Shoes are money well spent and a good metaphor for life: everything else in life may be awful but a shoe will cheer me up, lift my body and take an outfit up five levels. Plus, shoes are easy to carry and fun to collect.

Mastery is in constantly wanting to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realize that there isn't one. On utterly smooth ground, the path from aim to attainment is in the permanent future.

To reach an audacious goal, we sometimes benefit from having it lie just beyond our grasp.

Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end.

Mastery requires endurance. Mastery, a word we don’t use often, is not the equivalent of what we might consider its cognate—perfectionism—an inhuman aim motivated by a concern with how others view us. Mastery is also not the same as success—an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.

The pursuit of mastery is an ever-onward almost.