The Internet of Money – Andreas Antopoulous

Takeaways
● Bitcoin is a standard or protocol just like TCP/IP, or the Internet. It is not owned by anyone. It is operated by simple mathematical rules that everyone who participates in the network agrees on.
● Why bitcoin is important: Approximately 1 billion people have access to banking, credit, and international finance capabilities – primarily the upper classes, the Western nations. Six and a half billion people on the planet have no connection to the world of money. Bitcoin can help these people participate in this world of money.
● With bitcoin you can do micro transactions, allowing you to collect payments from
millions of people in tiny amounts and make them, in aggregate, be worth something.
● Bitcoin creates a completely flat and decentralized network where every node is equal, where the protocol is neutral to the transactions, and it pushes innovations to the edge of the network, allowing exactly the same phenomenon we saw on the internet: innovation without permission.
● Money is a form of communication, a way of communicating value, a language. We use it to communicate value to each other, to express to each other how much we value a product, service, gesture. We use it as the basis of social interaction because by communicating value to each, we create social bonds. Which makes money a very important social construct.
● The real power of the internet comes from net neutrality. The concept that the internet does not discriminate based on source, destination, or content.
● Bitcoin is censorship-resistant . You can’t control where money is transmitted in bitcoin. Surveillance Of everyone is not possible.
● We live in a world where every individual transaction you do through the financial system is cataloged, analyzed, and transmitted to intelligence services all around the world that collaborate, and yet we have no idea what our governments do with money. Bitcoin rights this.
● Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices. It pushes all of the
intelligence to the edge, allowing innovation in the hands of its end users, and gives the users the ability to build applications without asking for anyone’s permission.
● We’re going to have to get used to a world where we have to judge currency not by who issued it, but by who uses it. By how many people use it and what they use it for.
● For many young people, bitcoin will be their first economic experience. A 10 year old can download an app and be in control of money for the first time.
● Bitcoin transactions contain no sensitive data. If you steal the information in the transaction, all you know is which address the money came from, which address the money’s going to, and how much. That’s it.
● Money is a message, a content type, that has now been separated from the medium. The medium has been a series of interconnected networks that segregate money by size and recipient. We have now cut off the gatekeepers

Perennial Seller – Ryan Holiday

Takeaways
● Classics stay classics and become more so over time. The longer something succeeds, the more likely it is to succeed in the future.
● To be great, you must make great work, which is incredibly hard. It must be your
primary focus and have your complete and total commitment.
● “People who are thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.”
● Creative ideas evolve over time, reflecting the colliding of seemingly disparate ideas. We must sit down and create something and let the process organically unfold. Tolerating ambiguity, frustration, and changes in the grand plan and being open to new experiences are essential to creative work.
● To wrestle with the conflicting, difficult ideas that go into creating, you often need real silence. Meditative isolation where you sit and wrestle with your project.
● You don’t have to be a genius to make genius – you just need small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff. Ask questions. Classics are built by thousands of small acts.
● “Getting into action generates inspiration. Don’t cop out waiting for inspiration to get you back into action. It won’t!”
● Answer a question that very few creators do: “ Who is this thing for?”
● The best way to avoid missing your target is to identify a proxy from the start, someone who represents your ideal audience, who you think about constantly throughout the creative process.
● We must also ask, “ What does this do?” . Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of people who buy it?
● The creator of any project should try to answer some variant of these questions:
○ What does this teach?
○ What does this solve?
○ How am I entertaining?
○ What am I giving?
○ What are we offering?
○ What are we sharing?
● Higher standards of projects:
○ What sacred cows am I slaying?
○ What dominant institution am I displacing?
○ What groups am I disrupting?
○ What people am I pissing off?
● Positioning is what your project is and who it is for. Packaging is what it look like and what it’s called. The Pitch is the sell – how the project is described and what it offers to the audience.

Principles – Ray Dalio

Takeaways
● Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life.
● To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained.
● If you can think for yourself to decide 1) what you want, 2) what is true, and 3) what you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2… you will make the most out of life.
● The key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. Fail well by being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without feeling badly enough to get knocked out of the game.
● Make believability- weighted decisions.
● Operate by principles.
● Systemize your decision-making.
1) What do you want?
2) What is true?
3) What are you going to do about it?
● You can never be sure of anything. It’s always best to assume you’re missing something.
● The only way I could succeed would be to:
1. Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning.
2. Know when not to have an opinion.
3. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles.
4. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.
● The satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.
● Look at the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.

Life Principles
1. Embrace Reality and Deal with It
1.1. Be a hyperrealist
a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life.
1.2. Truth – or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality – is the essential foundation of any good outcome.
1.3. Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.
a. Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change.
b. Don’t let fear of what others think of you stand in your way.
c. Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships.
1.4. Look to nature to learn how reality works.
a. Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are.
b. To be “good” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded.
c. Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.
d. Evolve or die.
1.5. Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.
a. The individual’s incentives must be aligned with the group’s goals.
b. Reality is optimizing for the whole – not for you.
c. Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable.
d. Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing – and decide what you want to be.
e. What you will be will depend on the perspective you have.
1.6. Understand nature’s practical lessons.
a. Maximize your evolution.
b. Remember “no pain, no gain.”
c. It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one’s limits, which is painful.
1.7. Pain + Reflection = Progress
a. Go to the pain rather than avoid it.
b. Embrace tough love.
1.8. Weigh second and third-order consequences.
1.9. Own your outcomes.
1.10. Look at the machine from the higher level.
a. Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes.
b. By comparing your outcomes with your goals, you can determine how to modify your machine.
c. Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine.
d. The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others’ weaknesses again and again.
e. Successful people are those who can go above themselves to see things objectively and manage those things to shape change.
i. When encountering weakness you have four choices:
1. You can deny them (which is what most people do).
2. You can accept them and work at them in order to try to convert them into strengths (which might or might not work depending on your ability to change).
3. You can accept your weaknesses and find ways around them.
4. Or, you can change what you are going after.
f. Asking others who are strong in areas where you are weak to help you is a great skill that you should develop no matter what, as it will help you develop guardrails that will prevent you from doing what you shouldn’t be doing.
G. Because it is difficult to see oneself objectively, you need to rely on the input of others and the whole body of evidence.
H. If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want.
1. Don’t confuse what you wish were true with what really is true.
2. Don’t worry about looking good – worry instead about achieving your goals.
3. Don’t overweight first-order consequences relative to second and third-order ones.
4. Don’t’ let pain stand in the way of progress.
5. Don’t blame bad outcomes on anyone but yourself.
BAD: Avoid facing “harsh realities.”
GOOD: Face “harsh realities
BAD: Worry about appearing ood.
GOOD: Worry about achieving your goal.
BAD: Make your decisions on the basis of first-order consequences.
GOOD: Make your decisions on the basis of first, second, and third-order
consequences.
BAD: Allow pain to stand in the way of progress.
GOOD: Understand how to manage pain to produce progress.
BAD: Don’t hold yourself and others accountable.
GOOD: Hold yourself and others accountable.
2. Use the 5-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life
2.1. Have clear goals.
a. Prioritize: While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want.
b. Don’t confuse goal with desires.
c. Decide what you really want in life by reconciling your goals and desires.
d. Don’t mistake the trappings of success with success itself.
e. Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable.
f. Remember that great expectations create great capabilities.
g. Almost nothing can stop you from succeeding if you have a) flexibility and b) self-accountability.
h. Knowing how to deal well with your setbacks is as important as knowing how to
move forward.
2.2. Identify and don’t tolerate problems.
a. View painful problems as potential improvements that are screaming at you.
b. Don’t avoid confronting problems because they are rooted in harsh realities that are unpleasant to look at.
c. Be specific in identifying your problems.
d. Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem.
e. Distinguish big problems from small ones.
f. Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it.
2.3. Diagnose problems to get at their root causes.
a. Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.”
b. Distinguish proximate causes from root causes.
c. Recognize that knowing what someone (including you) is like will tell you what you can expect from them.
2.4. Design a plan.
a. Go back before you go forward.
b. Think about your problem as a set of outcomes produced by a machine.
c. Remember that there are typically many paths to achieving your goals.
d. Think of your plan as being like a movie script in that you visualize who will do that through time.
e. Write down your plan for everyone to see and to measure your progress against.
f. Recognize that it doesn’t take a lot of time to design a good plan.
2.5. Push through to completion.
a. Great planners who don’t execute their plans go nowhere.
b. Good work habits are vastly underrated.
c. Establish clear metrics to make certain that you are following your plan.
2.6. Remember that weaknesses don’t matter if you find solutions.
a. Look at the patterns of your mistakes and identify at which step in the 5-step process you typically fail.
b. Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success: find yours and deal with it.
2.7. Understand your own and others’ mental maps and humility.
3. Be Radically Open-Minded
3.1. Recognize your two barriers.
a. Understand your ego barrier.
i. Your subliminal defense mechanisms that make it hard for you to accept mistakes and weaknesses.
b. Your two “yous’ fight to control you.
i. Your higher level (logical/conscious) and lower level (emotional/subconscious) “you”.
c. Understand your blind spot barrier.
i. Areas where your way of thinking prevents you from seeing things accurately.
3.2. Practice radical open-mindedness
a. Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important that whatever it is you do know.
b. Recognize that decision making is a two-step process: First take in all the relevant information, then decide.
c. Don’t’ worry about looking good; worry about achieving your goal.
d. Realize that you can’t put out with taking in.
e. Recognize that to gain the perspective that comes from seeing things through another’s eyes, you must suspend judgement for a time – only by empathizing can you properly evaluate another point of view.
f. Realize that you’re looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer that
you can come up with yourself.
i. Ask yourself: “Am I seeing this just through my own eyes?”
g. Be clear on whether you are arguing or seeking to understand, and think about which is most appropriate based on your and others’ believability.
3.3. Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement
a. Approach conversation in a way that conveys that you’re just trying to understand. Use questions rather than statements. Be calm, logical, and respectful.
3.4. Triangulate your view with believable people who are willing disagree.
a. Plan for the worst-case scenario to make it as good as possible.
3.5. Recognize the signs of closed-mindedness and open-mindedness that you should watch out for.
1. Close-minded people don’t want their ideas challenged. Open-minded people are more curious about why there is a disagreement.
2. Close-minded people are more likely to make statements than ask questions. Open-minded people genuinely believe they could be wrong; the questions they ask are genuine.
3. Close-minded people focus much more on being understood than on understanding others. Open-minded people always feel compelled to see things through others’ eyes.
4. Close-minded people say things like “I could be wrong…but here’s my opinion.”
Open-minded people know when to make statements and when to ask
questions.
5. Close-minded people block others from speaking. Open-minded people are
always more interested in listening than in speaking; they encourage others to
voice their views.
6. Closed-minded people have trouble holding two thoughts simultaneously in theirs
minds. Open-minded people can take in the thoughts of others without losing their ability to think well.
7. Closed-minded people lack a deep sense of humility. Open-minded people approach everything with a deep-seated fear that they may be wrong.
3.6 Understand how you can become radically open-minded.
a. Regularly use pain as your guide toward quality reflection.
b. Make being open-minded a habit.
c. Get to know your blind spots.
d. If a number of different believable people say you are doing something wrong, and you are the only one who doesn’t see it that way, assume that you are probably biased. Be objective!
e. Meditate.
f. Be evidence-based and encourage others to be the same.
g. Do everything in your power to help others also be open-minded.
h. Use evidence-based decision-making tools.
i. Know when it’s best to stop fighting and have faith in your decision-making process.
4. Understand That People Are Wired Very Differently
4.1. Understand the power that comes from knowing how you and others are wired.
a. We are born with attributes that can both help us and hurt us, depending on their application.
4.2. Meaningful work and meaningful relationships aren’t just nice things we chose for ourselves – they are genetically programmed into us.
4.3. Understand the great brain battles and how to control them to get what “you” want.
a. Realize that the conscious mind is in a battle with the subconscious mind.
b. Know that the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking.
c. Reconcile your feelings and your thinking.
d. Choose your habits well.
e. Train your “lower-level you” with kindness and persistence to build the right habits.
f. Understand the differences between right-brained and left-brained thinking.
g. Understand how much the brain can and cannot change.
4.4. Find out what you and others are like.
a. Introversion vs. extroversion.
i. Introverts focus on the inner world and get their energy from ideas, memories, and experiences while extroverts are externally focused and get their energy from being with people.
b. Intuiting or. sensing.
i. Seeing the big picture vs. seeing details.
c. Thinking or. feeling.
i. Logical analysis of objective fasts vs. focus on harmony between people.
d. Planning vs. perceiving.
e. Creators vs. refiners vs. advancers vs. executors vs. flexors
f. Focusing on tasks vs. focusing on goals.
i. Some people are focused on daily tasks while others are focused on their goals and how to achieve them.
4.5. Getting the right people in the right roles in support of your goal is the key to succeeding at whatever you choose to accomplish.
a. Manage yourself and orchestrate others to get what you want.
5. Learn How to Make Decisions Effectively
5.1. Recognize that 1) the biggest threat to good decision-making is harmful emotions, and 2) decision-making is a two-step process (first learning and then deciding).
5.2. Synthesize the situation at hand.
a. One of the most important decisions you can make is who you ask questions of.
b. Don’t believe everything you hear.
c. Everything looks bigger up close.
d. New is overvalued relative to great.
e. Don’t over squeeze dots.
5.3. Synthesize the situation through time.
a. Keep in mind both the rates of change and the levels of things, and the relationships between them.
b. Be imprecise.
c. Remember the 80/20 Rule and know what the key 20 percent is.
d. Be an imperfectionist.
5.4 Navigate levels effectively.
a. Use the terms “above the line” and “below the line” to establish what level a
conversation is on.
i. Above the line addresses the main points and a below the line focuses on the sub-points.
b. Remember that decisions need to be made at the appropriate level, but they should also be consistent across levels.
5.5. Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.
5.6. Make your decisions as expected value calcuations.
a. Raising the probability of being right is valuable no matter what your probability of
being right already is.
b. Knowing when not to bet is as important as knowing what bets are probably worth making.
c. The best choices are the ones that have more pros than cons, not those that don’t have any cons at all.
5.7. Prioritize by weighing the value of additional information against the cost of not deciding.
a. All of your “must-dos” must be above the bar before you do your “like-to-dos.”
b. Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things, which is better than not having time to deal with the important things.
c. Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities.
5.8. Simplify!
5.9. Use principles.
1. Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your
decision.
2. Write the criteria down as a principle.
3. Think about those criteria when you have an outcome to assess, and refine them
before the next “one of those” comes along.
5.10. Believability weight your decision making.
1. Don’t value your own believability more than is logical and 2. Distinguish between who is more or less credible.
5.11. Convert your principles into algorithms and have the computer make decisions alongside you.
5.12. Be cautious about trusting AI without having deep understanding. In order to have the best life possible, you have to:
1) Know what the best decisions are and
2) Have the courage to make them

Barking Up the Wrong Tree – Eric Barker

Takeaways
Chapter One: Should We Play It Safe
● The same traits that make people difficult to deal with can also make them the people who change the world. Creative people are more arrogant, dishonest, and disorganized.
● In terms of knowing what you want in life, means being aware of your strengths. To find out what you’re good at, use “feedback analysis”. When you undertake a project, write down what you expect to happen, that later note the result. Over time you’ll see what you do well and what you don’t.
● Pick the right pond. Pick the environments that work for you. What companies, institutions, and situations value what I do? Context affects everyone.
● Know thyself and pick the right pond. Identify your strengths and pick the right place to apply them.

Chapter 2: Do Nice Guys Finish Last?
● As long as you keep your boss or bosses happy, performance really doesn’t matter that much. Flattery is effective.
● DON’T BE ENVIOUS: Worry only about how well you are doing.
● DON’T BE THE FIRST TO DEFECT: Reciprocity is one of the key elements of influence and winning favor with others. Don’t be afraid to go first.
● RECIPROCATE BOTH COOPERATION AND DEFECTION: Never betray anyone initially.
● DON’T BE TOO CLEVER: You cooperate with me, I cooperate with you. You betray me, I betray you.
● Rule #1: Pick the Right Pond.
○ When you take a job take a long look at the people you’re going to be working with – because odds are you’re going to become like them. If it doesn’t fit who you are, it’s not going to work.
○ Cheating is infectious. Your boss has a much larger effect on your happiness and success than the company at large.
● Rule #2: Cooperate First
○ Be the first to offer. The number one way to succeed at negotiating is that they need to like you.
● Rule #3: Being Selfless Isn’t Saintly, It’s Silly
○ A mere two hours a week of helping others is enough to get maximum benefits.
● Rule #4: Work Hard – But Make Sure It Gets Noticed
○ Every friday send your boss an email summarizing your accomplishments for the week.
○ Your boss does need to like you and notice your work.
● Rule #5: Think Long Term and Make Others Think Long Term
○ Bad behavior is strong in the short term but good behavior wins over the long term. So make things long term.
○ People are always trying to discern two things: whether a potential partner can be trusted and whether he or she is likely to be encountered again. Answers to these two questions will determine what any of us will be motivated to do in the moment.
● Rule #6: Forgive
○ Your not perfect and others aren’t either.

Chapter 3: Do Quitters Never Win and Winners Never Quit?
● Optimists and pessimists shape their stories of the world according to the three P’s: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.
○ Pessimists tell themselves that bad events
■ Will last a long time or forever
■ Are universal
■ Are their own fault
○ Optimists tell themselves that bad events
■ Are temporary
■ Have a specific cause and aren’t universal
■ Are not their fault
● Thinking about death reminds us of what is truly important in life. There is a distinction between Resume values and Eulogy values. Resume values are the things that bring external success like money and promotions. Eulogy values are about character. Am I kind, trustworthy, or courageous?
● Picture your funeral. What do you want them to say?
● Engaging in “cognitive reappraisal” and telling ourselves a different story about what is happening can subvert willpower. Change the story and you change your behavior.
● “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
● Whiny neutered goats fly. All good games have these in common, WNGF:
○ They’re Winnable
○ They have Novel challenges and Goals
○ They provide Feedback
WINNABLE
● Good games are winnable by design. You have control in a game and what you do is important. Your actions make a difference so you know your time is well spent.
NOVEL CHALLENGES
● Good games continually have new levels, new enemies, new achievements. Our brains love novelty. Good games are designed to trigger flow. Flow is produced by the specific combination of self-chosen goals, personally optimized obstacles, and continuous feedback. To make work fun, add challenges.
GOALS
FEEDBACK
● The most motivating thing is progress in meaningful work. Celebrate small wins. Take a moment at the end of each work day to ask yourself, “What one thing can I do to make progress on important work tomorrow?” Give yourself a clear idea on how to measure or achieve that.
● Keep trying new things, it makes you luckier. If you don’t know what to be gritty at
yet, you need to try lots of things – knowing you’ll quit most of them – to find the answer. Once you discover your focus, devote 5 to 10 % of your time to little experiments to make sure you keep learning and growing.
● After you dream, think, “What’s getting in the way of my fantasy? And what will I do to overcome that? For any obstacle, just thinking, if X happens, I’ll handle it by doing Y makes a huge difference.
● WOOP – wish, outcome, obstacle, plan – is applicable to most any of your goals.
● First, you dream . What’s the thing you wish for? What are you fantasizing about?Really crystalize in your mind and see the outcome you desire.Then face reality. What obstacle is in the way? Then address it. What’s your plan?

Chapter 4: It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know (Unless It Really Is What You
Know)
● The secret to networking. Be a friend. Make friends. The rule of thumb when making friends: be socially optimistic. Assume other people will like you and they probably will.
Fundamentals of friendship
● Similarities. People who are like us. Enjoy similar things or even dislike similar things.
● Listen and encourage others. Seek someone else’s thoughts and opinions without judging them. Stop thinking about what you are going to say next and focus on what their saying right now. Give sincere compliments. Don’t try to play it cool or impress. We prefer warmth to competence.
● Be a giver. Offer to help people. Then people say they’re having trouble with something, try to find a way you can help.
● Start with the friends you already have. Go through your contacts and text a few people each week you haven’t talked to in a long time.
● Find your “Super Connectors”. You met the vast majority of your friends through a handful of “super friends.” If you look through your contact list, you’ll find that you met many of them through a small group of people. Reach out to those “superfriends” and ask, “Who do you think I should meet?”
● Make the time – and the budget. Commit a specific amount of time and money on
networking.
● Join groups.
● Always follow up. What makes close friendships endure is simply staying in touch every two weeks. Checking in every now and then matters.
Five principles to finding a mentor:
● Be a worthy pupil.
● Study them, really study them
● Wasting a mentor’s time is a mortal sin
○ Never ask a mentor a question Google can easily answer for you.
● Follow up
○ Stay in the picture. You are easily forgotten by busy people, remember that. Find ways to stay relevant and fresh.
● Make them proud. Get a second mentor.
Steps to having difficult conversations
● Keep calm and slow down
○ Don’t get angry. Pretend you are talking to a small child. Behavior is contagious.
● Use active listening.
○ Ask open ended questions that start with “what” or “how”. Don’t judge. Just listen and acknowledge.
● Label emotions
○ Respond to their emotions by saying, “Sounds like you’re angry” or “Sounds like this really upsets you.” Giving a name to emotions helps reduce their intensity
● Make them think
○ Use questions, not statements.
*Gratidude is the quality that makes people want to spend more time with you and the
cornerstone of long-lasting relationships. Thanks the people around you. Write a letter of gratitude to someone. Say what they did for you and how it affected your life.

Chapter 5: Believe in Yourself….Sometimes
● People who believe they can succeed see opportunities, where others see threats. They are not afraid of uncertainty or ambiguity, they embrace it. They take more risks and achieve greater returns. They do not feel like victims of fate. They see their success as a function of their own motivation and ability – not luck, random chance, or fate.
● Believing in yourself is nice, forgiving yourself is better.
○ Self-compassion beats self esteem.
● Adjust for your natural level of self-esteem
● Absolutely have to have more confidence? Earn it.
○ Confidence is a result of success, not a cause. The surest path is to become really good at what you do. Focus on improving your skills, not doing well or looking good. “Get better” goals increase motivations, make tasks more interesting, and replenish energy.
● Don’t be a faker.

Chapter 6: Work, Work, Work…or Work-Life Balance?
● You need to ask What do I want? Otherwise you’re going to get what they want.
We must become “choosers” instead of “pickers”. A picker selects from the options available, leading us into false dichotomies created by the options we see in front of us. But a chooser is thoughtful enough to conclude that perhaps none of the available alternatives are satisfactory, that he may have to create the right alternative.
Four metrics that matter most
1. HAPPINESS: having feelings of pleasure or contentment in and about your life
2. ACHIEVEMENT: achieving accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for
3. SIGNIFICANCE: having a positive impact on people you care about
4. LEGACY: establishing your values or accomplishments in ways that help others find success.
Interpreting the feelings these need to provide:
1. HAPPINESS = ENJOYING
2. ACHIEVEMENT = WINNING
3. SIGNIFICANCE = COUNTING (TO OTHERS)
4. LEGACY = EXTENDING
“Good enough is almost always good enough.”
● The most effective method for reducing stress is having a plan. When we think about obstacles ahead of time and consider how to overcome them, we feel in control. A feeling of control motivates us to act. Just the feeling of control, not even being in control.
● Track Your Time
○ Write down where each hour of your day goes for a week. Note which hour is contributing to which of the big four or if the hour is going into a “none of the above” bucket. When do you waste the most time?
● Talk to Your Boss
● To-Do Lists Are Evil. Schedule Everything.
○ Decide when you want to leave work and you’ll know how many hours you have. Slot in what you need to get done by priority. Most of us don’t schedule work, we schedule interruptions. At least an hour a day, preferably morning time, needs to be “protected time.” An hour everyday where you get real work done without interruption.
○ Plan out your free time as well.
○ Deal with busy work in “batches.” Schedule a few intervals where you process emails, return phone calls, and shuffle the papers that need shuffling. After that session is over, turn off notifications, silence the phone, and get back to important stuff.
○ Learn to say no. “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.”
● Control Your Context
○ Environment matters. It influences us to a great degree. Think about how to change your environment.
○ Use the “twenty second rule”. Make the things that you should do twenty seconds easier to start and make the things you shouldn’t be doing twenty seconds harder.
● End the Day Right – And on Time
○ Cal Newport recommends a “shutdown ritual” in which you take the time to close out the day’s business and prepare for tomorrow. Write down the things you need to take care of tomorrow, which can settle your brain and help you relax.
Conclusion: What Makes a Successful Life?
“What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”
● Success is about the alignment between who you are and where you choose to be. The right skill in the right role. A good person surrounded by good people. “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people

Headstrong – Dave Asprey

Takeaways
Head Start
● Certain foods, products in our environment, types of light, and even forms of exercise can weaken your brain.
● All useless stimuli – potential threats, ringing phones, flashing lights, and so on use energy in your brain.
● Forgetfulness, low energy, moodiness, and inability to focus are all symptoms of low brain energy.
● Stop blaming yourself for running out of willpower – it’s not a moral failing!
● Reduce the amount of stimuli in your environment when you want to focus – turn off the phone, limit alerts from your computer, cover the windows.
● Make the most important decisions first every day, before you can experience decision fatigue.

Mighty Mitochondria
● The cells in your brain, heart, and retina have the most mitochondria and are the ones to suffer first when energy demand exceeds supply.
● Your hormones, blood sugar levels, diet, and lifestyle all affect the function of your mitochondria.
● From age thirty to age seventy, the average person experiences a 50 % decline in mitochondrial efficiency.
● If you have big problems with energy, have your advanced thyroid hormone levels checked by a functional medicine doctor.
● If your energy crashes after meals, check your blood sugar levels either using a home glucose meter or a functional medicine doctor.
● Pay attention to your energy dips throughout the day – perhaps you ate something or were exposed to something that damaged your mitochondria.

Become a Neuro-master
● Your neurons require massive amounts of energy to function and they die when they don’t get it.
● Myelin is made of fat and insulates the communication path between neurons.
● You can grow new neurons (neurogenesis) at any age, and it is possible to increase your rate of neurogenesis by five times!
● Eat more good fat, particularly healthy saturated fat from grass fed butter and meat.
● Eat a lot less sugar.
● Manage your stress.
● Have more sex, but don’t ejaculate every day.

Inflammation
● Your brain is the first part of the body to suffer when you are chronically inflamed.
● When your mitochondria are inflamed, they are less efficient at making energy because electrons have to travel farther to get to the same place.
● Nearly every cause of lowered energy production now lays the groundwork for developing chronic diseases later.
● Pay attention to changes in your muffin top; the same foods that cause your body to become inflamed are also making your brain foggy and inflamed.
● Spend some time outdoors barefoot to soak up the earth’s negative charge and get some UV and infrared light.
● Have your inflammation levels checked by a functional medicine doctor. Substances such as CRP (C-reactive protein), homocysteine, and Lp-PLA2
(lipoprotein-associated phospholipase) are good markers to review for inflammation.

Brain Fuel
● Polyphenols are antioxidants that protect your gut, increase your rate of neurogenesis, play a role in apoptosis, and lower inflammation – and your body needs fat to absorb them.
● You need certain nutrients to make the most important neurotransmitters for your
brain. The best foods for this include beef, almonds, eggs, lamb, and wild salmon.
● Your mitochondria make energy more efficiently with ketones than they do with glucose.
● Always eat low-sugar fruits and veggies with a healthy fat source such as grass-fed butter.
● Eat more fish to get plenty of essential fatty acids for your brain.
● Use Brain Octane Oil or restrict carbs so your brain has access to ketones.

Brain-Inhibiting Foods
● Dairy protein, gluten, trans fats, and vegetable oils cause inflammation in everyone.
● Mold toxins are particularly toxic to your mitochondria and are commonly found in grains, coffee, dried fruit, wine, beer, chocolate, nuts, and corn.
● You can damage healthy fats by cooking them at high temperatures that make them toxic.
● Never eat fried food!
● Buy organic produce whenever possible.

Avoid Toxins and Improve Your Body’s Detox Systems
● About 25 percent of us are genetically sensitive to mold and get very sick when exposed. The rest of us have symptoms that are very subtle and might be written off as just a bad day.
● Mold toxins, heavy metals, and some pharmaceutical drugs are directly toxic to your mitochondria.
● Your body stores toxins in fat, so anything you do to break up the fat in your body will help you detox.
● Check your home and office for leaks and address any potential mold issues right away.
● Keep track of how you feel in different environments – you may realize that one or more of the places you spend a lot of time in contain toxins.
● Talk to your doctor about how your prescription drugs may be affecting your mitochondria.

Your Brain on Light, Air, and Cold
● LED and CFL bulbs have too much blue light, which damages your mitochondria. This is junk light!
● About half of us have Irlen syndrome, which means we have trouble processing certain frequencies of light. This may be why you get tired while reading or driving at night.
● To teach your cells how to use oxygen more efficiently, temporarily expose them to less oxygen than they’re used to.
● Buy some red LED light to balance out all of the blue light your eyes are getting from your screens.
● Wear sunglasses in an indoor environment with lots of junk light.
● Turn the water all the way to cold for the last 30 seconds of your shower.

Sleep Harder, Meditate Faster, Exercise Less
● When it comes to sleep, focus on quality more than quantity.
● Meditation changes your brain on a structural level – for the better.
● You need lots of time to recover in between intense bouts of exercise – at least several days.
● Jump on a trampoline or do jumping jacks to shake the water in your cells and make them more EZ.
● Get some extra sleep tonight to give your brain a chance to form pathways between neurons and solidify new memories.
● Try breathing in for 5 seconds, holding for 5 seconds, breathing out for 5 seconds, and holding the breath out for 5 seconds. Do it 5 times in a row.

The Two – Week Head Strong Program
Eat to Fuel Your Brain

Proteins
● Pastured eggs
● Pastured bacon
● Grass fed lamb
● Grass fed beef
● Pastured pork
● Wild salmon fillets

Fats
● Brain octane oil
● Grass-fed butter
● Coconut milk – Full fat
● Olive oil
● Avocados

Herbs and Spices
● Pink Himalayan Salt
● Vanilla extract
● Cayenne powder
● Oregano
● Rosemary
● Mint
● Cilantro
● Basil
● Fresh ginger
● Cumin
● Turmeric

Veggies
● Red bell peppers
● Asparagus
● Carrots
● Iceberg lettuce
● Zucchini
● Romaine lettuce
● Celery
● Thai Chilies

Fruits
● Frozen blueberries (organic)
● Lemons
● Limes
● Blackberries
● Raspberries

Nuts
● Pistachios
● Almond butter
● Pistachio butter

Miscellaneous
● Bulletproof coffee (or single-estate, washed coffee from high elevations in
Central America)
● Matcha green tea powder
● White rice
● Gluten-free, grain free bread or crackers
● 85% dark chocolate
● Apple cider vinegar

Headstrong Lifestyle
One and done
● Set up your lights
● Set up your sleep cave
● Maximize your technology
● Invest in tinted lenses

Daily
Any time of day
● Cold shower or facial ice bath
● Mitochondrial mediation
● Meaningful movement
In the Morning
● Get natural sunlight – at least 10 minutes
In the Afternoon
● Get natural sunlight or violet light
● Switch to decaf after 2 pm
At night
● Take 1 tablespoon of raw honey
● Dim the lights 2 hours before bed or switch to candles
● Do a breathing exercise
● Turn off your Wi-Fi and router
● Put your phone in airplane mode
● Go to bed by 11 p.m.
Once a Week
● HIIT-Back Exercise
● Resistance Workout
Head Strong Supplements
Low-Impact Supplements
Caffeine: 1 to 5 cups daily, coffee, before 2 p.m.
BCAAS: 5 g daily, before, during, or right after exercise
Magnesium: 600-800 g daily, mainly in the morning
Vitamin D: 5000 IU daily in the morning
Medium-Impact Supplements
Activated Coconut Charcoal: 1 to 4 capsules daily, before bed
Creatine: 20 g daily (5 g 4 times daily) for one week, then 5 g daily to maintain
Krill Oil: 1,000 mg daily, with bulletproof coffee or fatty meals for best absorption
High-Impact Supplements
Ketoprime: 100 mg one or more times per day (up to 10 times) before workouts, anytime you feel symptoms of mitochondrial (headaches, tiredness, brain fog, weakness, eye stress, etc), also before bed.
Glutathione: 500 mg or more daily, morning or night on an empty stomach. Skip one or
two days a week to avoid building tolerance.

It’s Not All About Me: The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone – Robin Dreeke

Takeaways
● Technique 1: Establishing Artificial Time Constraints
○ Let the other person know that there is an end in sight, and it is really close.
○ Use conversational nonthreatening “themes’ in your dialogues.
○ Most humans assess new situations and people for threat before anything else.
○ Nonverbal matching can be used effectively if done lightly and in non-obvious ways.
● Technique 2: Accommodating Non-verbals
○ Smiling is the number one nonverbal technique you should utilize to look more accommodating.
○ The main objective in all engagements is simple; the person you are engaging with must leave the conversation and interaction feeling better for having met you.
● Technique 3: Slower Rate of Speech
○ Purposefully slow down your delivery and take pauses.
● Technique 4: Sympathy or Assistance Theme
○ The importance of keeping the request easy and non threatening cannot be overemphasized. Keep the requests “light”
● Technique 5: Ego Suspension
○ Suspending your ego is the most challenging and effective techniques of all.
○ It means putting other individuals’ wants, needs, and perceptions of reality ahead of your own.
○ Continue to encourage the other person to talk about their story, and neglect your own need to share what you think is a great story.
○ People who allow others to continue talking without taking their own turn are regarded as the best conversationalists.
● Technique 6: Validate Others
○ Validation Technique 1: Listening
■ Most of us have difficulty keeping from interjecting our own thoughts, ideas, and stories during a conversation. True validation coupled with ego suspension means that you have no story to offer, that you are there simply to hear theirs. A great conversationalist and rapport builder will put the entire focus on the other individual.
○ Validation Technique 2: Thoughtfulness
■ Demonstrate thoughtfulness in your actions and your words to every individual in your life.
○ Validation Technique 3: Validate Thoughts and Opinions
■ Most humans are very self-centered. They naturally make a connection with others who “think like we do.” One of the most effective techniques is to have them come up with your idea and then you validate it.
● Technique 7: Ask…How? When? Why?
○ A key step to strengthening the emotional connection in any relationship is to anchor or solidify the relationship with “how, when, and why” questions.
○ The key is to ask open ended questions.
○ Some techniques associated with “how, when, and why”
■ Minimal encouragers: simple head nods or verbal confirmations that you are paying attention and listening, such as “uh huh,” “yes,” “I understand,” etc.
■ Reflective questions: Restating what the other person just said but as a question.
■ Emotional labeling
■ Paraphrasing: great at helping you remember the content of the conversation for later recall. People are used to others not paying attention.
■ Pauses: Creates a break in the dialogue so you can think about what you want to say next, rather than continue to go on with no thought. Also creates a slightly awkward silence that hopefully the other person will fill with their own content.
■ Summarize: Will act like paraphrasing in that it will demonstrate to the other person that you were listening and will help you remember the content of the conversation.
● Technique 8: Connect with Quid Pro Quo
○ Quid pro quo refers to the art of giving a little information about yourself to get a little from others.
○ Two situations to utilize it: First, when you attempt to converse with someone who is either very introverted, guarded, or both. The second instance is when the person you are conversing with suddenly becomes very aware about how much they have been speaking, and they suddenly feel awkward.
● Technique 9: Gift Giving (Reciprocal Altruism)
○ Gifts can range from non-material compliments to tangible material gifts.
○ You can give the gift of “focus”. They may not be conscious of the gift they are receiving but the desire to reciprocate remains strong.
○ Carry breath mints or hand sanitizer on you at all times.
○ When people give gifts or do kind deeds with an agenda, it demeans the value of the gift, and has the appearance of insincerity. The key to being a successful gift giver is to manage your expectations and keep the focus on them.
● Technique 10: Manage Expectations
○ Every conversation or engagement with someone has an agenda. The people who can mask their agenda or shift it to something altruistic will have great success with building rapport.
○ If you can manage expectations before an encounter and ensure the conversation is for their benefit and not yours, you will greatly enhance your chances for success.

Every Hand Revealed – Gus Hansen

Takeaways
● The best way to deal with high antes in a tournament is to be very aggressive.
● The more players, the stronger holding you need to take down a pot.
● 3 Types of tournament players near the bubble:
○ Survivors: Just trying to hang on, playing with only premium hands.
○ Accumulators: Playing a lot of hands, not folding much
○ Regulators: Unpredictable
○ It is critical to know what types you’re up against at the bubble.
● 6 handed the number of hands you play should be around 30% for the following reasons:
○ The blinds come around much faster.
○ Your average cost per hand has increased.
○ The number of opponents has decreased.
● Keep your cool and give away less information than you gather.
● One of the best ways to improve your game is to have long discussions with your peers.
● Guidelines when considering to call a pre-flop all-in:
○ Your own cards
○ The pot odds
○ Supposed strength of opponent’s hand
○ If your winning odds exceed your pot odds, calling is the right play.
● The best way to deal with small stack all-ins:
○ Keep the pot odds in perspective and play accordingly
○ Instead of raising aimlessly, analyze the situation and look a couple of moves ahead.
○ Be aware of what possible counter measures might be available to your opponents
○ Don’t get stuck on standard raises but use your imagination
● The continuation bet is a very important strategy in no limit tournament strategy. Always aim to make continuation bets around 80% of the time.
● It is a lot better to lead out and send the message right away rather than leave the initiative to the raiser.
● The urgency which you proceed depends on your chip stack compared to the blinds and antes. “M” is a concept that tells you how many more rounds you can afford with your current chip stack.
○ M > 20 = deep stacked
○ 20>M>7 = medium stacked
○ M>7>3 = short stacked, prepare for crash landing
○ M<3 = goodbye
● Slow playing before the flop is not a good idea unless you’re holding AA or maybe KK.
● If you don’t know what you’re up against you’re better off letting your opponent do the guessing. By moving all-in you put them to the test and eliminate mistakes you might make later in the hand.
● When pots reach a certain size you have to consider your options carefully. More often than not the all-in play has more merit than other in-between plays do.
○ Maximum pressure
○ Your opponent has to have a hand to consider calling
○ You will never get bluffed
○ It might be a mistake pushing all-in, but at least it’s gonna be the last one you make.
● To proceed with mediocre hands: raise and see what happens.
● Reraising: picking your spots carefully is the most important angle
● Limping is a mistake! He never does on the button, 1 off the button, in super high ante structures, with high cards

Unlimited Power – Tony Robbins

Takeaways
● Information is not enough. Knowledge is only potential power until it is used in a
productive way. Successful people have the ability to take action.
● The quality of our lives is not determined by what happens to us but by what we do about what happens.

The Ultimate Success Formula
1. Know your outcome – what you want
2. Take action
3. Develop the sensory acuity to recognize the responses and results you’re getting from your actions and note if they are getting you closer or further from your goals.

Seven Fundamental Success Character Traits
1. Passion
2. Belief
3. Strategy
4. Clarity of Values
5. Energy
6. Bonding Power
7. Mastery of Communication
● “The few who do” versus “the many who talk”
● Find models of excellence. Find what actions they took.
● Three forms of actions that correspond to results:
○ Belief system
○ Mental syntax – how a person organizes their thoughts
○ Physiology
●State
● Understanding state is the key to understand change and achieving excellence. Our behavior is a result of the state we’re in.
● There are enabling states like confidence, love, inner strength, joy, ecstasy, belief and paralyzing states like confusion, depression, fear, anxiety, sadness, frustration.
● A state is the sum total of our experience at any moment in time. Most happen without any conscious direction on our part.
● What and how you picture things, as well as what and how you say things to yourself about the situation, create the state you’re in, and thus the kinds of behaviors you produce.
● To control our states we must control and consciously direct our internal representations and physiologies.
● Your internal representation and experience of an event isn’t precisely what happened but rather a personalized, internal representation.
● If you’ve ever produced a successful result, you can reproduce it by taking the same mental and physical actions you did then.
Belief
● A belief is any guiding principle, dictum, faith, or passion that can provide meaning and direction in life. The prearranged, organized filters to our perceptions of the world.
● The birth of excellence begins with the awareness that our beliefs are a choice. You can choose beliefs that limit you or support you. Choose the ones that are conducive to success.
● Where they come from:
○ The environment
○ Events, small or large
○ Through knowledge
○ Our past results
○ Creating in your mind of the experience you desire in the future as if it were here now.

The Seven Lies of Success
1. Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves us.
2. There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.
3. Whatever happens, take responsibility.
4. It’s not necessary to understand everything to be able to use everything.
5. People are your greatest resource.
6. Work is play.
7. There’s no abiding success without commitment.
● If we have a negative image that presented in big, bright, potent, resonant form, the brain gives us a big, bright, potent, resonant bad experience. But if we take that negative image and shrink it, darken it, make it a still frame, then we take away its power, and the brain will respond accordingly.
● If your brain keeps running dialogues in your head, just turn down the volume. Make the voice in your head softer, further away, and weaker.
● If you find out what specifically makes you feel motivated to do just about anything, then you know exactly what you have to do with any experience to make yourself feel motivated. From that motivated state, you can get yourself to take action.
● Frustration, depression, and ecstasy aren’t things. They are processes created by specific mental images, sounds, and physical actions.
● The Swish Pattern takes internal representations that normally produce states of resourcefulness and causes them to automatically trigger new internal representations.
○ Step 1: Identify the behavior you want to change. Make an internal representation of that behavior as you see it through your eyes.
○ Step 2: Once you have a clear picture of the behavior you want to change, create a different representation, a picture of yourself as you would if you made the desired change, and what that change would mean to you.
○ Step 3: “Swish” the two pictures so that the unresourceful experience automatically triggers the resourceful experience.
○ Start by making a bright picture of the behavior you want to change, then in the bottom, right hand corner of the picture, make a dark picture of the way you want to be. Then in less than one second, take the small picture and have it grow in size and brightness and burst through the behavior you no longer desire. Say the word, “whoosh” with all the excitement and enthusiasm you can.
○ We must ask ourselves regularly, “If I continue to represent things to myself this way, what will likely be the final result in my life? What direction is my present behavior taking me, and is that where I want to go? What are my mental and physical actions creating?”
Physiology
● One way to get yourself in a state that supports you achieving any outcome is to “act” as if you were already there. Put yours physiology in the state you’d be in if you were already effective.
● If you adopt a vital, dynamic, excited physiology, you automatically adopt that same kind of state. We can change how we are standing, breathing, and the tone of voice we use.
● Congruence is power. Those who succeed are able to commit all their resources toward achieving a task. If the signals your body provides the brain are weak or conflicting, the brain doesn’t have a clear sense of what to do.
● One way to develop congruence is to model the physiologies of people who are congruent. The essence of modeling is to discover which part of the brain an effective person uses in a given situation.
● Next time you see someone who is extremely successful, copy gestures.
Energy
● The most effective way to breath to cleanse your system: Inhale one count, hold for four counts, exhale two counts. Stop and take ten deep breaths like this at least three times a day.
Setting Outcomes
1. State your outcome in positive terms.
2. Be as specific as possible.
a. How does your outcome look, sound, feel, smell? Specific completion date.
3. Have an evidence procedure.
a. How will you know the outcome has been realized?
4. Be in control.
5. Verify that your outcome is sound and desirable.
● If you knew you could not fail, what would you do? If you were absolutely certain of success, what activities would you pursue, what actions would you take?
Precision
Five guidelines for asking intelligently
1. Ask specifically
2. Ask someone who can help you
3. Create value for the person you’re asking
4. Ask with focused, congruent belief
5. Ask until you get what you want
● Avoid words like “good”, “bad”, “better”, “worse”.
Rapport
● How do we create rapport? By creating or discovering things in common. Also through mirroring or creating a common physiology with the person.
● Practice mirroring people you’re with, their gestures and posture, rate and location of breathing, the tone, tempo, and volume of their voice.
Meta-programs
● Meta-programs are the keys to how a person processes information, how they form their internal representations and direct their behavior.
○ Moving toward something or moving away.
○ External and internal frames of reference.
○ Sorting by self or sorting by others.
○ Matchers or mismatches
○ What it takes to convince someone of something.
○ A person’s working style
● Two ways to change meta-programs: One is by significant emotional events, the other is by consciously deciding to do so.
● Three phrases in the agreement frame:
○ “I appreciate that…”
○ “I respect and…”
○ “I agree and…”
● Try arguing for something you don’t believe to surprise yourself by coming up with new perspectives.
● Our behavior patterns aren’t carved into us, we can interrupt the pattern and try something new.
Reframing
● Nothing in the world has any inherent meaning, only how we perceive things. We tend to frame things based upon how we have perceived them in the past.
● Our past experiences filter out our ability to see what is really happening in the world. There are multiple ways to see or experience any situation.
● The key to success is to consistently represent your experience in ways that support you in producing great results.
● Reframing is changing a negative statement into a positive one by changing the frame of reference used to perceive the experience.
○ Context reframing involves taking an experience that seems bad and showing how that same experience is actually a great advantage in another context.
○ Content reframing involves taking the exact same situation and changing what it means.
● Make a list of five things you’re doing right now that you’re pretty pleased with. Now imagine them even better.
Anchoring
● With anchoring you can create a consistent triggering mechanism that will automatically cause you to create the state you desire in any situation without you having to think about it.
● First, you must put yourself, or the person you’re anchoring, into the specific state you wish to anchor. Then you must consistently provide a specific, unique stimulus as the person experiences the peak of that state.
● Keys to anchoring: Intensity of the State, Timing (Peak of Experience),
Uniqueness of Stimulus, Replication of Stimulus
1. For an anchor to be effective, when you provide the stimulus you must have the person in a fully associated, congruent state, with his full body involved.
2. You must provide the stimulus at the peak of the experience.
3. You should choose a unique stimulus.
4. For an anchor to work, you must replicate it exactly.
● Imagine yourself in a confident state, gently make a fist and say “Yes!” in a powerful tone of voice. Do it 5 or 6 times. Repeat for a couple days. Then see if when you make a fist, your physiology changes to the confident state.
● Use your fingers to install five states into your nervous system.
● Key ingredient of success: The ability to eliminate from your own environment triggers that tend to put you in negative or unresourceful states, while installing positive ones in yourself and others.
Five Keys to Wealth and Happiness
1. You must learn how to handle frustrations
a. Don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all small stuff.
2. You must learn how to handle rejection
a. The word “no” itself has no power. It’s power comes from the way you represent it to yourself. Limited thoughts create limited lives.
b. Success is buried on the other side of rejection. If you can handle rejection, you’ll learn to get everything you want.
3. You must learn how to handle financial pressure.
a. Give away 10% of your income, invest 10%, pay off debts with 10%. Live off 70% of what you make.
4. You must learn how to handle complacency
5. Always give more than you expect to receive.
a. “The secret to living is giving

The Distracted Mind – Adam Gazzaley

Takeaways
● Goal interference occurs when you reach a decision to accomplish a specific goal and something takes place to hinder the successful completion of that goal.
● What distinguishes distractions from interruptions are your intentions about how you choose to manage them: either you attempt to ignore them and carry on with your original goal – distraction – or you engage in them as a simultaneous, secondary goal – interruption.
● In regard to rewards, research shows that novelty is associated with reward processing in our brains. The act of receiving an earlier reward is more highly valued, even if the delayed award has higher overall value.
● We engage in interference-inducing behavior because, from an evolutionary perspective, we are merely acting in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive to seek information. Our current conditions perpetuate this behavior by offering us greater accessibility to feed this drive.
● Areas of cognitive control: 1) attention, 2) working memory, and 3) goal management.
● Our prefrontal cortex separates us from other animals by: the ability to pause in response to a stimulus and enact complex goals in a non reflexive way.
● Ignoring is an active process because it takes resources to filter out what is irrelevant.
● When we simultaneously pursue multiple goals that compete for cognitive control resources, our brains switch between tasks – they do not parallel process.
● Working memory is characterized in two domains: capacity and fidelity. Capacity
refers to the amount of information being stored, how many items can be held in the mind at any given time. Fidelity refers to the quality of the stored internal representations of those items.
● Our brains likely did not evolve true multitasking capabilities because the competition for resources involved in cognitive control would also choke the system and create an energy drain.

Summary of Cognitive Control Limitations
Attention
1. Selectivity is limited by susceptibility to bottom-up influences.
2. Distribution of attention results in diminished performance compared to focused attention.
3. Sustainability of attention over time is limited, especially in extended, boring situations.
4. Processing speed limitations affect both the efficiency of allocation and withdrawal of attention.
Working Memory
1. Capacity, or the number of items that can be actively held in mind, is severely limited.
2. Fidelity, the quality of information maintained in working memory, decays over time and as a result of interference.
Goal Management
1. Multitasking is limited by our inability to effectively parallel process two attention-demanding tasks.
2. Task switching results in costs to accuracy and speed performance.
● To accomplish our ultimate goal of gaining control, the first step is to understand why we are so driven to engage in using new technology with such an extreme multitasking style that it places pressure on our cognitive control abilities and results in so many negative life consequences.
● We are getting more bored with what we are doing and anxious to move on more quickly than ever before. Internal factors of boredom and anxiety influence the perceived benefits of being in an information patch, even if only subconsciously, to offset the value of consuming important information in a sustained manner.
● One possible reason boredom has increased in recent time is the influence of
pervasive short timescale reward cycles in modern media: boredom drives frequent switching to new tasks > rapidly induced rewards > increased rate of boredom in non-stimulating information sources > rapid flattening of resource intake curve > quicker switch times > and so on.
● Skinner described concept of “intermittent reinforcement”. When someone is reinforced only some of the time, and particularly when that occurs on a variable
(unpredictable) schedule, the behavior itself becomes resistant to extinction. Such as there always being an interesting email to read or social media post.
he next time we are bored, our past experiences, having gained reinforcement from our smartphone, will us to self-interrupts even an important source of information, and even our own quiet time.
● The impact of boredom is not just to make us switch between information patches; we also seem to have lost the ability to simply do nothing and endure boredom. This leaves little time for reflection, deep thinking, or even just simply sitting back and letting our random thoughts drive us places we might not have gone.
● The ability to connect with other people anywhere, all the time has put pressure on our expectations of inter-connectivity and has resulted in the emergence of heightened levels of anxiety accompanied with FOMO, nomophobia, and phantom pocket vibrations.
● The more readily available a new patch of information is (or even seems to be), the earlier the time someone will disengage from their current source. Information has never been more accessible.
● We don’t understand the benefits of remaining in an information patch and don’t
appreciate our internal states of anxiety and boredom. We also don’t accurately evaluate the consequences of moving to a new patch or understand the performance costs of multitasking and task switching.
● People are largely unaware of the amount of time they end up spending on alerting applications.

Taking back control
● Meditation
● Cognitive Exercise (brain games)
● Video Games
● Nature
● Drugs
● Physical Exercise
● A rule of thumb for when you should minimize switching and give a task your full attention is if it is: 1) difficult or requires a lot of thought 2) carries a risk of high negative impact 3) is critical or high value or 4) time sensitive
● To maintain better focus on information source:
1. Improve meta-cognition by increasing your understanding of the cost of multitasking/task switching and the the value of remaining at an information patch.
2. Limit accessibility to new information sources.
3. Decrease your boredom when focusing on a single goal.
4. Reduce anxiety that prompts a switch to something new.

Strategies for Completing Critical Assignments
● Metacognition: in the workplace a seemingly brief interruption can lead to nearly a half hour off task. It’s important to appreciate how much time you are actually spending on different online or smartphone activities.
● Accessibility: A major problem is the constant availability of information.
○ Begin by setting up your environment to avoid being distracted and interrupted. This is the most difficult and challenging part of the process. Limit yourself to a single screen. Put away all non essential work materials, no books or paper materials that you don’t need.
○ Next step is to decide which programs or apps you are going to need open to complete the task and close down all others. Don’t just minimize them, shut them down. Only open one website at a time, don’t use tabs. Shutdown email.
○ You should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done at a designated time, so should email. Also, you should silence your smartphone. Keep it on airplane and out of direct reach.
○ Apps to help control environment: SelfControl, Freedom, Keep Me Out, Cold Turkey, FocalFilter, Training Wheels, LeechBlock, Tiny Filter, Anti-Social, Freedom, Stay-Focused.
● Boredom: Spend some of your computer time standing rather than sitting. Raise your computer by putting it on a box or purchase a treadmill desk. Listening to music works as well.
● Gradually increase time on task before allowing yourself to take a break. Brief mental breaks will help you stay focused on your task. Some break ideas:
○ Exercise
○ Train your eyes using the 20-20-20 rule: every twenty minutes take a twenty second break and focus on objects 20 feet away. This changes your focal distance from inches to many feet and requires blood flow to brain areas that aren’t related to constant attention.
○ Expose yourself to nature. Even looking at pictures of nature works
○ Daydream, stare into space, doodle on paper.
○ Short ten minute naps
○ Talking to another human.
○ Laugh!
○ Grab something to drink or a snack
○ Read a chapter in a fiction book.
● Anxiety: Consider engaging in mediation and mindfulness practices.
Strategies for Uninterrupted Socializing
● Accessibility: Have all people involved turn off their phones or remove them from the area of interaction. Create a “technology free zone”.
Strategies for Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
● Accessibility: Dim your smartphone and position it at least 14 inches from your face or remove all technology from the bedroom.
If you find yourself being distracted ask yourself the following questions:
● How might I increase my metacognitive view of how my own mind performs in a given situation, and in what ways are my actions not in line with how I should behave based on my goals and an understanding of my limitations?
● How might I change my physical environment to reduce accessibility of potential
distractors?
● How might I assess whether I am self-interrupting because of boredom, and how might i make the task more interesting to stave off that boredom?
● How might I recognize when my actions are driven by anxiety about missing out on something in my virtual world, and what steps can I take to reduce that anxiety?

The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Increasing Your Skills – Daniel Coyle

Three sections of the book:
1. Getting Started: ideas for igniting motivation and creating a blueprint for the skills you want to build.
2. Improving Skills: methods and techniques for making the most progress in the least time.
3. Sustaining Progress: strategies for overcoming plateaus, keeping motivational fires lit, and building habits for long-term success. “Small actions, repeated over time, transform us.”

Part One: Getting Started: Stare, Steal, and Be Willing to Be Stupid
● Talent begins with brief, powerful encounters that spark motivation by linking your identity to a high-performing person or group. This is called ignition, and consists of a tiny, world-shifting thought lighting up your unconscious mind: I could be them.

Tip #1: Stare at Who You Want to Become
● We each live with a “windshield” of people in front of us; one of the keys to igniting our motivation is to fill our windshield with vivid images of your future self; and to stare at them every day. Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain.
● Use pictures (pictures and posters on wall) or better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.

Tip #2: Spend 15 Minutes a Day Engraving the Skill on Your Brain
● Called the engraving method. Watching the skill being performed, closely, and with great intensity, over and over, until they build a high-definiton mental blueprint.
● The key is to watch and listen so closely that you can imagine the feeling of performing the skill. For physical skills, project yourself inside the performer’s body. For mental skills, simulate the skill by re-creating the expert’s decision patterns. Some writers do this by rewriting passages word by word.

Tip #3: Steal Without Apology
● All improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. So steal it.
● When you steal, focus on specifics, not general impressions. Capture concrete facts: the angle of a golfer’s left elbow at the top of a backswing. Ask yourself:
○ What, exactly, are the critical moves here?
○ How do they perform those moves differently than I do?

Tip #4: Buy a Notebook
● Write stuff down and reflect on it. Results from today. Ideas for tomorrow. Goals for next week. A notebook works like a map: It creates clarity.

Tip #5: Be Willing to Be Stupid
● Being willing to be stupid – willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes – is essential. Reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections. Mistakes are not really mistakes, they’re guideposts you use to get better.

Tip #6: Choose Spartan Over Luxurious
● Luxury signals our unconscious mind to give less effort: It whispers, Relax, you’ve made it.
● Simple, humble spaces help focus attention on the deep-practice task at hand: reaching, and repeating, and struggling. When given the choice between luxurious and spartan, choose spartan. Your unconscious mind will thank you.

Tip #7: Before You Start, Figure Out if It’s a Hard Skill or a Soft Skill
● Hard skills are actions that are performed as correctly and consistently as possible, every time. Skills you could imagine being performed by a reliable robot. They are about ABC: Always Being Consistent
○ Examples include a golf swing, a violinist playing a specific chord, basketball player shooting a free throw
● Soft skills are those that have many paths to a good result, not just one. Found in broader, less-specialized pursuits. They are about being agile and interactive; about instantly recognizing patterns as they unfold and making smart, timely choices. About the three R’s: Reading, Recognizing, and Reacting
○ A soccer player sensing a weakness on defense and deciding to attack
○ A stock trader spotting a hidden opportunity amid a chaotic trading day
○ A novelist instinctively shaping the twists of a complicated plot
● Begin by asking yourself which of these skills need to be absolutely 100 % consistent every single time. Which need to be executed with machine like precision? These are hard skills.
● Then, ask yourself, which skills need to be flexible, and variable, depending on the situation? Depending on instantly recognizing patterns and selecting an optimal choice? Soft skills.
● Is a teacher or coach involved in the early stages? If so, it’s likely a hard skill.

Tip #8: To Build Hard Skills, Work Like a Careful Carpenter
● You need to connect the right wires in your brain by being careful, slow and keenly attuned to errors. To work like a careful carpenter.
● Be precise and measured. Go slowly. Make one simple move at a time, repeating, and perfecting it before you move on. Pay attention to errors and fix them, particularly at the start. Learning fundamentals only seems boring – but it’s the key moment of investment. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and trouble

Tip #9: To Build Soft Skills, Play Like a Skateboarder
● Soft skills are built by playing and exploring inside challenging, ever-changing
environments. Behave like a skateboarder in a skatepark: aggressive, curious, and experimental, always seeking out new ways to challenge yourself.
● When you practice a soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. Don’t worry too much about making errors- the important thing to do is explore. Soft skills are more fun to practice but they can be tougher they demand that you coach yourself. After each session ask yourself, What worked? What didn’t? And why?

Tip #10: Honor the Hard Skills
● Most talents are not exclusively hard skills or soft skills, but rather a combination. Prioritize the hard skills because in the long run they’re more important to your talent.
● One way to keep this in mind is to picture your talent as a big oak tree – a massive, thick trunk of hard skills with a towering canopy of flexible soft skills up above. First build the trunk. Then work on the branches.

Tip #11: Don’t Fall for the Prodigy Myth
● Early success turns out to be a weak predictor of long-term success. If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens. If you don’t’ have early success, don’t quit. Treat your early efforts as experiments, not verdicts. This is a

marathon, not a sprint.
Tip #12: Five Ways to Pick a High-Quality Teacher or Coach
1. Avoid Someone Who Reminds You of a Courteous Waiter
a. Don’t pick someone who focuses on keeping you comfortable and happy, on making things go smoothly, with a minimum of effort.
2. Seek Someone Who Scares You a Little
a. Look for someone who: watches you closely, is action-oriented, is honest, sometimes unnervingly so; and who fills you with feelings of respect, admiration, and maybe a shiver of fear.
3. Seek Someone Who Gives Short, Clear Directions
a. Teaching is about creating a connection and delivering useful information.
4. Seek Someone Who Loves Teaching Fundamentals
a. Fundamentals are the core of your skills.
5. Other Things Being Equal, Pick the Older Person
a. Great teachers are first and foremost learners, who improve their skills
with each passing year.

Part Two: Improving Skills: Find the Sweet Spot, Then Reach
● People in hotbeds of talent have a different relationship with practicing.
● The key to deep practice is reach. To stretch yourself slightly beyond your current ability, spending time in the zone of difficulty called the sweet spot, embracing repetition so the action becomes fast and automatic.

Tip #13: Find the Sweet Spot
● There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest, called the sweet spot. How to find it:
○ (Comfort Zone)
■ Sensations: Ease, effortlessness. You’re working, but not reaching or struggling
■ % of Successful Attempts: 80% and above.
○ (Sweet Spot)
■ Sensations: Frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You’re fully engages in an intense struggle- as if brushing your goal with your fingertips.
■ % of Successful Attempts: 50-80 %
○ (Survival Zone)
■ Sensations: Confusion, desperation. You’re overmatched, scrambling, thrashing, and guessing. You guess right sometimes, mostly luck
■ % of Successful Attempts: Below 50%
● Seek out ways to stretch yourself and play on the edges of your competence. Ask yourself: If you tried your absolute hardest, what could you almost do? Mark the boundary of your current ability, and aim a little beyond it.
● “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.” – Albert Einstein

Tip #14: Take Off Your Watch
● Instead of counting minutes or hours, count reaches and reps. Instead of planning to hit golf balls for an hour, plan to make 25 high quality swings with each club. Ignore the clock and get to the sweet spot, even if it’s only for a few minutes.

Tip #15: Break Every Move Down Into Chunks
● To begin chunking, first engrave the blueprint of the skill on your mind and ask:
1)What is the smallest single element of this skill that I can master?
2) What other chunks link to that chunk?
● Practice one chunk until you’ve mastered it – then connect more chunks, one by one. Then combine those chunks into still bigger chunks. And so on.
● No matter what skill you set out to learn, the pattern is the same: See the whole thing. Break it down to its simplest elements. Put it back together. Repeat.

Tip #16: Each Day, Try to Build One Perfect Chunk
● “Never mistake mere activity for accomplishment.” – John Wooden
● One useful method is to set a daily SAP: smallest achievable perfection. You pick a single chunk that you can perfect – not just improve, or “work on”, but get 100% consistently correct. The point is to take the time to aim at a small, defined target, and then put all your effort toward hitting it. You are built to improve little by little.

Tip #17: Embrace Struggle
● When it comes to building talent, struggle isn’t an option – it’s a biological necessity. Your brain works just like your muscles: no pain, no gain.

Tip #18: Choose Five Minutes a Day Over an Hour a Week
● Small practice “snacks” are more effective than binges because of the way our brains grow – incrementally, a little each day. Daily practice nourishes this process.
● The act of practicing- making the time to do it, doing it well – can be thought of as a skill in itself, perhaps the most important skill of all. Give it time to become a habit.

Tip #19: Don’t Do “Drills.” Instead, Play Small, Addictive Games
● Skills improve faster when their thought of as games. If it can be counted, it can be turned into a game. Track your progress, and try to improve each week.

Tip #20: Practice Alone
● Solo practice works best because it’s the best way to 1) seek out the sweet spot at the edge of your ability, and 2) develop discipline, because it doesn’t depend on others.
● “The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching.” – Anson Dorrance

Tip #21: Think in Images
● Images are far easier to grasp, recall, and perform because our brain evolved to register images more vividly and memorably than abstract ideas. Whenever possible, create a vivid image for each chunk you want to learn. Images that are easy to see and feel.

Tip #22: Pay Attention Immediately After You Make a Mistake
● Develop the habit of attending to your errors right away. Look straight at them and see what really happened, and ask yourself what you can do next to improve. Take mistakes seriously, but never personally.

Tip #23: Visualize the Wires of Your Brain Forming New Connections
● When you get to eh sweet spot of your ability and reach beyond it, you are forming and strengthening new connections in your brain. Mistakes are the information you use to build the right links. The more you pay attention and fix them, the more of the right connections you’ll be building in your brain. Visualizing this process as it happens helps you reinterpret mistakes as what they actually are: tools for building skill.

Tip #24: Visualize the Wires of Your Brain Getting Faster
● Every time you practice deeply – the wires of your brain get faster. Over time, signal speeds increase to 200 mph from 2 mph. When you practice it’s useful and motivating to visualize pathways of your brain being transformed from simple copper wires to high-speed broadband, because that’s what’s really happening.

Tip #25: Shrink the Space
● Ask yourself: What’s the minimum space needed to make these reaches and reps? Where is extra space hindering fast and easy communication?

Tip #26: Slow It Down (Even Slower Than You Think)
● When we try something new our urge is to do it again, faster. We trade precision and long-term performance for a temporary thrill. Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.
● “It’s now how fast you can do it. It’s how slowly you can do it correctly.”

Tip #27: Close Your Eyes
● Closing your eyes is a swift way to nudge you to the edge of your ability and get you to the sweet spot. It sweeps away distraction and engages your other senses to provide new feedback. It helps engrave the blueprint of the task on your brain by making a familiar skill seem strange and fresh.

Tip #28: Mime It
● Removing everything except the essential action lets you focus on what matters most: making the right reach.

Tip #29: When You Get It Right, Mark the Spot
● When you have your first perfect rep, freeze. Rewind the mental tap and play the move again in your mind. Memorize the feeling, the rhythm, the physical and mental sensations. The point is to mark this moment – this is the spot where you want to go again and again. It’s the new starting point for perfecting the skill until it becomes automatic. “Practice begins when you get it right.”

Tip #30: Take a Nap
● Napping is good for the learning brain because it helps strengthen the connections formed during peace and prepares the brain for the next session. “You need sleep before learning, to prepare your brain, like a dry sponge, to absorb new information.”

Tip #31: To Learn a New Move, Exaggerate It
● Going too far helps us understand where the boundaries are. Go too far so you can feel the outer edges of the move, and then work on building the skill with precision.

Tip #32: Make Positive Reaches
● Always focus on the positive move, not the negative one. It always works better to reach for what you want to accomplish, now away from what you want to avoid.

Tip #33: To Learn From a Book, Close the Book
● Learning is reaching. Closing a book and writing a summary forces you to figure
out the key points (one set of reaches), process and organize those ideas so they make sense (more reaches), and write them on the page (still more reaches, along with repetition). More reaching = more learning

Tip #34: Use the Sandwich Technique
1. Make the correct move.
2. Make the incorrect move.
3. Make the correct move again.
● The goal is to reinforce the correct move and to put a spotlight on the mistake, preventing it from slipping past undetected and becoming wired in your circuitry.

Tip #35: Use the 3 x 10 Technique
● To learn something most effectively, practice it three times, with ten-minute breaks between each rep. Our brains make stronger connections with a break period.

Tip #36: Invent Daily Tests
● To invent a good test, ask yourself: What’s one key element of this skill? How can I isolate my accuracy or reliability, and measure it? How can I make it fun, quick, and repeatable, so I can track my progress?

Tip #37: To Choose the Best Practice Method, Use the R.E.P.S. Gauge
● The key elements of deep practice
○ Element 1: Reaching and Repeating. Does the practice have you operating on the edge of your ability, reaching and repeating?
○ Element 2: Engagement. Is the practice immersive? Does it command your attention? Does it use emotion to propel you toward a goal?
○ Element 3: Purposefulness. Does the task directly connect to the skill you want to build?
○ Element 4: Strong, Speedy Feedback. Does the learner receive a stream of accurate information about his performance – where he succeeded and where he made mistakes?
R: Reaching and Repeating
E: Engagement
P: Purposefulness
S: Strong, Speedy Feedback
● Pay attention to the design of your practice. Small changes in method can create large increases in learning velocity. Pick one that maximizes these 4 qualities.

Tip #38: Stop Before You’re Exhausted
● When it comes to learning, exhaustion is the enemy. Fatigue slows the brain, triggers errors, lessens concentration, and leads to shortcuts that create bad habits. Practice when fresh, usually in the morning.

Tip #39: Practice Immediately After Performance
● Practicing right after a performance helps you target your weak points and fix them.

Tip #40: Just Before Sleep, Watch a Mental Movie
● Just before bed, play a movie of your idealized performance in your head as a way to rev the engine of your unconscious mind.

Tip #41: End on a Positive Note
● A practice session should end with a small, sweet reward.

Tip #42: Six Ways to Be a Better Teacher or Coach
1) Use the First Few Seconds to Connect on an Emotional Level
a) To build trust
2) Avoid Giving Long Speeches – Instead, Deliver Vivid Chunks of Information
3) Be Allergic to Mushy Language
a) Use language that is concrete and specific
4) Make a Scorecard for Learning
5) Maximize “Reach Fullness”
6) Aim to Create Independent Learners

Part Three: Sustaining Progress: Embrace Repetition, Cultivate Grit, and Keep Big Goals Secret
● While developing talent, you will hit snags, plateaus, and steep path; motivation will ebb and flow. To sustain progress, it’s necessary to be flexible one moment and stubborn the next, to deal with immediate obstacles while staying focused on the horizon

Tip #43: Embrace Repetition
● Repetition is the most powerful lever we have to improve our skills, because it uses the built-in-mechanism for making the wires of our brain faster and more accurate. Instead of viewing it as a chore, view it as your most powerful tool.

Tip #44: Have a Blue-Collar Mindset
● Top performers get up in the morning and go to work every day, whether they feel like it or not. “Inspiration is for amateurs.” – Chuck Close

Tip #45: For Every Hour of Competition, Spend Five Hours Practicing
● Competition doesn’t improve skill as much as practice.
Tip #46: Don’t Waste Time Trying to Break Bad Habits – Build New Ones
● Our brains are good at building new circuits but awful and unbuilding them. The key is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy towards building a new habit that will override the old one. To build new habits, start slowly, little by little.

Tip #47: To Learn It More Deeply, Teach It
● When you communicate a skill to someone, you come to understand it more deeply yourself.

Tip #48: Give a New Skill a Minimum of Eight Weeks
● 1) Constructing and honing neural circuitry takes time, no matter who you are; and 2) Resilience and grit are vital tools, particularly in the early phases of learning. Don’t make judgements too early. Keep at it.

Tip #49: When You Get Stuck, Make a Shift
● A plateau happens when your brain achieves a level of automaticity; when you can perform a skill on autopilot, without conscious thought. Our brain loves autopilot but when it comes to developing talent it is the enemy because of plateaus.
● The best way past a plateau is to change your practice method so you disrupt your autopilot and rebuild a faster, better circuit. One way is to speed things up – to force yourself to do the task faster than you normally would. Or you can slow things down – going so slowly that you highlight previously undetected mistakes. Or you can do the task in reverse order, turn it inside out or upside down.

Tip #50: Cultivate Your Grit
● Grit is a mix of passion, perseverance, and self-discipline that keeps us moving forward in spite of obstacles. It’s not inborn, it’s like a muscle. Take the test and ask yourself: When you hit an obstacle, how do you react? Do you tend to focus on a long-term goal, or move from interest to interest? What are you seeking in the long run? Begin to pay attention to places in your life where you’ve got grit, and celebrate them in yourself and others.

Tip #51: Keep Your Big Goals Secret
● Telling others about your big goals makes them less likely to happen, because it creates an unconscious payoff – tricking our brains into thinking we’ve already accomplished our goal.

Tip #52: “Think Like a Gardener, Work Like a Carpenter”
● We all want to improve our skills quickly, today, if not sooner. The truth is, talent grows slowly. You would not criticize a seedling because it was not yet a tall oak tree; nor should you get upset because your skill circuitry is in the growth stage. Instead, build it with daily deep practice. Think patiently, without judgement. Work steadily, strategically, knowing that each piece connects to a larger whole