Be mindful of where you put in your hours and what exactly you think is important. Be cautious about the promise of jumping from one opportunity to the next too quickly, without giving yourself time to deeply understanding anything. As Duckworth warns in “Grit”, “some people get 20 years of experience while others get one year of experience 20 times in a row”.

The people that really get somewhere - the people that are able to build extraordinary things - they're the ones that aren't afraid to fail - They're the ones that aren't afraid to fail publicly. They're never worried about what other people think.

We all need a word of encouragement from time to time so let this be that word. You can change no matter what you think of yourself. Humans are designed to change. That’s what we do. But you have to put yourself underneath tremendous amount of stress in order to trigger that adaptation response.

The things that matter to you are the things that matter most. And so, to run in the opposite direction to allow yourself to get into that to allow yourself to see that there are stakes that it matters that it has meaning, and to move in the opposite direction is to literally state you want to stay small is to literally say that you don't want to be successful.

It is extremely hard to make decisions with a just cause in mind. With so many of the pressures on all of us pushing to make the finite short term decisions. If you work for a public company the pressure is overwhelming from the outside to focus on the finite at the expense of the infinite. Sometimes we put pressure on ourselves to focus on the finite we become so obsessed with the arbitrary goals we set for the end of the year that sometimes we abandon our own values in order to make the sale, getting the client, move the numbers.

The military is not different than business, it's not better or worse than business. The lessons are just much easier to see because the stakes are higher. In other words, everything is exaggerated. So the good is really good and the bad is really bad, and the impact of really good is obvious, and the impact of really bad is obvious. And so, I find that it's a much easier place for me to study leadership, just because it's way exaggerated. Right. The other thing is it's a deeply human culture, because the stakes are life and death, very often. And so in business, we have colleagues and co-workers. They have brothers and sisters, it feels really different.

I found that nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. Nothing. There is no passion to be found playing small and settling for a life that's less than the one you're capable of living.

Through daily work the better you get the quieter the voice gets. The enemy within cannot criticize the one who has done the work it can’t argue with someone who has no regrets so do the work every day. Every step forward builds belief. Every step forward builds confidence. Every step forward develops habit. Every step forward is a step ahead of that voice.

We are not born feeling inadequate. Life experiences and emotions create that sense within us in a variety of creative ways. When we were little and when we felt afraid or anxious our mind told us something was wrong with us, not with our environment. That’s why children who were abused or neglected grow up to be adults who carry so much shame. A child’s mind not yet rational concludes, there must be something wrong with me if I feel so bad or I must be bad if I am being treated badly. As adults armed with education on emotions and how childhood adversity affects the brain we can understand that feeling “not enough” is a byproduct of an environment that was insufficient. We are in fact enough!

I don’t care how scared you are, what you need to do is make bold decisions. Right now you’ve got to begin training yourself to act you’ve got to begin training yourself to take chances to put yourself at risk - to risk embarrassment to know that you’re going to fail that’s the only way that you’re ever going to get the things that you want out of life. All of us want to do something extraordinary.