Key Takeaways
- Daily study is necessary for all people.
- Life’s task is to express your uniqueness through your work.
- When you find your uniqueness, it feels natural, it feels like destiny.
- First move towards mastery is always inwards.
- Occupy your own niche – embrace your strangeness.
- Bring self-reliance is critical. Depending on others is misery.
- Operating with long-term goals brings tremendous clarity and resolve.
- Become who you are by learning who you are.
- The Apprenticeship – learn from a master, this leads to transformation of mind and character.
- Learn best by practice and repetition – active, real world learning.
- Love the detailed work.
- Get to the inside – mastery requires internalization.
- Retain the craftsman’s spirit – it’s the work that matters.
- Patience critical for creativity.
- Person with the more global view and longer time horizon wins.
- What does not move is dead. Motion equals life, possibilities, keep moving.
- Need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.
- People cannot envy the power they themselves have given to someone who seems not to desire it.
- Weak character will not realize all the other good qualities a person may possess.
- Cui bono? Ask who benefits to deduce motives.
- Ability to measure people is the most important skill of all – take person into account before making any move.
- Mask newness, change in tradition – embrace the old, while peddling the new.
- Display a hint of weakness – nobody loves perfection.
- A seducer sees all of life as a theater, every one an actor.
- Insecurity is anti-seduction.
- Make use of contrasts.
- Familiarity is the death of seduction.
- Influence comes from being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand what it is they want, what they’re interested in.
- Arguing is anti-seductive. Use hammer and light touch.
- There is nothing more therapeutic than action.
- What limits individuals is the inability to confront reality, to see things for what they truly are.
What I got out of it
- A thought provoking and fun read that helped me recall many of the ideas and concepts i read about in his previous books.
