At a couple of points I felt that he might be contradicting himself when he stresses how long it takes to get through the steps to mastery. Avoid the false path: We’ll all be attracted to fields for the wrong reasons: money, fame, parental influence. He was also a former United States Army Air Corps pilot, and held a fifth degree black belt in aikido.

And on television we can watch top athletes, dancers, ice skaters, singers, actors, comics, and pundits, all giving us their best. Unfortunately a mess of ideas and misconceptions (did you know that Albert Einstein discovered relativity due to spending a badly estimated 10,000 hours thinking about it over 10 years?Even so saying, one of the greatest things about being human is the ability to continue to evolve, to learn all throughout our lives. I probably still don't know the answer to that, but I have now finished reading one of his books, and it is written from what feels like a different point of view.

The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character— the first transformation on the way to mastery… This has a simple consequence: you must choose places of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning… This means that you move toward challenges that will toughen and improve you, where you will get the most objective feedback on your performance and progress. Submit to the Other — The Inside Out Perspective: We can never really experience what other people are experiencing. Emphasizes growing to love the plateaus, the in-betweens, the process, the art of being in the zone, of focusing on the moments rather than the goals. Impatience: The best way to neutralize our natural impatience is to cultivate a kind of pleasure in pain— like an athlete, you come to enjoy rigorous practice, pushing past your limits, and resisting the easy way out.After 10 years of pondering, Einstein's theory of relativity came to him in a flash minutes after he completely disregarded any solution. He also developed the Leonard Energy Training (LET) practice for centering the mind, body, and spirit. Rigidity: The world has become increasingly complex in many ways, and whenever we humans face a situation that seems complicated our response is to resort to a kind of artificial simplicity, to create habits and routines that give us a sense of control. If we experience this time as something to get through on the way to real pleasure, then our hours at work represent a tragic waste of the short time we have to live. When a Most Valuable Player candidate misjudges a ball and falls on his duff, he does it in the sight of millions.

It’s fine to dabble in things here and there, but your true success and fulfillment comes from doing the absolute best you can. When we fuse this intuitive feel with rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself. The human individual is equipped to learn and go on learning prodigiously from birth to death, and this is precisely what sets him or her apart from all other known forms of life.Suffer fools gladly: In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture.