You have the power to think differently about who you are. You have the ability to turn off the critical voice inside of you. That's not you. That's coming from the culture. That's coming from the outside of you. You've internalized the voice of your parents, your teachers, your friends.

When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.

No one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you.

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.

Everybody wants power and control in their life.

It is the fool who always rushes to take sides. Do not commit to any side or cause by yourself. By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others — playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

If you're consumed only with the big dream, you're going to die because you won't be able to feed yourself or you're going to be losing your job, so you'll just be sitting in your room dreaming, but if you're only holding onto the crap jobs that keep you just above of the water you're going to be unhappy. You're going to be burnt out, washed out.