Subjected to those pressures, these individuals were transformed. They were transformed along the lines that Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.
Let the others slap each other on the back while you’re back in the lab or the gym or pounding the pavement. Plug that hole – that one, right in the middle of your face – that can drain you of your vital life force. Watch what happens. Watch how much better you get.
I hope you will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the.
Ego can’t see both sides of the issue. It can’t get better because it only sees the validation. Remember, “Vain men never hear anything but praise.” It can only see what’s going well, not what isn’t. It’s why you might see egomaniacs with temporary leads, but rarely lasting runs of it.
To resent change is to wrongly assume that you have a choice in the matter. Everything is change. Embrace that. Flow with it.
As a result, we carry all kinds of biological baggage.
Never give reasons for you what think or do until you must.
Do not take the slights of the day personally – or the exciting rewards and recognitions either, especially when duty has assigned you an important cause. Trivial details like the rise and fall of your position say nothing about you as a person. Only your behavior – as Cato’s did – will.
Breathless, twenty-four-hour media coverage makes it considerably harder for politicians and CEOs to be anything but reactive. There’s too much information, every trivial detail is magnified under the microscope, speculation is rampant – and the mind is overwhelmed.
So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation.
What matters is that you learn how to manage yourself and others, before your industry eats you alive. Micromanagers are egotists who can’t manage others and they quickly get overloaded. So do the charismatic visionaries who lose interest when it’s time to execute. Worse yet are those who surround themselves with yes-men or sycophants who clean up their messes and create a bubble in which they can’t even see how disconnected from reality they are.
Harold Geneen put it, “People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.
Find out why you’re after what you’re after.
Thought will not work except in silence,” Thomas Carlyle said. If we want to think better, we need to seize these moments of quiet. If we want more revelations – more insights or breakthroughs or new, big ideas – we have to create more room for them. We have to step away from the comfort of noisy distractions and stimulations. We have to start listening.
Never rattled. Never frantic. Always hustling and acting with creativity. Never anything but deliberate.
We must be sure to act with deliberation, boldness, and persistence. Those are the attributes of right and effective action.
The mind and the body are there to be used – they begin to turn on themselves when not put to some productive end.
Greed was what led people to create complex markets that no one.
Sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” Immediately, Churchill replied, “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.
A person who can think long term doesn’t pity herself during short-term setbacks. A person who values the team can share credit and subsume his own interests in a way that most others can’t.