Leave no holes in your game

Probably the most influential step you can take toward creating a consistent practice of success is to invest in the systems that make your life run like a well-oiled machine.

Systems allow you to leverage your and other people’s time.

We all plateau. It’s frustrating but also a normal part of life. The key to bursting through ceilings, be they mental, physical or financial, is to hold yourself accountable. That doesn't mean accountable for doing it all, but accountable for getting help.

You’ll be surprised by how much further and faster a little help can take you. 

Once you’ve written down a company or a team goal, two questions arise. Who is responsible for the goal (accountability), and how do you review the results (performance review)?

These goals are designed to try new things, experiment and break old habits. It’s reaching for the moon and landing among the stars.

Track your progress towards said goal week by week. This is called continuous performance review. 

Weekly status meetings are used in most companies. But you have to be careful with them as they can become pointless very easily if you haven’t set clear goals first.

Nelson Mandela was lauded as a courageous leader -- even when he was truly terrified. Like the time he astonished his bodyguard by calmly reading a newspaper while the plane he was flying on had engine failure.

Mandela himself, however, later confessed in private that he’d been truly terrified but refused to show it. Mandela knew that courage is a choice, and everyone can be courageous by learning to cope with your anxieties and fears every day. 

Niccolò Machiavelli held that using advisors well begins with knowing one’s own weaknesses and selecting advisors to offset them. It’s also necessary to know how to solicit advice the right way.

For Machiavelli, that meant showing advisors he valued their honest opinion and would not punish them for giving it. But, at the end of the day, he was the one calling the shots.

• Ask about passion projects. Learners tend to pursue something else outside work (training for a marathon, playing with a band, etc.)
• Focus on curiosity as much as hard skills. Bring up problems currently facing the team and see how the candidate responds.
• One of the most important things to a learning mindset is the ability to admit you don't know something. So be aware of how they approach the things they don't understand.

This means explicitly defining ongoing learning as a core company value.

Empowering employees can mean providing the time or money to enable learning - in other words, offering learning opportunities as a job benefit like health insurance. 

By learning to fight, he was able to better understand who he was — he could force himself out of his comfort zone, test his limits, and confront his fears. 

Bruce Lee saw life as being in constant change.

Unless we learn to adapt to it, we’re bound to experience tremendous resistance that will entrap us in a constant state of suffering.

This type of comfort breeds something lazy in us and we only do what is expected of us, but do not go beyond. 

Crave what is new and unexplored, and fearlessly pursue those areas. 

Effort counts twice as much as genius or talent.

Commit to being a person who wants to be more, do more, and consistently test the limits of your capacity. Embrace the responsibility and enjoy the freedom that comes with it.

Being proficient at anything at full speed takes the willingness and patience to first go slowly, literally and figuratively.

 Any professional athlete will tell you that the ritualistic nature of slowing down your craft is the key to success in that craft. You have to walk before you can run.

Words inspire, words inform, and words can destroy - if we let them.

The martial arts will teach you not to react to other’s problems, but to pay attention to your own. Learn not to react to words that are meant for harm.