It is your own bad strategies, not the unfair opponent, that are to blame for your failures. - Robert Greene

The Tiny Wound. It is small but painful and irritating. You try all sorts of medicaments, you com- plain, you scratch and pick at the scab. Doctors only make it worse, transforming the tiny wound into a grave matter. If only you had left the wound alone, letting time heal it and freeing yourself of worry.

Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers.

Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery.

A sense of urgency comes from a powerful connection to the present.