• The best way to move past any plateau is to challenge your brain and body in a new way. Figure out the components of the skill that are holding you back, and find a way to push yourself more on those specific elements. Design a practice technique focused on improving that specific weakness.
• To keep working on something, you need to keep the reasons to continue high, and the reasons to quit low.

Keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it.

Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.

Improvement is possible is we learn to let go of these myths:

1. The belief that one’s abilities are limited by one’s genetically prescribed characteristics.
2. If you do something for long enough, you’re bound to get better at it.
3. All it takes to improve is effort. If you just try hard enough, you’ll get better.

It offers the following view: anyone can improve, but it requires the right approach. If you are not improving, it’s not because you lack innate talent; it’s because you’re not practicing the right way.

Once you understand this, improvement becomes a matter of figuring out what the “right way” is.

Principles of Deliberate Practice:

1. The field must be well developed. If there’s no competition to indicate skill, then it’s hard for there to be deliberate practice because the differences of the best are less clear.
2. Deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or her performance.
3. Near maximal effort, constantly being taken out of your comfort zone by a teacher or coach. Not “fun”
4. Well defined, specific goals, not aimed at “overall improvement.”
5. Full attention and conscious action, no autopilot.
6. Feedback and constant little improvements, modifying efforts in response to feedback
7. Building and modifying mental representations
8. Focusing on building and improving specific skills by focusing on aspects of those skills and improving them

• They are mental structure that corresponds to an object, an idea, a collection of information, or anything else, concrete or abstract, that the brain is thinking about.
• They help with processing large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory.
• Your skill in anything is based on the number and quality of “mental representations” you have for the skill.
• What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.

The reason that most people don’t possess extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it.

The traditional approach to learning is not designed to challenge this: It assumes that learning is all about fulfilling your innate, fixed potential and that you can develop a particular skill or ability without getting too far out of your comfort zone. 

• Purposeful practice means having a plan - putting a bunch of baby steps together to hit a long term goal, 
• Purposeful practice is focused.
• Purposeful practice involves feedback: you have to know whether you are doing something right and if not, what mistakes you’re making.
• Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone, feeling uncomfortable. If you never push beyond your comfort zone you’ll never improve.
• It involves a way to monitor your progress and a system to maintain your motivation.

• Naive practice means doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance. This is how most people “practice” but it’s ineffective.
• Purposeful practice has well-defined, specific goals. Without such a goal, there is no way to judge whether the practice session has been a success.

• We all follow pretty much the same pattern with any skill we learn: We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction (teacher, a book, or a website), practice until we reach an acceptable level, and then let it become automatic. 
• But once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance, you have stopped improving.
• Once a person reaches that level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement.

There is no such thing as natural talent or prodigies.

The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else. 

It is far from being a gift a lucky few have. It can be trained: By exposing kids to tones and challenging them to match them before age 4, they can develop perfect pitch for the rest of their life. Even adults can learn some of this, though there is some brain plasticity at that young age that makes it easier.

So did the young Mozart have a gift for perfect pitch? Yes and no. If Mozart had been raised in some other family without exposure to music—or without enough of the right sort of exposure—he would certainly have never developed that ability at all.

Revisiting great books is helpful because the problems you deal with change over time. Sure, when you read a book twice maybe you'll catch some stuff you missed the first time around, but it's more likely that new passages and ideas will be relevant to you.

On any topic don't just read one book or one article , try to dig into that topic from different author's perspective or from different angles , which widens up your knowledge on that topic and transcend the boundary of your own experience.

Some questions I consider when summarizing a book include:

• What are the main ideas?
• If I implemented one idea from this book right now, which one would it be?
• How would I describe the book to a friend?

One way to imagine a book is like a knowledge tree with a few fundamental concepts forming the trunk and the details forming the branches. You can learn more and improve reading comprehension by “linking branches” and integrating your current book with other knowledge trees.

Keep notes on what you read. You can do this however you like.

So that you can emphasize on the important points and passages .

But here's the real key: store your notes in a searchable format so that you can search the meaning or the interpretation of them .

One way to improve reading comprehension is to choose books you can immediately apply. Putting the ideas you read into action is one of the best ways to secure them in your mind.

Always try to find those books that are relevant to your daily life , so that you can relate to it and it helps in remembering things better .

It is not necessary to read every book page by page , in 10 minutes you can figure out that whether the book is right for you or not . Start more books. Quit most of them. Read the great ones twice.

The Five Assets of Genious are your mental focus, your physical energy, your personal willpower, your original talent, and your daily time.

The balance should be maintained between High Excellence Cycles (the time when you work) and Deep Refueling Cycle (when you take rest).

THE LEGENDARY PERFORMANCE EQUATION:

PRESSURE × REFUELING = GROWTH + ENDURANCE

Remember this: The time you least feel like doing something is the best time to do it.

1. To Create Magic in the World, Own the Magic within Yourself.
2. Collect Miraculous Experiences over Material Things.
3. Failure Inflates Fearlessness.
4. Proper Use of Your Primal Power Creates Your Personal Utopia.
5. Avoid Bad People.
6. Money Is the Fruit of Generosity, Not Scarcity.
7. Optimal Health Maximizes Your Power to Produce Magic.
8. Continue Raising Your Life Standards Toward Absolute World-Class.
9. Deep Love Yields Unconquerable Joy.
10. Heaven on Earth Is a State, Not a Place.
11. Tomorrow Is a Bonus, Not a Right.

1. The Tight Bubble of Total Focus: preserves your focus as well as your primal brilliance by giving you long stretches of time free from trivial fascinations and any influences that dissolve your inspiration.
2. The 90/90/1 Rule: For 90 days spend 90 minutes of a workday on a single task.
3. The 60/10 method: 60 minutes work - 10-minute break.
4. The Five Daily Concepts: During the second pocket of your Victory Hour, list the five tiny targets you wish to accomplish over the day ahead for you to feel it was one well-spent.
5. The Second-Wind Workout: schedule a second workout at the end of your workday to give you a second wind for a great evening.
6. The Two Massage Protocols: Lock two ninety-minute massages onto your weekly schedule.
7. Traffic University: Use the traveling time to learn, expanding your professional prowess and personal knowledge.
8. The Dream Team Technique: Delegate tasks that not only are a poor use of your hours but also diminish your happiness. Ideally, restructure your entire life so you’re doing only the things you’re great at—and love to do.
9. The Weekly Design System: Carve out and then ritualize thirty minutes early each Sunday morning to create your “Blueprint for a Beautiful Week.”
10. The 60-Minute Student: For at least sixty minutes a day, study. Do whatever it takes to fireproof your commitment to relentless growth.

By using this formula you will get most of your Victory Hour(5-6 am). It is divided into three 20 minutes pockets.

1.  Move: 1st 20 minutes for intense exercise. It will increase your metabolism rate and your brain will be optimized and you will be able to better focus on work.
2. Reflect: Here you plan your day or Mediate for clear vision or you may do praying or journaling.
3. Grow: This pocket is for gaining knowledge. You can read books, listen to podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

It takes 66 days to get to the automation point of a new habit. The time can be divided into 3 parts (22 days each)- 

1. Destruction Phase: Here your old habit gets destroyed. It is the hardest part. You need most of your willpower in this phase.
2. Installation Phase: In this phase installation of a new habit takes place. Here you should remember why you are going to build this habit.
3. Integration Phase: Here the habit gets integrated with your daily life 

After 66 days the habit will be automated.

1. Victory demands consistency and persistence. Anyone can be great for just one day. But to be great consistently is what is required to become heroic.
2. Completing what is started determines the size of personal respect that will be generated.
3. The way you practice in private is precisely how you will perform once you are in public.

1. World-class willpower isn’t an inherent strength; it is a skill developed through relentless practice.
2. Personal discipline is a muscle. The more you stretch it, the stronger it gets.
3. Like other muscles, willpower weakens when tired. Therefore, recovery is necessary for the expression of mastery and to manage decision fatigue.
4. Installing any virtuous habits follows a distinct four-part pattern for automation of the routine.
5. Increasing self-control in one area of your life should elevate self-control in all areas of your life.

1. Mind Set: It is the psychological aspect of our being. For example, our thinking.
2. Heart Set: It is our emotional intelligence. How good are we at managing our own emotions? What is our relation to others?
3. Health Set: It relates to our physical fitness.
4. Soul Set: It connects to spirituality. How are we connecting to that Supreme power?

1. Capitalization IQ: 'Natural talent is not what defines great individuals. Instead, it is the extent of that potential that they capitalize on through consistency and relentlessness.'
2. Freedom from Distraction: ‘An addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production.’
3. Personal Mastery Practice: 'Your influence in the world mirrors the glory, nobility, vitality, and luminosity you’ve accessed in yourself.' Focus on your Four Interior Empires.
4. Day Stacking: 'As you live each day, so you craft your life. We all are so focused on pursuing our futures that we generally ignore the exceedingly important value of a single day. And yet what we are doing today is creating our future.'

Now, Kraft Heinz up in Canada are experimenting with a way to help out: the Pour-Perfect bottle.

With just a tilt of the label, the bottle becomes a tutorial in ketchup pouring. Created by Rethink Canada, the experimental bottles will be tested out in the Toronto market for a limited time.

Everyone’s got a theory, a technique, their own special spell to coax ketchup out of the bottle. It's a skill you must master.

Of course, over the past few decades, package designers have given us the plastic squeeze bottles—the condiment world’s version of the automatic transmission or TV remote—to make life easier.

But still, for many, the ketchup bottle remains a Rubik’s Cube of mealtime.

Cooperation: The successful leader must understand, and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce his followers to do the same. Leadership calls for POWER and power calls for COOPERATION.