Excerpts from the book: Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
The struggle to perform well is universal, but nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine. In his new book, Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable.

• Here are the 3 requirements for success:
• The first is diligence, the necessity of giving sufficient attention to detail to avoid error and prevail against obstacles.
• The second challenge is to do right. Medicine is a fundamentally human profession. It is therefore forever troubled by human failings, failings like avarice, arrogance, insecurity, misunderstanding.
• The third requirement for success is ingenuity—thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.
• When you make an effort, you find sometimes you are not the only one willing to do so.
• People underestimate the importance of diligence as a virtue. No doubt this has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.” There is a flavor of simplistic relentlessness to it. And if it were an individual’s primary goal in life, that life would indeed seem narrow and unambitious.
• Beneath the ideal is the gruelingly unglamorous and uncertain work. If the eradication of polio is our monument, it is a monument to the perfection of performance—to showing what can be achieved by diligent attention to detail coupled with great ambition.
• Have tried to emulate the spirit of my father’s visits—the decorum in language and attire, the respect for modesty, the precision of examination.
• Choices must be made. No choice will always be right. There are ways, however, to make our choices better.
• There is a legal definition of negligence (“when a doctor has breached his or her duty of care”), but I wanted to know his practical definition of the term. Lang said that if he finds an error that resulted in harm and the doctor could have avoided it, then, as far as he is concerned, the doctor was negligent.
• But what if I have a good record among surgeons, with generally excellent outcomes and conscientious care? That wouldn’t matter, he said. The only thing that matters is what I did in the case in question. It’s like driving a car, he explained—I could have a perfect driving record, but if one day I run a red light and hit a child, then I am negligent, he said.
• The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do. I am sympathetic to this rule. It gives us our best chance of avoiding the worst error of all—giving up on someone we could have helped.
• Good doctors, she finally said, understand one key thing: “This is not about them. It’s about the patient.” The good doctors didn’t always get the answers right, she said. Sometimes they still pushed too long or not long enough. But at least they stopped to wonder, to reconsider the path they were on. They asked colleagues for another perspective. They set aside their egos.
• In the end, no guidelines can tell us what we have power over and what we don’t. In the face of uncertainty, wisdom is to err on the side of pushing, to not give up. But you have to be ready to recognize when pushing is only ego, only weakness. You have to be ready to recognize when the pushing can turn to harm. In a way, our task is to “Always Fight.” But our fight is not always to do more. It is to do right by our patients, even though what is right is not always clear.
• True success in medicine is not easy. It requires will, attention to detail, and creativity. But the lesson I took from India was that it is possible anywhere and by anyone. I can imagine few places with more difficult conditions. Yet astonishing successes could be found. And each one began, I noticed, remarkably simply: with a readiness to recognize problems and a determination to remedy them. Arriving at meaningful solutions is an inevitably slow and difficult process. Nonetheless, what I saw was: better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.
• MY FIRST SUGGESTION came from a favorite essay by Paul Auster: Ask an unscripted question. Ours is a job of talking to strangers. Why not learn something about them? If you ask a question, the machine begins to feel less like a machine.
• MY SECOND SUGGESTION was: Don’t complain. But resist it. It’s boring, it doesn’t solve anything, and it will get you down. You don’t have to be sunny about everything. Just be prepared with something else to discuss: an idea you read about, an interesting problem you came across— even the weather if that’s all you’ve got. See if you can keep the conversation going.
• MY THIRD ANSWER for becoming a positive deviant: Count something.
• If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something interesting.
• MY FOURTH SUGGESTION was: Write something
• MY SUGGESTION NUMBER five, my final suggestion for a life in medicine, was: Change.
• So find something new to try, something to change. Count how often you succeed and how often you fail. Write about it. Ask people what they think. See if you can keep the conversation going.

Book Excerpts: Buck Up, Suck Up . . . and Come Back When You Foul Up

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Buck Up, Suck Up . . . and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room
The political strategists who directed the Clinton campaign's War Room reveal the lessons and secrets from their hard-fought battles -- and how to use these highly effective strategies for success in business and everyday life. 

• The bottom line is that if you’re faster, smarter and more aggressive than the other guy (or gal), you’re going to win more often than not.
• So we don’t believe that brains or personality or good fortune are the most important attributes in a winner. Perseverance. Toughness. Tenacity. Those are the qualities that make the difference.
• You won’t believe how far you can go if you simply refuse to quit.
• One of the reasons that people who persevere often succeed in the end is that they put themselves in a position to win.
• The easiest way to be undefeated is to never compete. But folks who don’t try, who don’t fight, who don’t compete are losers already.
• But you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.
• Knowing what to do is not that hard. What separates the successful from the mediocre is the ability to get other people to do what you need them to do.
• But the purpose of leadership is to get adults—smart, competent adults—to stay with you and to follow you. You’ve got to create a culture, a philosophy that makes people feel as if they’re part of something important—and that they themselves are important.
• the more forward momentum you have, the harder it is to knock you over. But if you’re just barely moving, or trying to stand still, even the slightest push will make you tumble.
• Planning is important. Strategy is vital. Thinking through the consequences of both victory and defeat is crucial. Training and preparation are essential. But at some point you gotta pull the damn trigger. And when you do pull the trigger, you can’t hesitate.
• Do something … now. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, do something else. But do something—quickly.
• The objective is the broad goal. Strategy is the plan of action for achieving the goal. And tactics are the various steps you take to get there.
• So much of the energy of a campaign—or of any other enterprise—goes into the small questions, the “how” questions. Not nearly enough goes into the big, existential questions like “What are we doing?” and “Why are we doing it?” Those questions seem simple. And they are. But simplicity and importance are not mutually exclusive. It’s been our experience that those simple questions are the hardest to answer and the easiest to avoid.
• If There’s Something Bad to Be Said About You, Say It Yourself
• You show up. You do your job. You strive for a level of perfection. Then you get up in the morning and do it all over again
• Hard work can make up for a lot—lack of innate genius, grating interpersonal skills, even ugly scars and tattoos. But without a strong work ethic, even the geniuses, the charmers and the folks with flawless skin wind up losers.
• Remember: Once you’ve won, the goal is not to gloat; it’s to win another one. Do everything you can to set your-self up for another victory. Do nothing that will make your next effort more difficult.
• Only pick battles that are: a) winnable; b) important; c) battles for which you’re fully prepared to pay the price to win; and d) battles that you’re damn sure you can afford to win.

Excerpts from the book: North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

Scott Jurek is one of the world's best known and most beloved ultrarunners. Renowned for his remarkable endurance and speed, accomplished on a vegan diet, he's finished first in nearly all of ultrarunning's elite events over the course of his career. But after two decades of racing, training, speaking, and touring, Jurek felt an urgent need to discover something new about himself. He embarked on a wholly unique challenge, one that would force him to grow as a person and as an athlete: breaking the speed record for the Appalachian Trail. North is the story of the 2,189-mile journey that nearly shattered him. He would have to run nearly 50 miles a day, every day, for almost seven weeks. With his wife, Jenny, friends, and the kindness of strangers supporting him, Jurek ran, hiked, and stumbled his way north, one white blaze at a time. A stunning narrative of perseverance and personal transformation, North is a portrait of a man stripped bare on the most demanding and transcendent effort of his life. It will inspire runners and non-runners alike to keep striving for their personal best.

• Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, it beckons not merely north and south, but upward to the body, mind and soul of man. —Harold Allen, early Appalachian Trail planner
• To transcend like Thoreau and Muir, with the Christopher McCandless ideals from Into the Wild, chasing a romantic goal to “move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.”
• El Coyote had the ability to laugh when he wanted to cry, the secret to longevity in ultrarunning.
• Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.
• The planning was done, our doubts were irrelevant.
• Out here it was very easy to appreciate the few things we had with us. It was better than lamenting what we had lost.
• I was in good shape physically. I was breathing steadily, and I felt my skin cooling as I took a moment to take in the view. I was tired, of course, but the ache in my muscles felt good; I was alive, doing what I did best, and pushing myself to do more. That was the reason I was out here.
• I ran into two women well into their sixties. We all stopped to chat, and I asked how far they were planning to go. I was expecting to hear about a day trip, maybe an adventurous overnight, maybe a drop-off and pickup somewhere on the other side of the forest. They smiled and said, “Katahdin!” Their spirit sustained me through the rest of the day. It began to rain harder as we conversed, but it didn’t matter. I hoped to be just like them one day: older, vibrant, and on the trail.
• Would he have understood if I’d told him that, though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain?
• The Hardrock victories weren’t what made Horty resilient, though. It was how he’d won them.
• I’ve experienced my fair share of success. And I know this: You rarely ask why when you win. It’s a word you can outrun and outperform. Applause makes it hard to hear yourself. But just because you ignore it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And why doesn’t get old and tired. It catches up, and it gets louder. It churns up thoughts that are best kept down in the dark.
• And there was that paradoxical peace of mind that emerged with middle age: As I accumulated more and more memories—good and bad—the pain of each individual bad one was blunted. What’s one more mile when you’ve already run forty-nine?
• But like execution and adaptability, will is just another ingredient in the recipe for success.
• I knew that my prior experiences in dealing with unforeseen adversity would be a secret weapon. I’d gotten through a lot of tough spots in my life, and I knew I would be fully capable of tapping into my best self once again to meet whatever challenges inevitably cropped up over six weeks.
• The pain must have been affecting my ability to hold a conversation because Will kept reminding me that if anyone could get through this, it was me. That sounded right, and I appreciated it, but right then it didn’t feel right. During those moments of quiet, my mind snapped back from newts and grassy balds and homed back in on the pain. To try to take command of my ruminations, I started repeating my tried and true mantras: Sometimes you just do things. This is what you came for. I’d chosen this path, and I’d chosen to push myself to the limits of my body and mind. I knew that adversity bred transformation, that there would be an enlightening ease at the other end of this struggle. The sweetest reward lay in that ease, and it was a feeling that neither money nor power—nor a healthy quadriceps—could guarantee. And it existed in each one of us. Stay the course; keep pressing forward, I told myself, but part of me—a lot of me—kept questioning the choices I’d made that had gotten us out here.
• I sensed the tears welling up deep behind my eyes. Just when I felt like I couldn’t hold them back a moment longer, Horty spun around and looked straight into my soul. “Remember this, boy: This is who I am, and this is what I do.” He was still crazy old Horty, and on any other day, that would have sounded like nonsense. But in that moment, it felt like an answer to that question I couldn’t shake. Why? This is who I am. This is what I do.
• Among the unwritten, wildly interpreted FKT ethics, there is only one inviolable rule: Cover every step of the trail under your own power.
• Or maybe, at the core, helping someone reach a goal is what it means to be human.
• What matters most is how you walk through the fire. —Charles Bukowski
• When I was with her, I fed off that energy. But on day ten, I was alone, high up on Hump Mountain. And the more I tried to screw my head on straight, the more it spun. Maybe I just need to let go of the glory days and accept that the fire is gone. And yet … despite the swirling doubts, despite the stories I told myself of decline and retirement, somewhere deep inside, I still felt some of that drive, that old ego. You have to have some ego.
• I wish I could say that I was just channeling the vibrations and energy of the wilderness through my body, mind, and soul, that it was all beauty and joy. But at the end of the day, you have to want it. Plain and simple. The ego doesn’t have to be destructive, and it doesn’t have to make you lose sight of the real reasons you do what you do. It doesn’t have to go to your head. But when push comes to shove, nothing motivates like winning does.
• And in the case of pain, perhaps the one we know hurts us less than the one we fear.
• I forgot about Katahdin being eighteen hundred miles away, about the FKT, about the loss of normalcy, about everything. I felt how sweet life could be when I wasn’t looking at it through a prism of doing, but just being. That was enough for now. It was enough to start running again.
• I took a few tentative steps, felt the same stabbing pains … and kept going. I was back running. Not elegantly, not with fierceness, not with anything near the speed I’d eventually need. But I was running. If I could just let life happen, everything could work. I didn’t have to win, not yet. I just needed to let myself run.
• Here’s the thing: if anyone had come across me hiking and hobbling toward Damascus and asked what I thought my chances were for the FKT, I would have been … more than cautious. I wouldn’t have advised putting a single cent on me, despite El Coyote’s advice “never bet against the Champ.”
• It was only years later, well after her passing, that I began to understand what she had been doing. Certainly as I limped in pain and doubt along the Appalachian Trail, I was giving myself a crash course in the power of a mantra, in the power of single-mindedness, of stubbornness, of codes, of real toughness. When I was a younger man, I was angry, and I’d wanted my mother to be angry too. But she wasn’t. She was reminding herself that despite the hideous disease that was stealing everything else from her, she still had her toughness. Because she said so, and because she could say so. And did. Often. Her physical strength was gone. But her toughness only got tougher; it became her essential feature. If she hadn’t been a tough old lady, she would have had to just be a bitter teenager like me. She was still teaching me things, still reminding me what toughness looked like.
• “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles …. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
• Perspective can be both humbling and inspiring. Those
• He carried himself with that same Zen-like dignity, but he could quickly switch to Mortal Kombat mode.
• There are echoes of its lessons in the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, especially in the tenet that has most influenced me: The mind of a warrior (or anyone performing a difficult task) should be so attuned to the moment that thoughts and emotions do not impede proper action. A mind in this condition is thought to function so optimally that the right decisions come naturally and pain and fear disappear. I often saw similarities between this mind-set and what elite athletes refer to as being “in the zone.”
• Don—wonderful Don—had brought exactly what I needed most in that moment: stability, authority, grace, and groundedness. He almost instantaneously shook me out of my depression, and I was grateful once again for his ability to intervene in my life and make me focus on the here and now.
• Horty had a theory about motivation. He told me that a lot of motivation could be boiled down to this: How bad do you want it? He would ask people, “What’s the furthest you can run without stopping?” After they replied whatever distance, he followed up with “Could you run a mile further if I gave you a million dollars? What if I was running behind you holding a gun to your head, could you run even further?”
• He said, “It’s easy to say you want it real bad when you’re sitting at home on the couch. But when the going gets tough, do you want it enough?”
• We often think we can’t go any farther and feel like we have nothing left to give, yet there is a hidden potential and strength in all of us, begging us to find it. We arrive at it via different means—sometimes reward, sometimes fear. There was something to Horty’s motivational theory, and finding that desire was the most vexing problem. How bad did I want it?
• I didn’t have the energy to care what was reality. And yet I was still moving forward. My decades of running had trained my brain in ways I hadn’t even anticipated. It was triaging itself, shutting off certain systems to allow others to keep going. Above all—my legs, my lungs.
• It was really testing my faith in Horty’s favorite aphorism: It never always gets worse.
• In the past, the best moments in my life were when I reached down and found inner strength where I’d thought none existed. But I needed more than my own strength these days. I needed the strength embodied by the people standing by the side of the road, waving and calling out. This time, I really didn’t have any strength left. But my team did. And even if they gave it to me, it still wouldn’t be mine. It would be ours, collectively, just like the FKT would be—if we managed to get it.
• The sport of ultrarunning cultivates perseverance in the face of pain, fatigue, illness, and anything else. For that reason, to the untrained eye, it might seem to reward the self-sufficient and punish any kind of weakness. But the most experienced and highest-achieving ultrarunners learn that without support, it’s easy to wander aimlessly. And without a crew that you can honestly turn to for help, a crew that truly understands you, you won’t be able to help yourself. Even the most eccentric among us—and, yes, I am referring here to Speedgoat—depend on other people far more than an outsider might suppose.
• Out there in the wild, on a long journey, you hike your own hike, blaze your own trail, and only you can find what you’re looking for.

Excerpts from the book: Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

The urge to pick up our phones every few minutes has become a nervous twitch that shatters our time into shards too small to be present. In this timely book, professor Cal Newport shows us how to pair back digital distractions and live better with less technology. Introducing us to digital minimalists -- the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones or obsessively document everything they eat -- Newport reveals how to live more intentionally in our tech-saturated world. Take back control from your devices and become a digital minimalist.

• I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.
• The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.
• Minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.
• “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
• Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience—and this is a bet that seems to be paying off.
• As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
• Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.
• Wendell Berry summarized this point more succinctly when he wrote: “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.”
• The urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated. To live permanently without these devices would be needlessly annoying, but to regularly spend a few hours away from them should give you no pause. It’s important that I convince you of this reality, as spending more time away from your phone is exactly what I’m going to ask you to do.
• I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.
• Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
• My core argument is that craft is a good source of high-quality leisure.
• Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
• Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

Excerpts from the book: Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean

Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism – delivered to produce better results and help your employees develop their skills and increase success. Great bosses have a strong relationship with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters.

• By failing to confront the problem, I’d removed the incentive for him to try harder and lulled him into thinking he’d be fine. To make matters worse, I kept making the same mistake over and over for ten months. As you probably know, for every piece of subpar work you accept, for every missed deadline you let slip, you begin to feel resentment and then anger. You no longer just think the work is bad: you think the person is bad. This makes it harder to have an even-keeled conversation. You start to avoid talking to the person at all.
• As is often the case when people are not sure if the quality of what they are doing is appreciated, the results began to suffer, and so did morale.
• Lack of praise and criticism had absolutely disastrous effects on the team and on our outcomes.
• Results has a lot more to do with listening and seeking to understand than it did with telling people what to do; more to do with debating than directing; more to do with pushing people to decide than with being the decider; more to do with persuading than with giving orders; more to do with learning than with knowing.
• Relationships may not scale, but culture does. Is “relationship” really the right word?
• We are all more likely to be “ruinously empathetic” or “obnoxiously aggressive” or “manipulatively insincere” toward people who are different from us. Learning how to push ourselves and others past this discomfort, to relate to our shared humanity, can make a huge difference. PART I A NEW MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY
• Richard Tedlow’s biography of Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, asserts that management and leadership are like forehand and backhand. You have to be good at both to win.
• RELATIONSHIPS, NOT POWER, DRIVE YOU FORWARD
• Very few people focus first on the central difficulty of management that Ryan hit on: establishing a trusting relationship with each person who reports directly to you.
• Nevertheless, these relationships are core to your job. They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively. If you think that you can do these things without strong relationships, you are kidding yourself. I’m not saying that unchecked power, control, or authority can’t work. They work especially well in a baboon troop or a totalitarian regime. But if you’re reading this book, that’s not what you’re shooting for.
• Your ability to build trusting, human connections with the people who report directly to you will determine the quality of everything that follows.
• And yet challenging people is often the best way to show them that you care when you’re the boss. This dimension I call “Challenge Directly.”
• “Radical Candor” is what happens when you put “Care Personally” and “Challenge Directly” together.
• It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to 1) accept and act on your praise and criticism; 2) tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well; 3) engage in this same behavior with one another, meaning less pushing the rock up the hill again and again; 4) embrace their role on the team; and 5) focus on getting results.
• Why “candor”? The key to getting everyone used to being direct when challenging each other (and you!) is emphasizing that it’s necessary to communicate clearly enough so that there’s no room for interpretation, but also humbly. I chose “candor” instead of “honesty” because there’s not much humility in believing that you know the truth. Implicit with candor is that you’re simply offering your view of what’s going on and that you expect people to offer theirs. If it turns out that in fact you’re the one who got it wrong, you want to know. At least I hope you want to know!
• Why some people live productively and joyfully while others feel, as Marx put it, alienated from their labor—was central to a boss’s job. In fact, part of my job was to figure out how to create more joy and less misery. 
• To most bosses, being professional means: show up at work on time, do your job, don’t show feelings (unless engaged in “motivation” or some such end-driven effort). The result is that nobody feels comfortable being who they really are at work.
• Just remember that being a boss is a job, not a value judgment.
• Why do I say “caring personally” instead of just “caring”? Because it’s not enough to care about the person’s work or the person’s career. Only when you actually care about the whole person with your whole self can you build a relationship.
• It’s about finding time for real conversations; about getting to know each other at a human level; about learning what’s important to people; about sharing with one another what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning and go to work—and what has the opposite effect.
• In the end, caring personally about people even as you challenge them will build the best relationships of your career.
• The hardest part of building this trust is inviting people to challenge you, just as directly as you are challenging them.
• “If we have the data about what works, let’s look at the data, but if all we have are opinions, let’s use yours,”
• Radical Candor is also not an invitation to nitpick. Challenging people directly takes real energy—not only from the people you’re challenging but from you as well. So do it only for things that really matter. A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.
• BOTH DIMENSIONS OF Radical Candor are sensitive to context. They get measured at the listener’s ear, not at the speaker’s mouth. Radical Candor is not a personality type or a talent or a cultural judgment. Radical Candor works only if the other person understands that your efforts at caring personally and challenging directly are delivered in good faith.
• Giving meaningful praise is hard. That’s why it’s so important to gauge your guidance—to find out how it lands for people.
• But here’s a paradox of being a good boss. Most people prefer the challenging “jerk” to the boss whose “niceness” gets in the way of candor. I once read an article that claimed most people would rather work for a “competent asshole” than a “nice incompetent.” This article was a useful expression of the Catch-22 that worried me about being a boss. Of course I didn’t want to be incompetent. Nor did I want to be an asshole.
• THERE’S A RUSSIAN anecdote about a guy who has to amputate his dog’s tail but loves him so much that he cuts it off an inch each day, rather than all at once. His desire to spare the dog pain and suffering only leads to more pain and suffering. Don’t allow yourself to become that kind of boss!
• In my experience, people who are more concerned with getting to the right answer than with being right make the best bosses. That’s because they keep learning and improving, and they push the people who work for them to do the same. A boss’s Radically Candid guidance helps the people working for them do the best work of their lives.
• Not all artists want to own a gallery; in fact, most don’t. If you honor and reward the rock stars, they’ll become the people you most rely on. If you promote them into roles they don’t want or aren’t suited for, however, you’ll lose them—or, even worse, wind up firing them. Superstars, on the other hand, need to be challenged and given new opportunities to grow constantly.
• No person is always an “excellent performer.” They just performed excellently last quarter.
• You don’t want to be an absentee manager any more than you want to be a micromanager.
• mediocre. And seeing what truly exceptional performance looks like will help those who are failing to see more clearly what’s expected of them.
• David noticed when things were broken and rolled up his sleeves to fix them, even if they weren’t in his job description. Clearly David would always push for excellence in his work, no matter what job he had. He would not just do more than was required; he’d do things you didn’t even think were possible. He exemplified the advice from Ecclesiastes: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”
• In many ways, your job as the boss is to set and uphold a quality bar. That can feel harsh in the short term, but in the long run the only thing that is meaner is lowering the bar. Don’t get sucked into Ruinous Empathy when managing people who are doing OK but not great! Everybody can excel somewhere.

Excerpts from the book: Great Work Great Career

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.


Great Work Great Career
As we live through successive economic earthquakes that shake the core of our society, it can be difficult to maintain one's footing. Still, Covey argues there is a positive side to these tumultuous times, provided one is willing to take a chance and go with it. Welcome this wild and demanding new world and embrace the opportunities it presents. Covey tells us, don't just settle for a job; you want a great job - Great Work, Great Career.

• A person with a great career makes a distinctive contribution and generates a strong feeling of loyalty and trust in others. Anyone, regardless of title or position or profession, can do these things.
• Dr. Fiona Wood clearly shows us what it means to have a great career. It’s not the acclaim or the fame, it’s the contribution.
• A great career is all about solving great problems, meeting great challenges, and making great contributions.
• He is not ambitious in the sense of needing the signs of external success, like constant promotions or public acclaim, but he’s making a difference.
• object of the ambition. If you’re ambitious only for the trappings of success and unwilling to pay an honest price for success, ambition can destroy your happiness over time. On the other hand, if you’re ambitious to make a real difference—a meaningful contribution—you will experience the deep satisfaction of a job well done and a life well lived. That is the kind of ambition I believe in.
• A great career does not rise from a need for outside affirmation, but from within you, from your own curiosity, from your own unique mix of talents and passion.
• It also rises from your conscience—from the whispers deep inside that point you to what you should do.
• A great career requires both of these dimensions—the desire and skill to contribute, and a character worthy of the trust and loyalty of others.
• satisfies your conscience. But it’s not just about you. It’s also about answering a significant need.
• Your great career starts, as Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith say, “when you stop asking questions such as ‘How do I get promoted?’ and start asking ‘What is the difference I want to make? What is the legacy I want to leave?’”
• “In corporate leadership roles and over 10 years in coaching and counseling, I discovered the difference I want to make—help people make their difference. In doing so, they reclaim their passion and find significance in their work.” — Julia Tang Peters, leadership coach.
• A great career comes down to making a great contribution, to making a difference that matters to you and to the people you serve. Envisioning, defining, and designing your Contribution Statement is the first step on the path to a great career. People who are only looking for a job have résumés. People who are looking to make a great career have Contribution Statements.
• Maya Angelou said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
• Those who create a great career for themselves are those who make the time to define their contribution and plan how they will achieve it.
• The Industrial Age, people simply asked, “What’s my job description?” Now, according to Peter Drucker, “Knowledge Age workers must learn to ask, ‘What should my contribution be?’
• Intelligence has become the new form of property. Focused intelligence, the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and know-how, is the new source of wealth.”

Excerpts from the book: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
In this must-read for anyone seeking to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth takes us on an eye-opening journey to discover the true qualities that lead to outstanding achievement. Winningly personal, insightful and powerful, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that – not talent or luck – makes all the difference.

• The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance. Each was chasing something of unparalleled interest and importance, and it was the chase—as much as the capture—that was gratifying. In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.
• It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit. Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another. Wrote Darwin. “For I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference.”
• So what is the reality of greatness? Nietzsche came to the same conclusion Dan Chambliss did. Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.”
• They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it). … They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”
• Here they are: Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort.15 Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them. What this theory says is that when you consider individuals in identical circumstances, what each achieves depends on just two things, talent and effort. Talent—how fast we improve in skill—absolutely matters. But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.

• Accomplishment, in Will’s eyes, is very much about going the distance. “I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented,” he once observed. “Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.” Asked to explain his ascendancy to the entertainment elite, Will said: The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me. You might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die.36 It’s really that simple.
• When you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have. As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything. Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going.
• I would add that skill is not the same thing as achievement, either. Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive. I was impressed and said so. But I hastened to add that grit is more about stamina than intensity.
• But the important thing is the idea itself: Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

• You are, in a sense, pointing in the same direction, ever eager to take even the smallest step forward than to take a step to the side, toward some other destination. At the extreme, one might call your focus obsessive. Most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy. You have your priorities in order.
• Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time. Furthermore, this “life philosophy,” as Pete Carroll might put it, is so interesting and important that it organizes a great deal of your waking activity. In very gritty people, most mid-level and low-level goals are, in some way or another, related to that ultimate goal. In contrast, a lack of grit can come from having less coherent goal structures.

• Buffett takes him through three steps. First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals. Second, you do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five. Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more. So, to Buffett’s three-step exercise in prioritizing, I would add an additional step: Ask yourself, To what extent do these goals serve a common purpose? The more they’re part of the same goal hierarchy—important because they then serve the same ultimate concern—the more focused your passion.
• On any long journey, detours are to be expected. However, the higher-level the goal, the more it makes sense to be stubborn.
• Degree of strength of will or perseverance. Quiet determination to stick to a course once decided upon. Tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles. Perseverance, tenacity, doggedness. In her summary comments, Cox concluded that “high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.”
• Grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

• Any of the following four thoughts might go through your head right before you quit what you’re doing: “I’m bored.” “The effort isn’t worth it.” “This isn’t important to me.” “I can’t do this, so I might as well give up.” There’s nothing wrong—morally or otherwise—with thoughts like these. As I tried to show in this chapter, paragons of grit quit goals, too. But the higher the level of the goal in question, the more stubborn they are about seeing it through. Most important, paragons of grit don’t swap compasses: when it comes to the one, singularly important aim that guides almost everything else they do, the very gritty tend not to utter the statements above.
• Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Every gritty person I’ve studied can point to aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, and most have to put up with at least one or two chores they don’t enjoy at all. Nevertheless, they’re captivated by the endeavor as a whole and they find it meaningful.
• Likewise, in her interviews with “mega successful” people, journalist Hester Lacey has noticed that all of them demonstrate a striking desire to excel beyond their already remarkable level of expertise:
• “It’s a persistent desire to do better,” Hester explained. “It’s the opposite of being complacent. But it’s a positive state of mind, not a negative one. It’s not looking backward with dissatisfaction. It’s looking forward and wanting to grow.”

• But seeing that someone needs our help isn’t enough, Bill hastened to add. Purpose requires a second revelation: “I personally can make a difference.” This conviction, this intention to take action, he says, is why it’s so important to have observed a role model enact purpose in their own life. “You have to believe that your efforts will not be in vain.”
• There’s an old Japanese saying: Fall seven, rise eight. If I were ever to get a tattoo, I’d get these four simple words indelibly inked. Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.
• Optimists, Marty soon discovered, are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.

• How do grit paragons think about setbacks? Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that they explain events optimistically. Journalist Hester Lacey finds the same striking pattern in her interviews with remarkably creative people. “What has been your greatest disappointment?” she asks each of them. Whether they’re artists or entrepreneurs or community activists, their response is nearly identical. “Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.’
• Brent and other personality researchers have found that a key process in personality development involves situations and personality traits reciprocally “calling” each other. The corresponsive principle suggests that the very traits that steer us toward certain life situations are the very same traits that those situations encourage, reinforce, and amplify. In this relationship there is the possibility of virtuous and vicious cycles.
• “My sense, from being in admissions for over forty years,” Bill concluded, “is that most people are born with tremendous potential. The real question is whether they’re encouraged to employ their good old-fashioned hard work and their grit, if you will, to its maximum. In the end, those are the people who seem to be the most successful.”
• The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture. There are standards. And the more elite the team, the fiercer the desire of those already on the team to keep those standards high.
• “So it seems to me,” Dan concluded, “that there’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity—the basic human drive to fit in—because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.”

• First, thinking of yourself as someone who is able to overcome tremendous adversity often leads to behavior that confirms that self-conception. If you’re a Finn with that “sisu spirit,” you get up again no matter what. Likewise, if you’re a Seattle Seahawk, you’re a competitor. You have what it takes to succeed. You don’t let setbacks hold you back. Grit is who you are. Second, even if the idea of an actual inner energy source is preposterous, the metaphor couldn’t be more apt. It sometimes feels like we have nothing left to give, and yet, in those dark and desperate moments, we find that if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, there is a way to accomplish what all reason seems to argue against.
• Roosvelt "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,19 whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
• And here is how Jamie translates the poetry of Roosevelt into the prose of a JPMorgan Chase manual, titled How We Do Business: “Have a fierce resolve in everything you do.” “Demonstrate determination, resiliency, and tenacity.” “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.” And, finally, “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better—not reasons to quit.”

Excerpts from the book: Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable
For more than two decades, legendary trainer Tim Grover has taken the greats—Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and hundreds of relentless competitors in sports, business, and every walk of life—and made them greater. Now, for the first time ever, he reveals what it takes to achieve total mental and physical dominance, showing you how to be relentless and achieve whatever you desire. Direct, blunt, and brutally honest, Grover breaks down what it takes to be unstoppable: you keep going when everyone else is giving up, you thrive under pressure, you never let your emotions make you weak. 

• That is relentless. For Kobe, there was no time to think or plan or decide. No time to wait for instructions or hesitate. There was only his instinctive drive to keep going, to stay strong, to never quit. Even with a devastating injury, he finished the free throws and began the next chapter of his career.
• In real life, being relentless is a state of mind that can give you the strength to achieve, to survive, to overcome, to be strong when others are not. It means craving the end result so intensely that the work becomes irrelevant. Not just in sports, but in everything you do.
• “I’m not done yet,” he said. That is a Cleaner. You don’t have to love the hard work; you just have to crave the end result.
• Being the best means engineering your life so you never stop until you get what you want, and then you keep going until you get what’s next. And then you go for even more. Relentless.
• You’re what I call a Cleaner, the most intense and driven competitor imaginable. You refuse limitations. You quietly and forcefully do whatever it takes to get what you want. You understand the insatiable addiction to success; it defines your entire life.
• Wanting something won’t get you anywhere. Trying to be someone you’re not won’t get you anywhere. Waiting for someone or something to light your fire won’t get you anywhere.
• Decide. Commit. Act. Succeed. Repeat.
• Being relentless means demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you, knowing that every time you stop, you can still do more. You must do more.
• Truly relentless people—the Cleaners—are predators, with dark sides that refuse to be taught to be good. And whether you know it or not, you do have a dark side. Use it well and it can be your greatest gift.
• Michael wasn’t the best because he could fly through the air and make impossible shots; he was the best because he was relentless about winning, relentless in his belief that there’s no such thing as “good enough.” No matter how many times he won, no matter how great he became, he always wanted more, and he was always willing to do whatever it took—and then some—to get it.
• Relentless is about never being satisfied, always driving to be the best, and then getting even better. It’s about finding the gear that gets you to the next level . . . even when the next level doesn’t yet exist. It’s about facing your fears, getting rid of the poisons that guarantee you will fail. Being feared and respected for your mental strength and toughness, not just your physical abilities.
• “In order to have what you really want, you must first be who you really are.”
• Being relentless means never being satisfied. It means creating new goals every time you reach your personal best. If you’re good, it means you don’t stop until you’re great. If you’re great, it means you fight until you’re unstoppable. It means becoming a Cleaner.
• Greatness makes you a legend; being the best makes you an icon. If you want to be great, deliver the unexpected. If you want to be the best, deliver a miracle.
• A Cleaner’s attitude can be summed up in three words: I own this. He walks in with confidence and leaves with results. A Cleaner has the guts and the vision to steer everything to his advantage.
• Cleaners don’t do it for show, they don’t go through the motions. A true Cleaner never tells you what he’s doing or what he’s planning. You find out after the job is complete. And by the time you realize what he’s accomplished, he’s already moved on to the next challenge.
• Here’s the most important thing about a Cleaner, the one thing that defines and separates him from any other competitor: He’s addicted to the exquisite rush of success. His lust for it is so powerful, the craving is so intense, that he’ll alter his entire life to get it. And it’s still never enough. As soon as he feels it, tastes it, holds it . . . the moment is over and he craves more.
• Cleaner is never, ever, content. Cleaners understand they don’t have to love the work to be successful; they just have to be relentless about achieving it, and everything else in between is a diversion and a distraction from the ultimate prize.
• THE RELENTLESS  When You’re a Cleaner . . . #1. You keep pushing yourself harder when everyone else has had enough. #1. You get into the Zone, you shut out everything else, and control the uncontrollable. #1. You know exactly who you are. #1. You have a dark side that refuses to be taught to be good. #1. You’re not intimidated by pressure, you thrive on it. #1. When everyone is hitting the “In Case of Emergency” button, they’re all looking for you. #1. You don’t compete with anyone, you find your opponent’s weakness and you attack. #1. You make decisions, not suggestions; you know the answer while everyone else is still asking questions. #1. You don’t have to love the work, but you’re addicted to the results. #1. You’d rather be feared than liked. #1. You trust very few people, and those you trust better never let you down. #1. You don’t recognize failure; you know there’s more than one way to get what you want. #1. You don’t celebrate your achievements because you always want more.
• Physical dominance can make you great. Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable.
• Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear.
• Bottom line if you want success of any kind: you have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
• Ask yourself where you are now, and where you want to be instead. Ask yourself what you’re willing to do to get there. Then make a plan to get there. Act on it.
• With Cleaners, there’s no off-switch. They’re always on.
• Cleaners show emotion if it’s the only way to get everyone else where they need to be. But never because the Cleaner has lost control of his feelings.
• As in an intricate military operation, everything has a reason and a result. A Cleaner operates out of pure desire for that result because he knows he must execute or fail. There is no other way.
• The only exception to the emotions rule is anger: controlled anger is a deadly weapon, in the right hands. I’m not talking about a raging volcano that can’t be managed from inside or outside, but anger you can restrain and turn into energy. All Cleaners have that slow-burning, blue-hot internal anger, and it works if they can control and maintain it. But it never becomes blind rage, and it’s never allowed to become destructive.
• Picture a lion running wild. He stalks his prey, attacking and killing at will, and then goes in search of his next conquest. That’s what his lion instincts tell him to do, he doesn’t know anything else. He’s not misbehaving, he’s not bad, he’s being a lion. Now lock him up in the zoo. He lies there all day, quiet and lethargic and well fed. What happened to those powerful instincts? They’re still there, deep inside, waiting to be uncaged. Let him out of the zoo and he goes lion again, preying and attacking. Put him back in the cage, he lies down. Most people are the lion in the cage. Safe, tame, predictable, waiting for something to happen. But for humans, the cage isn’t made of glass and steel bars; it’s made of bad advice and low self-esteem and bullshit rules and tortured thinking about what you can’t do or what you’re supposed to do.
• Anytime you take natural instinct and try to change it, you’re going to have a problem. You can build on it, add to it, improve it, but you cannot tame it. There’s a difference between training and taming.
• Anyone who has actually experienced its raw power knows it can’t be summed up in a couple of words. And most people who claim to have killer instinct rarely do, because when you have that kind of power, you don’t talk about it. You don’t think about it. You just use it.
• When you become too focused on what’s going on around you, you lose touch with what’s going on deep inside you. Those are the guys who are perfect in practice, but blow it when it counts.
• But real learning doesn’t mean clinging to the lessons. It means absorbing everything you can and then trusting yourself to use what you know instantaneously, without thinking. Instinctive, not impulsive . . . quick, not hurried.
• Trust me: no one ever lost weight sitting on the couch with a book.
• Instinct is the opposite of science: research tells you what others have learned, instinct tells you what you have learned. Science studies other people. Instinct is all about you.
• When you’re great, you trust your instincts. When you’re unstoppable, your instincts trust you.
• They make no distinction between different parts of their lives, the way they work is the way they live: intense, competitive, driven. There is no way to be relentless and do it any other way.
• Cleaner Law: control your dark side, don’t let it control you.
• But being relentless means constantly working for that result, not just when drama is on the line. Clutch is about the last minute. Relentless is about every minute.
• I understand the desire of great players to play alongside other great players. But use the opportunity to jack up the pressure, not dial it down. Forge that partnership so you can become even more competitive and intense, not so you can share the pressure and take less responsibility.
• Remember, you don’t compete with anyone, you make them compete with you. You can control what you put on yourself; you can’t control what the other guy puts on you. So you focus only on the internal pressure that drives you. Run to it, embrace it, feel it, so no one else can throw more at you than you’ve already put on yourself.
• Of course, you have to be able to recognize the difference between stress that can bring great results, and stress you create yourself that just causes chaos. Showing up unprepared, not putting in the work, blowing off commitments and obligations . . . that’s the stuff that creates pointless stress. You had the option to manage those things before they turned into negative situations. But when you’re faced with the stress of great challenges set before you—making the team, working for a raise, finishing a job, winning a championship—undeniable gifts are buried under all that pressure. Not everyone gets the opportunity to be stressed by the potential to achieve exceptional things.
• Cleaners never feel external pressure; they only believe what’s inside them. You can criticize, analyze, demonize a Cleaner, but he’s still only going to feel pressure from within. He knows what he’s doing right, and what he’s doing wrong. He does not care what you think. He steps out of his comfort zone and challenges himself to get to the next level.
• Wounds heal, scars don’t; those are your combat medals.
• But there’s a difference between confidence and cockiness: confidence means recognizing something isn’t working and having the flexibility and knowledge to make adjustments; cockiness is the inability to admit when something isn’t working, and repeating the same mistakes over and over because you stubbornly can’t admit you’re wrong.
• A Cooler takes no risks. A Closer takes risks when he can prepare in advance and knows the consequences of failing are minimal. Nothing feels risky to a Cleaner; whatever happens, he’ll know what to do.
• Few people have the ability to adapt on the fly and make quick adjustments that work. You can plan and prepare for ten different scenarios, be completely ready for every variable you anticipated . . . and you can be sure there will be an eleventh scenario you never saw coming. Most people are ready for one scenario, they can’t even envision ten; they’re completely paralyzed by all the possible variables, and when one thing goes wrong, they can’t adjust.
• When you always go according to plan, you get robotic and lose that innate ability to know what to do when plans suddenly change, when you’re confronted by the unexpected. But a Cleaner can take that same plan, and when something goes off the rails, his instincts immediately take over and he adapts. Doesn’t think about it, doesn’t need to be told, he just knows.
• That’s the trademark of a dangerous competitor: he doesn’t have to know what’s coming because whatever you show him, he’s ready. No fear of failure. That’s not about the myth of “positive thinking”; it’s about the hard work and preparation that go into knowing everything there is to know, letting go of your fears and insecurities, and trusting your ability to handle any situation.
• You have to be willing to fail if you’re going to trust yourself to act from the gut, and then adapt as you go. That’s the confidence or swagger that allows you to take risks and know that whatever happens, you’ll figure it out. Adapt, and adapt again.
• Being relentless means having the courage to say, “I’m going for this, and if I’m wrong, I’ll make a change and I’ll still be fine.” You can’t control or anticipate every obstacle that might block your path. You can only control your response, and your ability to navigate the unpredictable. Whatever happens, you have the smarts and skills to figure it out and arrive at the outcome you wanted in the first place.
• As hockey great (and Cleaner) Wayne Gretzky said, “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”
• You want to know a true sign of a Cleaner? He feels no pressure when he screws up and has no problem admitting when he’s wrong and shouldering the blame: When a Cooler makes a mistake, he’ll give you a lot of excuses but no solutions. When a Closer makes a mistake, he finds someone else to blame. When a Cleaner makes a mistake, he can look you in the eye and say, “I fucked up.”
• That’s it. Confident, simple, factual, no explanation. You made a mistake? Fine. Don’t explain it to me for an hour.
• People think admitting mistakes creates more pressure because now they’re to blame for something. False. The ability to put your hands up and say, “Yep, my fault,” is the greatest way to stop the pressure. Now you only have one objective: resolve the issue.
• I’ve made tons of mistakes, I’m going to make plenty more. But I never think of them as failures. Failure to me is when you bring other people into it, when you’re looking for an out instead of accepting your own mistake and planning a route to resolving the issue. Once you start blaming others, you’re admitting you had no control over the situation. And without that control, you can’t create a solution.
• Create your own pressure to succeed, don’t allow others to create it for you. Have the confidence to trust that you can handle anything. When you can laugh at yourself and not take every setback seriously, that’s confidence. On the other hand, when someone says something to you that you don’t like or you don’t want to hear, and you allow it to put pressure on you, even for a moment, that’s a confidence problem. When you’re confident, you don’t care about what others think; you can take your mistakes seriously but still laugh because you know you can and will do better. Cleaners always have the confidence to know they’ll get it right. Accept the consequences and move on.
• That’s internal pressure at work, getting on yourself for something no one else would even notice and challenging yourself to get it right. Not because you have to, but because you want to.
• Have the confidence to say when you’ve screwed up, and people will respect you for it.
• A Cooler does a good job and waits for a pat on the back. A Closer does a good job and pats himself on the back. A Cleaner just does a good job, that’s his job.
• When you’re the guy at the top, it’s on you to pull everyone else up there with you, or everything you’ve built comes crashing down. Not so easy for a Cleaner who demands excellence of himself and has no tolerance for those who can’t or won’t rise to that level.
• Bringing my game down so you can look better; you bring your game up so you can look better. He refused to put his own game in the backseat just to give other guys more action, unless you proved to him you could handle the responsibility.
• Michael forced every one of his teammates to be ready, to play better, harder, stronger, and every one of them ended up with careers they could not duplicate when they were no longer playing with him. You don’t have to like it, he said, but you’ll like the results. And he was right, they didn’t like it. But they all elevated their games, they all looked better than they were, and they all got a payday. Even the guys with zero minutes, he made them better too. He took the pressure off everyone and put it all on himself.
• But don’t be fooled: a true Cleaner isn’t thinking about making you better for your benefit. He’s happy for you if you get something out of it, but whatever he’s doing, it’s for his sake, not yours. His only objective is putting you where he needs you to be so he can get the result he desires.
• But you’ll never hear Dwyane say any of that or take any credit because, in his mind, that was his job. A great leader knows the best way to get people to raise their performance is to put them where they can truly excel, not just where you want them to excel. Cleaners don’t block others from reaching the top with them, if they’re capable and ready. And as LeBron evolves as a leader and potential Cleaner, eventually he can take over responsibility for putting a winning team on the floor.
• Everyone is given some ability at birth. Not everyone finds out what that ability is. Sometimes you find it on your own, sometimes it has to be shown to you. Either way, it’s there. At the same time, there are abilities you are not given. Our challenge in life is to use the abilities we have, and to compensate for the abilities we don’t have. It’s completely instinctive; we compensate in order to survive.
• Successful people compensate for what they don’t have; unsuccessful people make excuses, blame everyone else, and never get past the deficiencies. A true leader can see past those deficiencies, identify the abilities, and get the most out of that individual.
• A Cleaner’s job is to take control and determine what has to happen to get results. You have a coach telling you this, players wanting that . . . but if you’re the guy in the middle with the responsibility and the talent, all fingers are pointing at you, win or lose. Not just in sports, but in anything. When you’re the guy they hired to make things happen, those things better happen or you won’t be that guy for long. You are responsible. If there’s going to be a mistake, you have to be the one to make it so you can turn it around immediately and get everyone back on track. It’s all on you.
• The only way you can light other people on fire is to be lit yourself, from the inside. Professional, cool, focused. If you had a bad night and you can’t show up the next day ready to go, or you can’t show up at all, that doesn’t affect just you, it affects everyone around you. A professional doesn’t let other people down just because of personal issues. If you need to show up, you show up. You might detest every individual in the room, but if your presence makes them all feel better, if it pulls the team together, if it results in better performances, then you’ve helped yourself to get one step closer to your own goal. That’s how you get others to come up to your level: show them where it is, and set the example that allows them to get there.
• Thinking doesn’t achieve outcomes, only action does. Prepare yourself with everything you’ll need to succeed, then act. You don’t need a hundred people to back you up and be your safety net. Your preparation and your instincts are your safety net.
• No, good things come to those who work. I understand the value of not rushing into things—you want to be quick, not careless—but you still have to work toward a result, not just sit back and wait for something to happen.
• Oh, you can’t swim? Fine, then tell me what you can do. Why stand at the water’s edge feeling sorry for yourself? Go a different way, excel in another area, while everyone else is just competing for space in the same pool. You don’t become unstoppable by following the crowd, you get there by doing something better than anyone else can do it, and proving every day why you’re the best at what you do.
• People get paid a fortune for being the expert at one thing, so that anytime others need that one thing done, you’re the only one they’re calling.
• No one knows what this guy does every day to be this good. People just know he can deliver results. Figure out what you do, then do it. And do it better than anyone else.
• And then let everything else you do build around that; stay with what you know. Being great at one thing doesn’t mean you can also run a restaurant or a car dealership or a line of sportswear. Bill Gates is not going to launch a line of sportswear. Most likely, neither should you.
• One of the hardest decisions for an athlete is to determine how much fatigue and pain he can endure, and how far he can push himself. Everyone plays with pain, there’s always something going on physically. The question is, how do you keep that from affecting you mentally? If you know you’re going to have constant pain, can you get comfortable being uncomfortable?
• Depends how badly you want it.
• Sickness, physical or mental, is one of the best ways to put a person in the Zone: his survival instincts kick in and give him an extra gear for fighting back from a weakened state.
• After every game, I used to ask Michael one question: Five, six, or seven? As in, what time are we hitting the gym tomorrow morning? And he’d snap back a time, and that was it. Especially after a loss, when there wasn’t a whole lot else to say. No discussion, no debate, no lame attempt to convince me he needed the morning off. You good? I’m good. See you in the morning. And the next morning at whatever time he’d decided, he’d awaken to find me standing outside his door. No matter what had happened the night before—good game, bad game, soreness, fatigue—he was up working out every morning while most of the other guys slept. Interesting how the guy with the most talent and success spent more time working out than anyone else.
• It all comes back to this, no matter what you do in life: Are you willing to make the decision to succeed? Are you going to stand by that decision or quit when it gets hard? Will you choose to keep working when everyone else tells you to quit? Pain comes in all sorts of disguises—physical, mental, emotional. Do you need to be pain-free? Or can you push past it and stand by your commitment and decision to go further? It’s your choice. The outcome is on you.
• Making it to the top is not the same as making it at the top. True for any business; getting the job doesn’t mean you’re keeping the job; winning the client doesn’t mean he’s staying forever. Most people seem to understand that. They get a big opportunity and usually realize they now have to go out and earn that salary, working even harder to prove they deserve it.
• Doors swing two ways. Did you shut it on the competition or on yourself?
• It’s easy to improve on mediocrity, not so easy to improve on excellence.
• Cleaner Law: when you reduce your competition to whining that you “got lucky,” you know you’re doing something right. There are no shortcuts,
• Luck becomes a convenient excuse when things don’t go your way, and a rationale for staying comfortable while you wait for luck to determine your fate. You can’t be relentless if you’re willing to gamble everything on the unknown.
• You cannot understand what it means to be relentless until you have struggled to possess something that’s just out of your reach. Over and over, as soon as you touch it, it moves farther away. But something inside you—that killer instinct—makes you keep going, reaching, until you finally grab it and fight with all your might to keep holding on. Anyone can take what’s sitting right in front of him. Only when you’re truly relentless can you understand the determination to keep pursuing a target that never stops moving.
• No question, those who are gifted get to the top faster than anyone else. So what? Is that your excuse for not reaching as high? The challenge is staying there, and most people don’t have the balls to put in the work. If you want to be elite, you have to earn it. Every day, everything you do. Earn it. Prove it. Sacrifice.
• For all of Michael’s amazing moves and unforgettable moments, he knew none of that could happen without the fundamentals. Those basic moves he had practiced over and over and over since he was a kid made everything else possible. He didn’t work on being flashy, he worked on being consistent, and he worked on it relentlessly. Cleaners don’t care about instant gratification; they invest in the long-term payoff.
• Ask yourself honestly, what would you have to sacrifice to have what you really want? Your social life? Relationships? Credit cards? Free time? Sleep? Now answer this question: What are you willing to sacrifice? If those two lists don’t match up, you don’t want it badly enough.
• No matter what you do, if you’re in it for the money or the attention, if you’re not willing to put in the hard work and the commitment, if you’re okay with just being okay, I have to ask you, why?
• When did hard work become a skill? It doesn’t take talent to work hard, anyone can do it. Show up, work hard, and listen. It takes a willingness to be dedicated, to improve, to be better. I don’t care if you’re a superstar or the weakest guy on the team, anyone can show up, work hard, and listen. Are you looking for that nonexistent shortcut, or are you ready to do things the right way? Do you want it easy, or do you want it great?
• In anything you do, it takes no talent to work hard. You just have to want to do it.
• Anyone can start something. Few can finish. Priorities change if you don’t constantly protect and defend them.
• Part of the commitment to hard work is knowing what you have to give up to do the work . . . learning to control whatever pulls you away from your mission. You start having a little success, people notice you, it feels good . . . and maybe you start feeling a little satisfied and privileged. Trust me: privilege is a poison unless you know how to manage it.
• Shoe deals and commercials don’t make you an icon. Being unstoppable makes you an icon. And being unstoppable only comes with hard work.
• But, hey, you can enjoy that off-season permanently when you’re cut by the team.
• Do the work. There is no privilege greater than the pressure to excel, and no greater reward than earning the respect and fear of others who can only stand in awe of your results.
• A Cooler is liked. A Closer is respected. A Cleaner is feared, and then respected for doing exactly what everyone feared he’d do.
• This is what makes Kobe one of the greats of all time: He doesn’t tell you what he’s thinking or what he’s going to do. He just does it. He makes others fear his next move and respect his ability to execute it.
• Fear and respect: let them know you were there by your actions, not your words or emotions. You don’t have to be loud to be the focus of attention.
• A Cleaner has no need to announce his presence; you’ll know he’s there by the way he carries himself, always cool and confident. He’s never the blowhard telling you how great he is; he’s the quiet guy focused on results, because results are all that matter. A thief doesn’t walk into a crowded store screaming, “I’m stealing!” He comes in quietly, subtly executing his plan before anyone notices. And he’s long gone by the time you notice your watch is missing.
• Just because I don’t, doesn’t mean I can’t.
• The way you conduct yourself in all areas of your life, your ability to show intelligence and class and self-control . . . those are the things that separate you from the rest of the pack.
• That’s how you earn respect. Excellence in everything. Now you’re not just another high-paid athlete, you’re a class act.
• When you’re the guy at the top, you show others how to act, you don’t drop down to their level. You command respect and make them measure up to your standards, not the other way around.
• You’re not here to make friends. You’re here because you’re the best, and you’re not afraid to show it. And if that means setting yourself apart from everyone else, good for you. It means you’re doing something right.
• I’m not telling you to work at alienating people. But don’t be surprised if you do. Coolers are nice; they compensate for their competitive deficiencies by being likable. Cleaners don’t have to do that. They set themselves apart from their colleagues and peers, distinguishing themselves by rising to a higher level. When you’re completely focused on one thing—your craft—it’s hard to pay attention to other people.
• You don’t care about being liked, you care about getting what you want. Not a great way to make and keep friends. But the only way to be truly relentless.
• You can’t get to the top without stepping on some people, but a Cleaner knows where to step without leaving footprints, because you never know when you may need those people again. Being feared doesn’t mean being a jerk. I want you to carry yourself so you can be respected, not exposed as an insecure jackass who big-times others so he can feel better about himself.
• You can screw up your own reputation; you’re not going to screw up mine.
• When someone says, “I need to be surrounded by positive people,” I just laugh. You know what that really means? I want people who will lie to my face and make me feel better. You didn’t hire me to tell happy, shiny lies, my job is to set people straight, no matter what the consequence. And if that makes me sound cold or harsh, I’m fine with that. It’s made me very good at what I do.
• Someone asks you to do something you don’t want to do, and you start explaining, that person is going to ask you again and again and again. Don’t explain, don’t make excuses. Truth takes one sentence. Simple and direct. A question, an answer.
• Attaining excellence means finding those answers, not just settling for the convenient, easy route. It means seeking and accepting the truth, and adapting as necessary.
• Cleaner Law: surround yourself with those who want you to succeed, who recognize what it takes to be successful. People who don’t pursue their own dreams probably won’t encourage you to pursue yours; they’ll tell you every negative thing they tell themselves.
• When a Cooler speaks, you have doubts. When a Closer speaks, you listen. When a Cleaner speaks, you believe.
• I don’t understand the concept of failure. If you don’t succeed at everything you do on your first attempt, does that mean you “failed”? Isn’t it a good thing that you keep coming back and working at it until you succeed? How can that be failure?
• Let’s make this simple: Failure is what happens when you decide you failed. Until then, you’re still always looking for ways to get to where you want to be.
• What happened with the building was a setback. But dealing with setbacks is how you achieve success. You learn, and you adapt. When everyone else is talking about how you “failed,” you show up like a professional, remap your course, and get back to work. That’s the progression of good-great-unstoppable. No one starts at unstoppable. You fuck up, you figure it out, you trust yourself.
• Admitting defeat has no place in this discussion, or in this book, because the words quit and relentless just don’t work together in any productive way. People who admit defeat and say they had no choice just aren’t serious about success, excellence, or themselves. They say they’ll “try” and then give up when that doesn’t work. Fuck “try.” Trying is an open invitation to failure, just another way of saying, “If I fail, it’s not my fault, I tried.”
• Everything you accomplished, everything you worked for, you didn’t do any of it for the celebration, and you didn’t do it for anyone else. You did it for that exquisite moment, that electrifying, powerful surge of satisfaction that everyone dreams about but few ever get to experience. Yet the minute you experience it, it’s already fading. And all you can think about is doing whatever it takes to get it back.
• That’s the relentless pursuit of excellence, always believing in your ability, demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever ask of you.
• A Cleaner performs for himself, and everyone else wins. Whatever he does to satisfy his goals internally transfers to them externally. When he achieves what he desires, everyone else around him benefits.
• The drive to close the gap between near-perfect and perfect is the difference between great and unstoppable. You never shake the uneasy feeling that you can’t ever be satisfied with your results; you always believe you could have done better, and you stop at nothing to prove it. Is it an ideal way to live? I don’t know. It’s not easy, that’s for sure. You hope your family and friends ultimately understand. They might not. Your whole life is essentially dedicated to one goal, to the exclusion of everything else. Whether you’re focused on business, sports, relationships, anything, you have to be committed to saying, “I’m doing this, I’ll give up whatever I have to give up so I can do this, I don’t care what anyone thinks, and if there are consequences that affect the other parts of my life, I’ll deal with them when I have to.”
• To me, never being satisfied means being prepared for any situation, ready to adapt seamlessly without panic or fluster. It means scrutinizing every detail, paying meticulous attention to things no one else would even notice.
• A Cleaner feels burnout like everyone else, but the idea of walking away and not thinking about what he walked away from creates more anxiety and stress than keeping it going; that addiction is still demanding to be fed. That’s why you see guys retire and return; they’re still not satisfied, and they still have something to prove. Not to you, but to themselves. The pressure is all internal. You have to crave that pressure, embrace it, and never let up. You don’t have to love it. You just have to be insatiable for the results.
• Every dream you imagine, everything you see and hear and feel in your sleep, that’s not a fantasy, that’s your deep instinct telling you it can all be real. Follow those visions and dreams and desires, and believe what you know. Only you can turn those dreams into reality. Never stop until you do. The greatest battles you will ever fight are with yourself, and you must always be your toughest opponent. Always demand more of yourself than others demand of you. Be honest with yourself, and you’ll be able to meet every challenge with confidence and the deep belief that you are prepared for anything. Life can be complicated; the truth is not. I truly believe I have zero limitations. You should believe the same about yourself. Listen to your instincts. They’re telling you the truth.