short, your goal as a leader is to challenge people without insulting them. You want to lift up your followers and improve their lives in a meaningful way.
• Think carefully about how you can help people get what they want. If your campaign uplifts others or meets an important need, you’re on the right track.
• Create at least three ways your followers can connect with you—examples include a blog with RSS feed, a profile on a social networking site, a newsletter, or a live event.
• Communicate in at least two mediums. For example, if you are a writer with a blog, supplement the written posts with an occasional podcast or video message.
• Directly ask people to join your army, and then ask them for specific help.
• Set a target goal: within the next x months I will have x new followers in my small army.
• More than almost any other aspect of identity, if you don’t have clarity of purpose over how you view the role of money in your life, you’ll likely end up going along with what other people do.
• No matter how you decide to manage your money, it greatly helps if you’re clear about your values.
• There is no such thing as good debt.
• To get serious about saving, focus on increasing income more than cutting expenses.
• If you’re already in debt and want to escape, you can do one of two things:
• (1) find a way to pay it back, as quickly as possible, or
• (2) look for an alternative solution like deferral or debt forgiveness in exchange for public service.
• One final tip about giving: when you give, let go.
• Once you give, let it go. It’s literally out of your hands at that point, and that’s where it should stay.
• Money and happiness are correlated to a certain degree, but not much after that.
• Your behavior with money has to match up with your overall values.
• Consider “investing in yourself” through spending on unique life experiences more than “stuff.”
• A good savings program also includes investment in others. It’s not about guilt; it’s about gratitude.
• One thing’s for certain: when you set out on an unconventional journey, you’ll attract attention and criticism. If you succeed in your quest, you can expect more of both.
• Some people enjoy nothing more than putting down winners.
• People who possess self-confidence and focus are often labeled as arrogant by those who lack both qualities.
• convergence is the state of being where everything in our lives is in alignment.
• If you want to take on the world and live life your own way, you’ll need to be fairly determined, because there will be no shortage of distractions that crop up every day.
• When you’re starting to redefine how you spend your time and you’re not sure which responsibilities you should commit to, it can be helpful to begin to apply a filter to all the inputs that come your way. Asking two questions—“Why should I do this?” and “What will happen if I don’t?”—will clarify a great many responsibilities for you.
• Fair warning: when you choose to limit inputs and withdraw from social requests, not everyone will understand this behavior.
• An important principle of life planning is that you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything at the same time.
• The best way to stop spending time on unnecessary distractions is to make a “to-stop-doing list.” This is better than a to-do list, because it helps you see what’s bringing you down. Your to-stop-doing list is exactly what it sounds like: a list of things you simply don’t want to do anymore.
• If anything you read, including this book, is not interesting and helpful to you, you should put it down and spend your time in a more meaningful way. Apply this strategy militantly, and you’ll see positive changes in your life almost immediately.
• Practicing the art of radical exclusion is good for two reasons: first, it eliminates the unnecessary from our lives. But just as important, when you say no to some things, it gives you the chance to say yes to many more.
• You can probably have anything you want, but probably not everything at once. Radical exclusion is the process of eliminating things that are unnecessary, or even stepping away from almost everything for a set period of time.
• Creating a to-stop-doing list can usually help eliminate several hours of tasks in the average week.
• Asking “What’s the worst thing that can happen if I don’t do this?” may help you feel better about eliminating an obligation.
• After eliminating the unnecessary, start opening up to everything you’ve always wanted to do. It’s not a paradox; it’s a life of abundance.
• Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.
• One of the things that separates a goal from a dream is a deadline,
• Some people become expert planners without ever actually doing anything.
• Once you earn elite status with one airline, you can request a “status match” from several others to become a high-flyer on every major airline alliance.
• Most people have at least one place in their minds they’d really like to go to “one day.” By saving just $2 a day, you can usually get there within two years or less.
• Working on location from anywhere in the world rarely involves sitting in the sand with your laptop. It isn’t for everyone, nor is it always easy—but for me and many others, it’s worth it.
• As with most things in life, if you choose to get serious about travel, you can find alternative ways to accomplish almost any specific goal.
• “Travel hacking” helps to reduce costs and allow for more interesting experiences than conventional travel planning does.
• The kind of travel you value is better than anyone else’s idea of fun and adventure. Figure out what you like, and structure your roaming around those preferences.
• Here’s a novel idea: wherever you are in life, however old you are, begin thinking about every day as the first day of your life.
• Good work is useful, productive work. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the problem is that we have too much good work. Great work, on the other hand, is revolutionary. Great work leads to innovation.
• While most good work is comforting, great work is simultaneously comforting and discomforting because it pushes us to go further.
• A key principle of legacy work is that it usually involves creating something new as opposed to responding to something that already exists.
• Measure work in output, not hours.
• Which is more important—showing up for eight hours or actually doing the work?
• I follow a classic rule of writing and editing: when writing, don’t hesitate to include something; when editing, don’t hesitate to throw it out.
• Chances are, it’s never “too late” to get started on what you secretly wanted to do years ago, and maybe some things will be easier now that you’re older.
• By focusing on deliverables and metrics instead of hours, you’ll avoid the bad feeling that comes at the end of a day when nothing has been accomplished.
• Sitting down to do something and forcing yourself not to get up until real progress is made can work more powerfully than any time management program.
• All those good things you’ve done before are nice, but the future can be even better. Focus on that.
• Increase the percentage of legacy work as opposed to busywork (or even just “good work”).
• Setting a continual metric (like the 1,000-words standard) can help keep you focused on what really matters to you.
• Wake up in the middle of the night with good ideas. Share them with the world.
• The most common criticism of unconventional ideas is that they are unreasonable or impossible to implement.
• Innovation comes from entrepreneurs and others who are wiling to accept risk and try new things.
• Improvements in social justice come from those who question authority.
• The belief that career security can be found internally rather than through a traditional job is highly dangerous.
• In fact, the basic belief that you should do what you want most of the time is uncomfortable and troubling for some people.
• A combination of factors has led us to become who we are today, and for better or worse, we cannot be completely responsible for our past. What we are responsible for, however, is our future. What matters from here on out has little to do with luck and much more to do with our own choices.
• In choosing to live a remarkable life, failure is a real possibility, but regrets are completely optional.
• You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.
• Assert integrity against the play-it-safers and slaves of the ordinary.
• No one is self-taught, and unconventional ideas do not usually arrive independently.
• Choosing to be different is partly about questioning authority and conventional assumptions, but also about embracing life as a joyful, meaningful experience.
• You can start most businesses for less than $1,000, and many for less than $100.

READY FOR ANYTHING by David Allen

• MAXIMUM PRODUCTIVITY is making something happen—furniture, freeways, or fun—with as little effort as possible.
• Improving productivity has a lot to do with dealing more effectively with the hindrances, barriers, and distractions that show up in our way—anything that opposes or weakens our forward motion.
• I discovered that people didn’t need more discipline as such—they needed a disciplined approach. They didn’t need to work harder—they needed to define their work better at multiple levels of detail and stay focused on all of them simultaneously.
• There are times when individuals (and groups) will get the most leverage out of completing old stuff and clearing the decks (Part I). Other times a focus on the right focus is the primary key (Part II). Still other situations will call for structures and systems as most important for growth (Part III). And others will require simply letting go of trying to get it perfect and just get going (Part IV). All these aspects are important, but often one specifically will be the trigger point for busting through into a next level of productivity.
• A change in behavior leads to a change in action and in results.
• It’s most often the small things, done consistently in strategic places, that make the most difference.
• Sometimes the biggest gain in productive energy will come from cleaning the cobwebs, dealing with old business, and clearing the decks—cutting loose debris that’s impeding forward motion.
• The degree to which you haven’t done that is the degree to which you are enduring unnecessary stress.
• Get your ubiquitous capture tool in place and functioning as a standard life accessory.
• Stress comes from unkept agreements with yourself. You can relieve that stress only by canceling the agreement, keeping the agreement, or renegotiating it.
• If you try to make something too simple, it will make everything seem more complex and difficult.
• Managing yourself is simple, but not simplistic.
• Give yourself the freedom to do one thing at a time.
• Concentration is the key to power, in physics and in life, and cooperation is the lubricant for the efficient flow of that energy.
• A map is not functional until you know where you are on it. Locating yourself in space and time provides a reference for motion: how much is required and in what direction.
• In order to know what activities are more important than others, you must have a reference point for what you want to maintain, accomplish, or experience—you must know what your work is.
• Many people have a vague sense that they want to do or be something in the future—something different. But without a reality-based reference point of where they in fact are on all levels of life, they’re like the Flying Dutchman, doomed to drift. But clarifying and managing what’s in front of you to deal with right now, with even a small degree of completion, will open up natural inspiration and creativity for what’s to come—without any further effort on your part.
• “It’s not one thing but five things all wrapped together: People keep stuff in their head. They don’t decide what they need to do about stuff they know they need to do something about. They don’t organize action reminders and support materials in functional categories. They don’t maintain and review a complete and objective inventory of their commitments. Then they waste energy and burn out, allowing their busyness to be driven by what’s latest and loudest, hoping it’s the right thing to do but never feeling the relief that it is.”
• Most people keep stuff only in their head, which short-circuits the process to begin with. Plenty of people write lots of things down, but they don’t decide the next actions on them. And even when people actually think about the actions required (before it’s in crisis mode), they don’t organize the reminders so that they’ll be seen when they are in the contexts where the action is possible. And even most of those people who do get these lists together in a burst of inspired productivity let their systems quickly become out of date and inconsistent. As a consequence, without the care and feeding of their thinking tools, life and work become reactive responses instead of clearly directed action choices.
• “Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up—not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.”
• “Focus on positive outcomes and continually take the next action on the most important thing.” But who doesn’t know that? Consistent implementation of that principle, fully integrating every aspect of our life, is the biggest challenge—and not so simple.
• Learning to respond effectively and efficiently to everything that has hooked your attention is masterful behavior.
• Maintaining a complete, current, and reviewable inventory of all the open loops, no matter how big or small they are, is a prerequisite for setting trustworthy priorities.
• ONE OF THE MOST effective ways to spark a dynamic vision is to clean your garage.
• Keeping uncaptured, unclarified, and unprocessed things in our minds creates unnecessary stress.
• A core principle in our personal-productivity methodology confronts this issue head-on: Write it all down, think about it all, decide what needs to be done about it all, and manage the options of it all in a consistently reviewed external system.
• Naming your stuff gives you power over it.
• The greatest power we have to affect our world is always at our fingertips: our ability to change how we see things.
• Often a focus on the focus is the key to unlock the next level of gain.
• So, in order to achieve clarity and be fully and positively engaged in what you’re doing, you must (1) know the goal or outcome you’re intending and (2) decide and take the next physical move to propel you in that direction.
• Success in life may have more to do with how fast you can accept and get started on the new game than with how good you got at playing any of the old ones.
• You see the outcome first, and then you are unconsciously made conscious of information.
• Outcome thinking and the willingness to visualize something’s being true before it’s physically present is a master skill that we all could probably develop to a much greater degree.
• We tend to recall items stored in our mind based on criteria of latest (most recent in time) and loudest (emotionally), which is hardly the most effective file-retrieval system.
• The value of purposeful focus has been a core element of my learning, teaching, coaching, and management consulting for decades. If we don’t know why we’re doing something, our activities lack meaning, clarity, and direction. If we do know the purpose—for a meeting, a brochure, or a company—then we have a criterion for decision making and success in those endeavors, plus the motivation to creatively circumvent obstacles in getting there.
• I believe that every meeting in every organization should be canceled, only those that have a specific purpose should be rescheduled, and the intervals of standing meetings should be set based upon the needs of current reality instead of habit.
• There's a simple way to become indestructible: Have the intention to do your best at whatever you’re doing, right now.
• Not be the best—do your best.
• Best does not mean perfect—it simply means best. The best you can do in this moment, with whatever awareness and resources you can muster right now.
• If you want different results, a change of focus is required. Once you shift the image held in your mind, different things will automatically start to happen.
• Solutions, innovations, and success come not from greater intelligence or creativity but from what we notice because of where we point those attributes.
• The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills.
• Your point of view can change the most drastic of circumstances into the most powerful of positive experiences.
• Stuff is unactionable until we’ve decided the outcome and the next step to move toward it.
• Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in, business and life.
• Clarity of purpose is necessary in order to know how to evaluate the experiences and possibilities moving my way.
• At any moment, giving full attention to the one thing at hand is a hallmark of high performance.
• A vision of a desired future allows you to focus immediately on an improved condition.
• At times, tightening up our systems is what’s needed to release new levels of output and expression.
• It’s hard to be fully creative without structure and constraint.
• hallmark of master craftspeople is their knowledge of what tool is best for what job.
• The mind is a loyal and dedicated servant, but it needs to be given the jobs it does well—not the ones that it mismanages.
• Getting everything out of your head and making decisions about what it all means to you and what you need to do to move everything forward will give a tremendous freedom to your head.
• Real systems must be solid enough to hold up in the toughest reality—when we least feel like maintaining them.
• The better your systems, the more you don’t know you have them. The less attention you pay to them, the more functional they probably are. The only time you will notice them is when they don’t work or when you have to be too conscious about your use of them.
• Creating smoothly running silent systems is often the greatest improvement opportunity for enhanced productivity.
• The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
• There’s a form to mastering work. You collect it, process it, organize it, and review it, choosing actions based upon an interplay with what you can do at the moment and what you want to accomplish or maintain (your “job”).
• The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.
• Frequently, the last thing in the world we are inclined to do is exactly what would most improve the situation.
• Our minds, unchecked, can create a paralyzing fog of righteous worry—we’re too smart to start.
• Every decision we make about what action to take at any time is an intuitive risk.
• Simple answers are, for the most part, too simplistic.
• Prepare for the worst, imagine the best, and shoot down the middle. “Prepare for the worst” means to tie up all the loose ends and don’t leave yourself vulnerable to the self-deflation of unclear and unrenegotiated commitments. “Imagine the best” means to keep focused on the most positive outcomes and energies you can. “Shoot down the middle” means jump.
• Positive thinking is a tricky business. Once you are consciously aware of the creative power of your imagination, focusing purely on successful pictures and outcomes seems the only way to go. But to live a life of the best, there are times you must assume the worst.
• Too many times, we don’t recognize when reality has shifted but we haven’t, in our forms and behaviors. We keep doing what we’ve been doing, but the thrill is gone.
• Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.
• You don’t have time to do any project, because you actually can’t do a project—you can do only action steps.
• One of the best ways to procrastinate and deflate real motivation is to create big goals that are interpreted as “long term.” As soon as we set those goals or identify those kinds of projects, we tend to feel smug and self-congratulatory and pseudocomplete about them, just because we’ve “committed to them,” and our drive to close the loop starts to fizzle.
• Real change occurs not with a flash in the pan but with steady engagement at some new level of interaction.
• Little stuff, unchecked, can create some of the worst problems.
• the small actions we engage in regularly are the linchpins to the major results we experience.
• The development of real knowledge requires intentional activity. If you wait to know something before you do something, likely neither will happen.
• moving. It’s much easier to respond and move quickly—even when you need to go in the opposite direction—if you’re already in motion.
• The angst arises when you let loose the reins and stop directing your own energy.
• The biggest successes come from the most failures.
• Missiles and rockets are off course most of the time they’re in the air. They get where they’re going because they continually course-correct.
• You get things done by defining “done” and deciding what “doing” would look like.
• Capture anything and everything that has your attention in leakproof external “buckets” (your in-baskets, e-mail, notebooks, voice mail, etc.) to get them out of your short-term memory.
• Process the items you have collected (decide about your collected stuff ).
• If it is actionable, decide the very next physical action, which you do (if less than two minutes), delegate (and track on waiting-for list), or defer (put on an action-reminder list or in an action folder).
• Make choices about your actions based upon what you can do (context), how much time you have, how much energy you have, and then your priorities.
• If your project needs more clarity, raise the level of your focus (e.g., move from actions back to plans, plans back to brainstorming, vision back to purpose).
• If your project needs more to be happening, lower the level of your focus (e.g., move from vision to brainstorming, from plans to actions).

MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN by Joshua Foer

• Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it.
• To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
• “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,”
• Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers.
• The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued.
• For normal humans, memories gradually decay with time along what’s known as the “curve of forgetting.” From the moment you grasp a new piece of information, your memory’s hold on it begins to slowly loosen, until finally it lets go altogether.
• The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception—some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web.
• Because our memories don’t follow any kind of linear logic, we can neither sequentially search them nor browse them.
• The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity.
• There is something about mastering a specific field that breeds a better memory for the details of that field.
• Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don’t see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways.
• We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
• When a new thought or perception enters our head, it doesn’t immediately get stashed away in long-term memory. Rather, it exists in a temporary limbo, in what’s known as working memory, a collection of brain systems that hold on to whatever is rattling around in our consciousness at the present moment.
• Our working memories serve a critical role as a filter between our perception of the world and our long-term memory of it. If every sensation or thought was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we’d be drowning, like S and Funes, in irrelevant information.
• Most of the things that pass through our brain don’t need to be remembered any longer than the moment or two we spend perceiving them and, if necessary, reacting to them.
• Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time.
• Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.
• Notice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinterprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long-term memory.
• We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.
• According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
• Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we’ve seen, heard, and smelled in the past.
• A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
• We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.
• Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it.
• Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.
• Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories broadly into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM had lost the ability to make new declarative memories. Nondeclarative memories are the things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror (or what a word flashed rapidly across a computer screen means).
• Motor skill learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia.
• Indeed, most of who we are and how we think—the core material of our personalities—is bound up in implicit memories that are off-limits to the conscious brain.
• Over time, as they are revisited and reinforced, memories are consolidated in a way that makes them impervious to erasure. They become entrenched in a network of cortical connections that allows them to exist independently of the hippocampus.
• The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery (think of the two-picture recognition test), we’re terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers.
• “The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”
• The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory.
• “Things that grab our attention are more memorable, and attention is not something you can simply will. It has to be pulled in by the details.
• The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to cleave to its locus.
• Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex—and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.
• Because of the way spatial cognition works, all you have to do is retrace your steps through your memory palace, and hopefully at each point the images you laid down will pop back into your mind as you pass by them.
• The better I knew the buildings, and the more each felt like home, the stickier my images would be, and the easier it would be to reconstruct them later.
• Perfect recall of words is something our brains simply aren’t very good at,
• The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved.
• Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines.
• Much of the chaos that our brains filter out is words, because more often than not, the actual language that conveys an idea is just window dressing.
• The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.
• Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language.
• Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.
• Gunther’s method of creating an image for the un-imageable is a very old one: to visualize a similarly sounding, or punning, word in its place.
• This process of transforming words into images involves a kind of remembering by forgetting: In order to memorize a word by its sound, its meaning has to be completely dismissed.
• Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory.
• The brain is always making mistakes, forgetting, misremembering. Writing is how we overcome those essential biological constraints.
• Where one word ends and another begins is a relatively arbitrary linguistic convention.
• Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in the nonlinear way we access our internal memories.
• To our memory-bound predecessors, the goal of training one’s memory was not to become a “living book,” but rather a “living concordance,” a walking index of everything one had read, and all the information one had acquired.
• Because memories are associative, finding the odd misplaced fact is often an act of triangulation.
• So much of remembering happens at the moment of encoding, because we only tend to remember what we pay attention to.
• When it comes to memorizing long strings of numbers, like a hundred thousand digits of pi or the career batting averages of every New York Yankee Hall of Famer, most mental athletes use a more complex technique that is known on the Worldwide Brain Club (the online forum for memory junkies, Rubik’s cubers, and mathletes) as “person-action-object,” or, simply, PAO.
• The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven’t seen before.
• As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
• What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.”
• Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
• When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.
• Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.
• The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems.
• The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.
• There is not a single sport in which records don’t regularly fall. If there are plateaus out there, collectively we have not reached them yet.
• Once a benchmark is deemed breakable, it usually doesn’t take long before someone breaks it.
• We usually think about our memory as a single, monolithic thing. It’s not. Memory is more like a collection of independent modules and systems, each relying on its own networks of neurons.
• Generally when we forget the name of a new acquaintance, it’s because we’re too busy thinking about what we’re going to say next, instead of paying attention.
• You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.
• the simplest memory trick could dramatically increase the amount of information a person could remember, and nobody had bothered to teach him that trick until he was twenty years old, what else was there that he’d never learned?
• One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into as few words as possible and whenever possible are illustrated with images. It’s a kind of outline, exploded radially across the page in a rainbow of colors, a web of associations that looks like a prickly bush, or a neuron’s branching dendrites. And because it is full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.
• In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas.
• Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.”
• If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas.
• In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory.
• When information goes “in one ear and out the other,” it’s often because it doesn’t have anything to stick to.
• Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture.
• Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.
• The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered.
• The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.
• Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.
• we all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.
• Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.
• We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits,
• Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.
• Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.

EGO IS THE ENEMY by Ryan Holiday

• We must begin by seeing ourselves and the world in a new way for the first time. Then we must fight to be different and fight to stay different—that’s the hard part.
• Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.
• The need to be better than, more than, recognized for, far past any reasonable utility—that’s ego. It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.
• Most of us aren’t “egomaniacs,” but ego is there at the root of almost every conceivable problem and obstacle, from why we can’t win to why we need to win all the time and at the expense of others.
• With every ambition and goal we have—big or small—ego is there undermining us on the very journey we’ve put everything into pursuing.
• Without an accurate accounting of our own abilities compared to others, what we have is not confidence but delusion.
• Just one thing keeps ego around—comfort. Pursuing great work—whether it is in sports or art or business—is often terrifying. Ego soothes that fear. It’s a salve to that insecurity. Replacing the rational and aware parts of our psyche with bluster and self-absorption, ego tells us what we want to hear, when we want to hear it.
• We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers. But no one is truly successful because they are delusional, self-absorbed, or disconnected.
• Among men who rise to fame and leadership two types are recognizable—those who are born with a belief in themselves and those in whom it is a slow growth dependent on actual achievement.
• One must ask: if your belief in yourself is not dependent on actual achievement, then what is it dependent on? The answer, too often when we are just setting out, is nothing. Ego. And this is why we so often see precipitous rises followed by calamitous falls.
• One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible.
• Writing, like so many creative acts, is hard.
• Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
• Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress. The same goes for verbalization.
• Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it.
• Doing great work is a struggle.
• The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other.
• Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority.
• Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.
• What you choose to do with your time and what you choose to do for money works on you.
• The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.
• The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.
• The mixed martial arts pioneer and multi-title champion Frank Shamrock has a system he trains fighters in that he calls plus, minus, and equal. Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.
• You can’t learn if you think you already know.
• The art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life, particularly harsh and critical feedback. We not only need to take this harsh feedback, but actively solicit it, labor to seek out the negative precisely when our friends and family and brain are telling us that we’re doing great.
• In our endeavors, we will face complex problems, often in situations we’ve never faced before. Opportunities are not usually deep, virgin pools that require courage and boldness to dive into, but instead are obscured, dusted over, blocked by various forms of resistance. What is really called for in these circumstances is clarity, deliberateness, and methodological determination.
• Passion typically masks a weakness.
• What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.
• Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.
• Passion is form over function. Purpose is function, function, function.
• It’d be far better if you were intimidated by what lies ahead—humbled by its magnitude and determined to see it through regardless.
• Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
• When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities:
• 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are;
• 2) You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted;
• 3) Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.
• attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful and subsume your identity into theirs and move both forward simultaneously. It’s certainly more glamorous to pursue your own glory—though hardly as effective.
• Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.
• There is an old saying, “Say little, do much.” What we really ought to do is update and apply a version of that to our early approach. Be lesser, do more.
• Find what nobody else wants to do and do it.
• Produce more than everyone else and give your ideas away
• It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how great your connections are, how much money you have. When you want to do something—something big and important and meaningful—you will be subjected to treatment ranging from indifference to outright sabotage. Count on it.
• Those who have subdued their ego understand that it doesn’t degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.
• Restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one. You will often be tempted, you will probably even be overcome. No one is perfect with it, but try we must.
• It is a timeless fact of life that the up-and-coming must endure the abuses of the entrenched.
• you’re not able to change the system until after you’ve made it.
• We tend to think that ego equals confidence, which is what we need to be in charge. In fact, it can have the opposite effect.
• It is natural for any young, ambitious person (or simply someone whose ambition is young) to get excited and swept up by their thoughts and feelings.
• The more creative we are, the easier it is to lose the thread that guides us.
• Our imagination—in many senses an asset—is dangerous when it runs wild. We have to rein our perceptions in. Otherwise, lost in the excitement, how can we accurately predict the future or interpret events?
• Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if—especially if—it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it.
• There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.
• Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.
• Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one.
• Punching above your weight is how you get injured. Pride goeth before the fall.
• If you’re doing the work and putting in the time, you won’t need to cheat, you won’t need to overcompensate.
• Receive feedback, maintain hunger, and chart a proper course in life.
• We must prepare for pride and kill it early—or it will kill what we aspire to.
• Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous.
• The best plan is only good intentions unless it degenerates into work.
• “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to
• Where we decide to put our energy decides what we’ll ultimately accomplish.
• Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes.
• Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.
• Of course, what is truly ambitious is to face life and proceed with quiet confidence in spite of the distractions.
• Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything. We cannot buy into myths we make ourselves, or the noise and chatter of the outside world. We must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe. On top of all this, we have to build an organization and a system around what we do—one that is about the work and not about us.
• It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more.
• With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything.
• No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.
• Learn from everyone and everything. From the people you beat, and the people who beat you, from the people you dislike, even from your supposed enemies.
• Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weaknesses in our understanding, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.
• The solution is as straightforward as it is initially uncomfortable: Pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged—what about subjecting yourself to it deliberately? Change your mind. Change your surroundings.
• Crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse. It’s also dangerous and untrue. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance.
• Facts are better than stories and image.
• “The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.”
• That’s how it seems to go: we’re never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us, and can ruin us.
• All of us waste precious life doing things we don’t like, to prove ourselves to people we don’t respect, and to get things we don’t want.
• Let’s be clear: competitiveness is an important force in life. It’s what drives the market and is behind some of mankind’s most impressive accomplishments. On an individual level, however, it’s absolutely critical that you know who you’re competing with and why, that you have a clear sense of the space you’re in.
• It’s time to sit down and think about what’s truly important to you and then take steps to forsake the rest. Without this, success will not be pleasurable, or nearly as complete as it could be. Or worse, it won’t last.
• The more you have and do, the harder maintaining fidelity to your purpose will be, but the more critically you will need to.
• Find out why you’re after what you’re after. Ignore those who mess with your pace. Let them covet what you have, not the other way around. Because that’s independence.
• With success, particularly power, come some of the greatest and most dangerous delusions: entitlement, control, and paranoia.
• Ego is its own worst enemy. It hurts the ones we love too.
• A smart man or woman must regularly remind themselves of the limits of their power and reach.
• It turns out that becoming a great leader is difficult. Who knew?!
• Management? That’s the reward for all your creativity and new ideas? Becoming the Man? Yes—in the end, we all face becoming the adult supervision we originally rebelled against. Yet often we react petulantly and prefer to think: Now that I’m in charge, things are going to be different!
• As you become successful in your own field, your responsibilities may begin to change. Days become less and less about doing and more and more about making decisions. Such is the nature of leadership. This transition requires reevaluating and updating your identity. It requires a certain humility to put aside some of the more enjoyable or satisfying parts of your previous job. It means accepting that others might be more qualified or specialized in areas in which you considered yourself competent—or at least their time is better spent on them than yours.
• Sometimes systems are better decentralized. Sometimes they are better in a strict hierarchy. Every project and goal deserves an approach fitted perfectly to what needs to be done.
• This is one of the most dangerous ironies of success—it can make us someone we never wanted to be in the first place.
• Early in your career, you’ll notice that you jump on every opportunity to do so. As you become more accomplished, you’ll realize that so much of it is a distraction from your work—time spent with reporters, with awards, and with marketing are time away from what you really care about.
• It doesn’t make you a bad person to want to be remembered. To want to make it to the top. To provide for yourself and your family. After all, that’s all part of the allure.
• Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he says, and they’ll remember the name on the back.
• Ego tells us that meaning comes from activity, that being the center of attention is the only way to matter.
• When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone.
• Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you.
• Once we’ve made it, we tend to think that ego and energy is the only way to stay there. It’s not.
• We have to fight to stay sober, despite the many different forces swirling around our ego.
• But as Merkel supposedly said, “You can’t solve . . . tasks with charisma.”
• Sobriety is the counterweight that must balance out success. Especially if things keep getting better and better.
• Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way.
• Endless ambition is easy; anyone can put their foot down hard on the gas. Complacency is easy too; it’s just a matter of taking that foot off the gas.
• The world conspires against us in many ways, and the laws of nature say that everything regresses toward the mean.
• Reversals and regressions are as much a part of the cycle of life as anything else.
• No one is permanently successful, and not everyone finds success on the first attempt.
• Almost without exception, this is what life does: it takes our plans and dashes them to pieces. Sometimes once, sometimes lots of times.
• If ego is often just a nasty side effect of great success, it can be fatal during failure.
• Lacking the ability to examine ourselves, we reinvest our energy into exactly the patterns of behavior that caused our problems to begin with.
• “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
• There are many ways to hit bottom. Almost everyone does in their own way, at some point.
• The bigger the ego the harder the fall.
• The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.
• People make mistakes all the time.
• Most trouble is temporary . . . unless you make that not so.
• Only ego thinks embarrassment or failure are more than what they are. History is full of people who suffered abject humiliations yet recovered to have long and impressive careers.
• “He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man,” Seneca once said. Alter that: He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something worthy of a failure.
• The only real failure is abandoning your principles.
• If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.
• Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against.
• The more successful or powerful we are, the more there will be that we think we need to protect in terms of our legacy, image, and influence. If we’re not careful, however, we can end up wasting an incredible amount of time trying to keep the world from displeasing or disrespecting us.
• At various points in our lives, we seem to have different capacities for forgiveness and understanding.
• There is no way around it: We will experience difficulty. We will feel the touch of failure.
• We all experience success and failure in our own way.