Good Enough

True success means feeling content with the unfolding of your life. It's finding happiness in your work and life in the present time and being great all the time.

Interestingly, not always trying so hard to be great is the path to getting better.

To make sustainable progress, you don't have to be consistently great; it's about being great at being consistent.

Setting a goal and doing everything possible to pursue it is a great feeling.
However, often it is the very striving to be great that gets in the way of actually being great.

When we are young and insecure, passion or striving often manifest as looking ahead and craving external validation (becoming a champion or lawyer or millionaire or whatever).

If we gain wisdom, the energy of our passion and striving becomes less about achieving the goal and more about where you are on the journey at present. It is about having a richer experience of the present moment. With this as a focus, you are more likely to achieve success.

Outliers are extreme examples of people who are on the outer edge of success or have a radically different life, glorified by the media.

Following Outliers leads normal people to make decisions based on false hope and highly unlikely possibilities.

We need safe, nurturing environments to be our best, to blossom into what we truly are destined for, no matter how big or small, in our unique way.

We are provided with unnecessary pain and suffering by the constant comparison with people who are born radically different from us and are having different circumstances. 

The reason why we don’t do anything useful with our time is that we lack self-discipline.

But when you write every day, you strengthen your discipline. And you can transfer that better self-discipline to achieve anything in life.

Nothing will help you to get to know yourself more than translating your thoughts into words.

When you force yourself to write every day, you automatically become more aware of your thoughts. And self-awareness is one of the most important skills that predict career success.

Understanding your own desires, emotions, failings, habits, and everything else that makes you tick. The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting life changes that suit your needs.

You can read every productivity tip out there and you can adapt the routines of geniuses, but it's completely pointless if you don't know yourself well enough to put the correct advice into practice.

... is about showing up and being seen, about owning our vulnerability and understanding it as the birthplace of courage.

Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both.

• What’s keeping you out of the arena? Can you name the fear? Where do you want to be braver?
• Figure out how you’re currently protecting yourself from vulnerability:  Perfectionism, Cynicism, Control etc.

The main difference between individuals who show a certain level of self-compassion and the ones who show none or lower is that the first ones have the strength to stand up after having made a mistake, learn something from this mistake and be successful next time.

A sure way of practicing self-compassion is by actually trying to learn lessons from all your experiences, especially the negative ones. 

You should stop judging these experiences as being good or bad, but rather look for the meaning of each and every one of them.

The Minimum Viable Product is the simplest, most basic form of a product or service, which can be sold in the market. This doesn't have all of the bells and whistles but has enough features to work. Basically, it is good enough but not perfect.

Releasing an MVP allows one to get feedback at an early stage, and improve the product later on.

If a product is being launched in the market that is new and does not have competition, then launching it with bare minimum features is the right way.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) strategy does not work for a generic product.

Writing is about thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing, then maybe some typing with revisions as you go, deletions, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh.
Typing is what you do in the middle of the two vast thoughtful processes.

Read good writing—Dickens or Baldwin or evolutionary biology textbooks or the Old Testament, whatever holds your attention.

Don't read something just because it is popular at the moment; otherwise, you will be like everyone else and will not be able to make a meaningful contribution.