More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively

I think the basic problem is that everybody thinks they know what the truth is, and sometimes they're even distorting the truth to make their arguments.

With the media, we don't know what's true, and we don't have radical transparency because we're seeing everything through somebody else's eyes. There's no other industry that has as much power and as much freedom and as little quality control. I can't imagine how anyone could not think that's a problem.

There are far more good answers "out there" than there are in you.

For every mistake that you learn from you will save thousands of similar mistakes in the future, so if you treat mistakes as learning opportunities that yield rapid improvements you should be excited by them. But if you treat them as bad things, you will make yourself and others miserable, and you won't grow.

A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic.

People with good work habits have to-do lists that are reasonably prioritized, and they make themselves do what needs to be done. By contrast, people with poor work habits almost randomly react to the stuff that comes at them, or they can't bring themselves to do the things they need to do but don't like to do (or are unable to do).