The enemy of fear is creativity.

Who gets to decide what you want?

We live in a vague world. And it gets vaguer all the time. In this environment, the power of the specific, measurable and useful promise made and kept is difficult to overstate.

All motivation is self-motivation. Your family, your boss, or your co-workers can try to get your engine going, but until you decide what to accomplish, nothing will happen.

A brilliant author or businesswoman or senator or software engineer is brilliant only in tiny bursts. The rest of the time, they’re doing work that most any trained person could do.

The only path to amazing runs directly through not-yet-amazing . But not-yet-amazing is a great place to start, because that's where you are. For now.

Here's the fascinating part, call it the golden shoulder: We have no idea in advance who the great contributors are going to be. We know that there's a huge cohort of people struggling outside the boundaries of the curated, selected few, but we don't know who they are.