High-Performance Lifestyle
I heard Rob Shaul talking about the Quiet Professional on an Art of Manliness podcast and I have since been consumed with this approach to life.
The term comes from the Special Forces community but Rob builds the idea into a holistic message that coveys several big ideas.
It is a craftsman mentality — go to work and chase perfection. [Read more…]
I stumbled onto this interesting speech from 1986 by Dr. Richard W. Hamming of Bell Labs. From his more than 40 years of experience, he asks the question, “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?”
The speech was part of a colloquia series intended for other scientists, but it is applicable to any person in any industry.
The speech is based on his personal study into why some scientists were better than him. He kept asking “why,” and he studied and read and worked. He realized that a scientist must decide to do first-class work. It must be intentional, despite what society may say and despite what other scientists may think. [Read more…]
Which is better: a winner or a loser.
The answer is simple, a winner.
Yet, as a society, we are devaluing the idea of the winner.
We want to make everyone feel equal. We strive for equality in an environment that doesn’t reward everyone equally.
Soft minded people can push for this false premise of equality but it will never manifest.
We are programmed to always reward the winners and disregard the losers.
[Read more…]
The one-sentence book summary is something that I learned from Ryan Holiday. His post on 42 books that will make you a better person used the technique to provide stratagems into some of the most important books he has ever read.
Using just one sentence to clearly convey the most important message of a book is a tough task. It is not always the thesis or the major point, sometimes it is a small detail that makes the biggest impact.
Either way, it required me to deeply reflect on each book from this past year. [Read more…]
Robert Greene’s work on Mastery is a masterpiece in itself — a complete look into what it takes to achieve the pinnacle of human potential.
Greene is a master researcher, the singular skill that makes his books tower above others (literally). He has mentioned (podcast) that he spends a year reading before he even begins to write a book. This year is devoted to intense study, going through every conceivable piece of literature, developing ideas and piecing together bits of information. Using his notecard system, he then compiles thousands of note cards into stacks of knowledge; these stacks usually become chapters.
Months of endless refining would reveal a masterwork. Ryan Holiday would call them perennial sellers, books that endure the test of time.
Forged from the hands of a master is the premiere book on mastery itself. Better than Outliers and more thorough than Talent, it is a full discourse into supreme intelligence: the power that emanates from those who are masters.
Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure. But it’s the same with that type of artistic activity as with all others: We are merely born with the capability to do it. The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
