You can't do everything well

Get an extra hour of sleep. Stop trying to do so many things at once. Go for a walk or get a little exercise. Take a breath and actually think for a minute. You can do a few things well. You can't do everything well. If you keep scattering your attention across seven different priorities, you'll keep making mistakes that your rested and thoughtful mind would never make.

The depth required for better understanding

The depth required for better understanding can be achieved only through digging. Researching, investigating, experimenting and going beyond what is immediately visible. Finding otherwise invisible patterns, connections, bridges, gaps. It seems so obvious, yet it is so alien for most. We are out of sync with what is possible to see, and where we actually look at.

Loneliness is the cost of entry for transformation

Accept that evolving means outgrowing some people and places. Use solitude as fuel, as time alone isn’t a setback, but the quiet space where your new self takes shape.

Have a conversation with the book

Don’t just read the book, turn it into a conversation with the author by taking notes on the lines you’ve loved, writing down how they make you feel, and considering the possible reasons why the text resonated with you. If the book changes how you think about a topic, write down what changed and what lessons you learned from it.

It's ok to disappoint other people

Everyone searches for opportunities while running from problems, missing that they're the same thing. Problems aren't obstacles to opportunity, they are the opportunity. It's ok to disappoint other people if you avoid disappointing yourself. 

We are the circumstances

If someone with less skill and less dedication than you took over your job, could they degrade the quality of your work? Here’s the hard question: If someone with more skill and dedication took over your work, how many ways could they make it better? The first step in improvement is imagining that it could happen. We’re often not under the circumstances, we are the circumstances.

People are drawn to breaking news

If there was a website you could visit to find out what the future held, how often would you visit it? We do that with the weather, sometimes daily. People are drawn to breaking news and social media buzz because they have an urge to know the now, which is a bit like the future, except it already happened. One alternative is to spend that time and energy inventing the future instead. There are countless things we can do today to change tomorrow.