I used to want to change the world. Now I'm open to letting it change me.

Books have been my classroom and my confidant. Books have widened my horizons. Books have comforted me in my hardest times. Books have changed my life.

There is nothing more genuine than breaking away from the chorus to learn the sound of your own voice.

Make sure your characters are worth spending ten hours with. That’s how long it takes to read a book. Reading a book is like being trapped in a room for ten hours with those characters. Think of your main characters as dinner guests. Would your friends want to spend ten hours with the characters you’ve created? Your characters can be loveable, or they can be evil, but they’d better be compelling. If not, your reader will be bored and leave.

Who you are is more important than what you do. The goal is to bring what you do in alignment with who you are, so you don’t end up being someone you don’t want to be.

Good competitive skills means not just to compete hard, but to selectively compete, to harness your energy for the things that matter and, in some cases, to just realize it doesn't matter whether I win or lose here at all.

The important thing to know about playing to win and playing not to lose is that there are actually different neural networks that are being used. It's not very easy to do both at the same time and, if you are trying to have a playing to win mentality, you're going for it, there's some things that trip you up or trigger the wrong neural network. If you start worrying about your mistakes all of a sudden, if you get too focused on the facts and the details, these are going to shift your neural networks and sort of screw up your strategy.