As a collection of ideas that were divided into three parts, it is important to appreciate every part on its own and the power it has to help us grow. If we improve on how we learn, think, and act, we are closer to unlocking our potential.

We have learned the importance of learning, thinking, and doing, and the interconnectedness between the three when it comes to personal growth. In a large way, the meaning of life is growth. We constantly have the need to grow.

Where does growth comes from? It is an important question that has many potential answers. The hope for growth is what gets us up in the morning and improve our life, whether we want to attain enlightenment or push our ideas forward. Even those of us who already are successful still strive to grow in the future. When we grow, we challenge what we can achieve and go beyond what we see as currently possible.

The thesis we posed at the beginning of the book was that our thinking can make us or it can break us. We entrap ourselves in our thinking by the way we think. To some extent we all live in our own world that limits our potential. By applying the lessons contained in this book, we can find a way to escape from our mental prison. It requires a continuous effort that goes beyond this book. It’s up to you to continue the work.

While initially written as reminders to myself and expanded into chapters for this book, the elements contained in this book are meant to be a starting point to reflect on your life. I’m still struggling how to live within purpose, how to attain equanimity, develop an independent spirit, and have more bias for action. Trust me, there are a lot of things I still have to learn. Writing this book was an exercise in crystallizing my thoughts and developing a blueprint that can help me to grow in my own life.

With any book that simplifies its message to a wider audience, there is only so much you can say. In order to keep the chapters brief and easy to read, I couldn’t go into as much depth as I wanted. The good thing is that with your curiosity and the help of the internet, you can dig deeper into anything that you want to explore further.

We have learned through stories and anecdotes on how to become a better thinker. We should now have a better understanding of how we can grow as an individual. We have discovered new ways to grow and also learned what not to do.

I hope you have left inspired and start to see the world and yourself with new eyes. If any of the seeds offered here help you to grow in the future, even if it is just in a small way, then the book has served its purpose.

We cannot sit back and wait for things to happen. After finishing this book, it is time to start the real work. It is your task to go out into the world and make things happen. And in the end, we need to learn to take responsibility and stay self-reliant. As Latin writer and former slave Publius Syrus understood, “Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.”

Action is what makes learning and thinking possible. There are hundreds of potential obstacles that stand in our way. We cannot possibly know the solution to every obstacle in advance. What matters more is that we develop a mindset that primes us for action. We need to understand that with persistence, we can overcome every obstacle.

Action is a powerful way to learn faster and think better. Learning and thinking without doing is incomplete. Action is what holds learning and thinking together and moves everything forward. The things we learn and the ideas we have require action to manifest in the world.

Whatever obstacle we face, we need to understand that with a proper mindset, we can overcome any of them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we should bang our head against the wall. Sometimes we need to stop what we are doing because we are not getting any results. Stubbornness can be an expensive vice. We need to learn when it is time to stop and try something else. Yet we should never be discouraged by temporary defeats.

Life exists in doing. It’s up to us to decide what we do with the time and energy that we’re given. The worst thing that we can do is give up on our dreams and aspirations. When times are tough, it is easy to talk yourself into letting everything go. If we haven’t yet achieved what we want to do, it is not because we can’t do it but because we haven’t learned yet how to overcome the obstacles that stand in our way. Instead of focusing our energy on doubting ourselves, we are better served spending it on finding ways to overcome our obstacles.

There are only so many types of obstacles that we could explore in this part. More generally, we need to learn how to attack any type of obstacle. When we learn never to give up and always keep going, we have a greater chance at unleashing our potential.

“We had about a week’s cash in the bank or less, and there was very little time in the year to resolve these things,” Elon Musk recounts, “I mean there were two or three business days left in the year.”

Tesla Motors, the electric car company he co-founded, desperately needed funding to stay alive. After the financial crisis had cast a dark shadow over the global economy, finding investors was tricky. After all, the company was selling what seemed at best an optional car.

“I had to make a choice then,” he recalled. “Either I had to take all the capital that I had left from the sale of PayPal to eBay, or the company would die.” Musk decided to put his entire fortune into the dying company. It worked by sending a signal to other investors.

In the last hour of the last working day of the year, the financing round successfully closed. If the money had come in a few days later, the company would have been bankrupt.

Happening around the same time, SpaceX, the space exploration company, was burning through its three launches. When the third launch failed, it seemed that the startup was about to die.

Immediately following the third failure, Musk walked past the press to address his team. As former SpaceX employee Dolly Singh recounted, he stood undeterred in the face of all odds and unimpressed by the fear of failure while addressing his colleagues. They knew it was going to be hard, he told everyone. It was rocket science, after all. “For my part,” he added, “I will never give up. And I mean never.”

He announced to his team that he had secured funding for two additional launches. Everyone began to cheer. In an outstanding demonstration of leadership, Musk turned the failure and gloomy mood just minutes earlier into constructive feedback.

Following his speech, everyone returned to work with a rekindled spirit. Rejuvenated by Musk’s mental strength, colleagues delivered a work ethic that has been unparalleled in space exploration. What usually takes months was completed weeks. As soon as the team discovered the cause of the launch failure, they prepared for the next.

On September 28, 2008, SpaceX became the first private company to send a rocket into orbit. In December, Musk got a phone call from NASA, which promised to purchase 12 flights, a contract worth $1.5 billion. Upon hearing the news, barely able to hold the phone, he blurted, “I love you guys.”

In a remarkable turn of events for Tesla, Daimler invested into the company, and the U.S. Energy Department granted a $465 million loan. SpaceX’s and Tesla’s funding problems had been solved.

Against all the odds, Musk showed a remarkable sense of persistence, steering his two companies from the brink of collapse to the triumph of billion dollar revenues.

Any successful undertaking requires persistence. In fact, it’s impossible to get anywhere if we give into temporary defeat. Persistence means having the discipline to do the things that everyone else doesn’t want to do. It is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. As an African proverb describes, “When rain falls on the leopard, it wets him but does not wash out his spots.”

We need to learn how to exercise persistence from the moments when everything seems to fall apart. When things are going wrong, doubt is our companion. We question ourselves and what we are doing. This is the time when persistence is most needed — and also the hardest to obtain.

On my journey to America, I had many failed attempts even before ever setting one foot into the country. At the time, some of those defeats seemed like permanent failures. I couldn’t see how I would be able to turn things around. Yet every time, for some reason, I persisted. Not because I was born that way, but because I had made a commitment to go to America to work on my dreams there.

Like Musk, we need to make up our mind where we want to go and then stand behind our idea. We need to put our money where our mouth is. When we put skin in the game, it’s harder to give up. If we commit to the future we want to build, we are no longer paralyzed by the multiplicity of options.

However, if we are unsure of where we want to go, persistence is very difficult. If we lack conviction, we will question and doubt everything. In turn, the more we commit, the more we are invested into the future that we dream about, the more inevitable our persistence will become. And if you win the war, nobody will ask about your lost battles.

Of course, persistence doesn’t mean that you should bang your head against the wall. When something isn’t working, it’s time to try something else. Iteration and prototyping are essential components of growth. Avoid mixing up persistence with stubbornness. Never giving up is not equal to staying on the same road all the time.

As persistence is most needed in times of adversity, let’s remember Athenian orator Demosthenes and learn from his example of how to turn any trial into triumph.

When Demosthenes was born, he had a speech impediment which made his life difficult. People laughed at him, but he persisted through the bad times. Inspired by a speech that he had watched, Demosthenes worked with tremendous effort to mold a new image that would transcend his natural disadvantages. He wanted to be able to give a speech that was as great as the one he had watched as a kid.

To realize his goal, he developed exercises. At times, he would fill his mouth with pebbles. At other times, he rehearsed speeches and gave them with one breath. He practiced and improved with every interaction. Whenever he was made fun of, he channeled his anger into becoming stronger. Eventually, he became the great orator that he had always wanted to be.

In the Chinese language, the word “crisis” has two meanings. It means risk, but also denotes opportunity. Like Demosthenes, we need to dedicate ourselves to excellence and be fueled by our trials.

When I ran my first marathon, I had barely prepared for it. I had underestimated how much more difficult a marathon gets with every mile conquered. The first half was easy; the last quarter was unbearable. The last couple of miles, I was ready to fail. Toward the end of the marathon, an old man helped me with a strategy to finish. He told me to run for one minute and walk for thirty seconds.

In the past, women were not allowed to do everything that men could do. Many men didn’t see why that should change. Polish-born French physicist Marie Curie, however, wasn’t deterred by those obstacles. She worked hard and dreamed of having a university degree one day. Unfortunately, she couldn’t attend the University of Warsaw as it was only for men at that time. Instead, she took informal classes that were held in secret. She did everything she could to achieve her goal. In 1893, she earned a master’s degree in physics at the Sorbonne in Paris. She continued to dedicate herself to science and in 1903 became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in physics. Surely her persistence played a key role in her success.

Other people can be smarter than you, have more resources, or start out in a better position, but with persistence, you can beat them all. Giving up is easy, but sometimes success is around the corner if you try one more time.

In December 1776, six months after the Declaration of Independence had been adopted, things were looking dire for General George Washington’s Continental Army. In fact, failure seemed just around the corner. As the underdog, the American army lacked guns, ammunition, and artillery. It lacked clothing, tents, blankets, and steel for bayonets.

The British had already captured New York City and Rhode Island. Fortunately, British arrogance spared Washington’s army from being wiped out early. The British didn’t see the colonists’ resistance as a real threat and believed that a little display of force would suffice to end this insurgency. They didn’t understand the anger and pain that colonists felt.

When the British descended on New York with thousands of soldiers, they were confident that they would win. The first battle confirmed that belief, as Washington’s army lost three times as many men as the British. But instead of pressing on and eliminating Washington’s army, the British, under the command of Sir William Howe, were so confident that they waited for another day.

Under cover of darkness, Washington relocated his troops from Brooklyn Heights to New York, saving thousands of troops in the process. During the following weeks, there were a series of battles, but Washington always skillfully retreated when circumstances were not in his favor.

It wasn’t a pretty strategy, but it was an effective one. Nevertheless, as armies headed into winter quarters, Washington’s situation was still far from good. The British had sent more troops, and Washington’s army reduced to about 3,000 soldiers. Meanwhile, food supplies and pay for soldiers were at an all-time low, and soldier enlistments would run out by the end of the year.

During that time, Thomas Paine enlisted as a soldier and wrote a series of essays to encourage his fellow soldiers. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he wrote. “We have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

After Washington had made a personal plea to his soldiers to stay around until Christmas, he planned a surprise attack. On Christmas Day, Washington attacked a group of sleeping German mercenaries and captured thousands of prisoners. That battle and the next battle at Princeton boosted the army’s morale.

As an Englishman observed, the soldiers had recovered from their panic when they had almost given up on the cause just a few days ago. Washington’s strategy of retreat and surprise was powerful because he understood that he didn’t need to defeat the British. It was a strategy that leveraged his resources, and despite being outnumbered in resources, his strategy of withdrawal led to saving thousands of lives and was pivotal in deciding the war.

We are often limited by what we think we can or cannot do. If we believe that we cannot do something because of our lack of resources, we rarely even try. We fool ourselves in thinking that if only we had what we’re missing, everything would work exactly as we want to.

The truth is that lack of resources are seldom the reason for not being able to make things happen. Never tell yourself that a monetary token is the reason for not being able to turn your idea into reality. Like Washington, we need to work with the resources we do have at our disposal. Even better, we can find creative ways to leverage our existing resources. This can simply mean that we are able to play the situation to our advantage.

Being resourceful is a simple activity similar to physical exercise. You orient your life around the things that are important. If you only focus on what is essential, you can get by with only a small amount of resources.

Roman philosopher Seneca advised to practice poverty from time to time in order to appreciate the many things in life that we take for granted. It’s a practice for never letting the lack of resources interfere with the way you want to live your life.

It is easy to overlook the many resources that are available. Being resourceful is about harnessing opportunities and seeing opportunities where others don’t. Of course, we don’t want to be so resourceful that we never spend anything. Being stingy is not being resourceful. If we never invest into anything, there’s nothing to gain.

Keep in mind the creativity that results from constraints. If all we have is three blank pages, we are forced to think different than if we had an unlimited supply of notebooks.

When young Jane Austen grew up, her father encouraged her to read from his extensive library. In the evenings, she would often read a novel out loud, and she continued to write in her notebooks which improved her craft.

As a woman in her era, it was difficult to publish her work in her name, but she continued writing despite the discouragement. Soon, she started to write her own novel and eventually she published her work anonymously.

The constraints she faced only spurred her to write even more ferociously. Instead of being angry and resigning at the bleak prospect, she improved her writing constantly. Like Austen, we need to see constraints as a way to imbue creativity into our lives.

During his solitary confinement, prisoner Tollas Tibor survived by organizing a poetry translation contest. It took months for all the inmates to decide which poem to translate. They would pass secret messages from cell to cell. Without tools or paper, they had to come up with creative ways to memorize the poem. At the end of the cycle, they voted on the best translation, then restarted the game.

Again, it is rarely the lack of resources that prohibit us from doing what we want to do. It is our prerogative how we manage our time. Instead of being stifled by what we think we lack, let’s focus on what we have and how we can put it to use.

Just think about something that is limiting you right now. Instead of getting discouraged, consider ways you can turn that limitation into an advantage, something that gives you an edge.

From Palermo to Paris, from Frankfurt to Budapest, 1848 went down as the most volatile series of political upheavals in European history. What began in Sicily as a political uprising in January of that year quickly spread to Naples, and merely one month passed by before people were fighting on the streets of Paris. The wave quickly spread to Munich and Vienna, and later Krakow and Budapest, reaching over fifty countries.

In what is known as the Spring of Nations, liberal protesters challenged absolutist regimes and constitutional monarchies. As historian John Merriman explained, political, social, and economic tensions had been building up in the decades leading up to the revolutions, eventually leading to a credit crisis and thousands of bread riots on the streets in Europe.

In 1846, a famine across Europe had doubled food prices. As prices increased, wages remained stagnant at best, which had lowered consumer demand and profits. European states had raised taxes and imposed duties on its citizens. Population growth strained existing resources, and unemployment became rampant.

In a wave of festivities to celebrate the end of decades of oppression as the revolutions unfolded, commentators were quick to call 1848 the turning point of modern history. The Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, added to the romantic euphoria.

The revolutionary governments, however, were short-lived. The revolutions had threatened security and quickly gave rise to counter revolutionary successors that were closely related to the overthrown regimes. As historian AJP Taylor said in The Course of Germany Hitory, “German history reached its turning point and failed to turn.” The revolutions that promised so much had failed.

There are many reasons why 1848 failed, but no matter how hopeful, a revolution always harbors the chance of failure. Indeed, the probability of successfully escaping the status quo through revolution is low. In the case of the American Revolution, if the resistance had been stamped out early, things would have returned to how they were before the war.

Since a revolution is a process, it takes time. It rarely succeeds at the first attempt. But that’s alright, because a failed revolution can still bear the seeds of success later on.

Careful not to be impatient when it comes to seeing change manifest into reality. We celebrate a new habit on social media only a week after beginning it. We celebrate revolutions that challenge years of dictatorship as a wave of democracy. We expect our company to be the next billion-dollar business after the first round of funding.

Real change takes time and does not happen often. The potential for turning points is always present, but real turning points are not common.

We need to understand that a turning point only represents the possibility for change. It represents the possibility that a different future can be put in motion. For example, when the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, it represented the possibility that the thirteen colonies could together form a sovereign nation.

At the turning point, an old order is about to disappear, but a new order has yet to arrive. As author Marshall Brown writes, “a turning point is both a moment of balance and a moment of unbalance, of decision and indecision, of determination and indetermination.” When the old order is gone, it is easy to be excited about the new order. It is one thing to deconstruct the status quo, but quite another to build a new reality in its wake. In many ways, the work only begins when the old order is being successfully challenged.

Turning points come in various shapes and forms. Just like waves in the ocean, some are small, others big. Sometimes waves reinforce each other, at other times they cancel each other out. Only a few waves reach the shore, and its impact ranges from minuscule to lethal. Occasionally waves are visible in advance, but most often not.

At the age of 63, Katherine Graham experienced a watershed moment in her life. Her father had bought the Washington Post and her husband had managed it until his sudden death. When she took reins of the newspaper, she had no business experience and was raising three children.

One of her first decisions was to replace the traditional board with a new executive editor. Against the wish of the board, she decided to publish stolen government papers — known as the Pentagon Papers today — which ended up being a significant milestone in the history of journalism.

Luckily, she got Warren Buffett as an investor, who mentored her through her many trials. She became one of the most successful CEOs of the century. By embracing the turning point that had arrived in her life, she was able to redefine herself and grow beyond her wildest dreams.

We have also been at turning points, where our old ideas clash with a new path that we’re taking. Maybe we are changing our career. Perhaps we are just learning a new skill. Perhaps we are getting rid of a bad habit.

These things take time. A tree grows slowly over time from a single seed. We need what Germans call Sitzfleisch, the ability to sit and wait. Granted, fostering patience is difficult. We have to appreciate that growth is painstakingly slow at the beginning. It’s the cycle of learning: progress is invisible until it becomes noticeable.

In our fast-paced world, we expect results immediately. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. We live in a culture that focuses on the short-term, often at the cost of the long-term. We need to learn to manage our expectations. If we expect things to happen quickly, we only set ourselves up for disappointment.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in September 1783, formally acknowledged the colonies as a sovereign nation. In 1790, James Madison allegedly said that the new nation was in a “wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.” Although colonists had united in the cause against the British Crown, they did not agree on the new order that would replace the one they’d just overthrown.

In his last year in office, President George Washington yearned for a time when his nation would possess the strength of a giant and nobody could intimidate the United States. That wish came true, but only a century later. Washington understood that they were not the generation to realize this dream. It took a very long time for the vision that was set at the foundation of the country to be achieved.

When English street artist Banksy observes the world, he pays attention. His works of political and social commentary stem from observing what is going on around the world and then seeing what other people do not.

He displays his art on publicly visible surfaces, drawing what the public has yet to observe. His art is accessible and filled with wit and metaphors. By combining social and political statements with a sense of humor, he pokes fun at society.

We have to train ourselves to recognize opportunities that others are missing. Opportunities often come in disguise. Granted, it is difficult to embrace what is not popular yet. It requires us to take risks.

We are moving so fast through life that we often forget to pay attention to small details. Opportunities do not come knocking on our door. We have to pay attention to the many small opportunities that enable new ones. If we are distracted, it is difficult to recognize the opportunity at hand.

There are other ways to generate opportunities for yourself. It is always helpful if we understand the bigger picture and recognize what is needed.

Consider the legend of Betsy Ross, who, after the American Revolution, created the first flag for the young nation. She and her husband had started an upholstery business, making flags for Pennsylvania during the war. Despite her husband’s death, she continued her work. When George Washington visited her house, he pulled out a sketch of a flag and requested her to make it. Betsy had prepared for this opportunity and was ready to take advantage of it.

Whether this legend is true or not doesn’t matter as much as the fact that this story shows how some of the best opportunities are always embedded within larger shifts in society.

Think about how Gutenberg’s printing press increased the demand for spectacles. As more and more people started to read, many people realized they were farsighted. This increase in demand encouraged people to experiment, which eventually led to the invention of the microscope. Every innovation brings new forms of innovation.

Every invention also brings its own set of opportunities. As technologist Kevin Kelly writes in What Technology Wants, “technologies shift as they thrive. They are remade as they are used. They unleash second- and third-order consequences as they disseminate. And almost always, they bring completely unpredicted effects as they near ubiquity.” For example, Disney profited enormously when the video cassette was invented, as it was able to take that invention and put its movies on cassettes and market them.

When Apple launched the iPhone, many entrepreneurs started to build accessories that they could sell to new customers. Instead of competing with them, I thought of an opportunity by trading iPhones on the secondary market. A couple times per week, I scouted lower bid offers on Craigslist. Whenever I found someone selling the phone below value, I would buy it, sometimes refurbish it, and then resell the phone at a higher price.

Opportunities are like buses in that sense. If you miss one, you can always take the next one. There are always new opportunities arising. It’s easy to regret having missed an opportunity and focus too much on the past. Instead of endlessly wondering about why you have missed an opportunity, just focus on the future.

Sometimes we are given opportunities, yet instead of taking them we hold off for something better. In our pursuit for the perfect opportunity, we sit and wait. While this can be a good strategy in investing, in life it is often good to run with whatever advantage you are given, not to wait for the perfect opportunity.

Anna Eleanor had a difficult upbringing. By the time she was ten years old, she had lost both of her parents, considered herself the “ugly duckling” in school, and battled on and off with depression. Her parents sent her to a private school in England, where she was taught how to think independently. Eventually, she came out of her shell and gained more self-confidence. Upon her return to New York, she felt alienated, as she had lost touch with most of her friends.

A few years later, she met Franklin Roosevelt, whom she later married. After her husband had a polio attack, she helped him with his political campaign. When her husband became President of the United States, she transformed the role of the first lady by assuming a more active role in public life. She connected with people well. She took this opportunity to be the President’s eyes and ears. She leveraged mass media and showed the world that the first lady was an important role. Eleanor could have complained about her misfortune, but chose to focus on the opportunity that she had and made the most of it.

And if you aren’t given any opportunities or can’t seem to find one that you want to take, you can always create your own. Sometimes all it takes to create opportunities is look around you and help others in your immediate environment.

As an industrialist in Germany during World War II, Oskar Schindler sheltered over a thousand Jews by employing them in his factory. Since he had a contract to sell kitchenware, he began to hire Jews as the Nazi government targeted them. He protected them and argued that they were essential for the war efforts. When the situation intensified, he bribed officials in return for releasing Jews that were meant to go to a concentration camp. Over the course of his life, he saved over a thousand lives.

There are many examples of people who, by paying attention to what their immediate environment needed, were able to create opportunities. Born a slave in the United States in the early 1920’s, Harriet Tubman endured endless physical violence and whiplashes. While the scars lasted for the rest of her life, her slavery ended when she took advantage of a network of anti-slavery activists that helped free slaves. After enjoying freedom, however, she returned to rescue her family and many others.

Clearing the way for others can produce many opportunities. As author Ryan Holiday explains, this approach originates from Roman times, when a forerunner traveled in front of a patron to make his life easier. What Holiday argues is that we need to find canvases for other people to paint on.

Consider how in 1994, Barnett Helzberg, Jr. created an opportunity for himself when he ran into Warren Buffett. When he crossed Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, passing by The Plaza Hotel, he spotted the legendary investor. He crushed his self-doubt and approached him. Helzberg introduced himself as a shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway and a great admirer of Buffett. He also used the opportunity to pitch him his venture. When he finished, Buffett requested more details. One year later, Helzberg sold him his company.

When it comes to opportunities, we have to remember that they always come in different shapes and forms. We have to pay attention to what is happening in our environment. We don’t need to be upset when opportunities have passed, as there are always new ones. Most importantly, we can’t sit around waiting for them. We have to go out and create them for ourselves. To put it simply, once we realize that it is our responsibility to find opportunities, we can tap into our creativity to forge our own path.

During the Great Depression, racing horse Seabiscuit had a tough time winning. Of his first seventeen races, he lost them all. As a frequent loser, the horse became a joke. Seabiscuit’s owner thought the horse was too lazy and focused on his other horses. Even after Seabiscuit began winning a few races, his owner was still not impressed. Eventually, he sold Seabiscuit to automobile entrepreneur Charles S. Howard for $8,000.

Howard paired him with a new trainer and jockey. They found new unorthodox ways of training the horse. The new training methods catalyzed Seabiscuit and brought him out of his lethargy. Slowly, the horse began to win races — a small win here and another one there.

When the team went to California, despite a few bumps, Seabiscuit continued to win, the prizes getting higher with every race. By 1937, the horse became of one of the most successful racehorses and that year was the leading money winner.

In what was called the “Match of the Century,” Seabiscuit met War Admiral, another successful racehorse at Pimlico Race Course with the 40,000 track and nearly 40 million people listening on the radio. War Admiral was the favorite by a large margin. From the start, though, Seabiscuit led the race, and while War Admiral ran his best time, Seabiscuit won by four lengths.

A new owner, trainer, and jockey were the ingredients that brought Seabiscuit to the championship and made him one of the most successful racehorses in history. At a time of depression, Seabiscuit inspired countless people. And despite having a failed start, he turned into a symbol of hope.

In chemistry, a catalyst is a material that lowers the activation energy of a chemical reaction. The catalyst creates more value than was initially created by increasing the rate of a process.

Sometimes we are stalling and lose enthusiasm. Despite working hard, we are not getting ahead. In those times, it is easy to question ourselves. All we need is that catalyst that can get us out of our lethargy.

How do we find the catalyst that can accelerate our growth? It is not very clear what the catalyst is until we look back and recognize it. Figuring out the missing element is an art that we discover through trial and error.

Like Seabiscuit, we need to change our environment. As Seneca advised, change of place imparts new vigor to the mind. It is often not because of our lack of ability that we can’t do what we want to do, but because something is missing and we don’t know what it is. It is often by experimenting with different possible solutions that we find what we were missing. If we keep doing the same things over and over again without changing anything, we cannot expect different results. We need to focus on our goal and not get married to any one potential path that we think we need to travel. There are many different roads to get to the finish line.

It is easy to get wrapped up in our thoughts or listen to the advice of other people. Instead, we need to ask ourselves what is missing in any given situation that we’re in. If we can pinpoint that, we can begin to search for the catalyst that will help us grow.

Consider how a young revolutionary created a catalyst that moved the American Revolution forward. When English political activist Thomas Paine released Common Sense, a short pamphlet, the future of America was uncertain. But Paine’s rhetoric was optimistic. “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” he wrote in his pamphlet. He explained how a nation’s bravest deeds always occur in its youth.

Written in a simple language, Paine’s pamphlet addressed what the colonists felt but couldn’t express. It sold over 125,000 copies within the first two months, making it an instant bestseller.

Paine questioned the monarchy and legitimacy of the English constitution. He ridiculed the Old World’s corruption and decadence. Instead of impressing with fancy vocabulary, he expressed his ideas honestly. Paine advocated for commerce, equality, and social mobility, which appealed to colonists. He convinced colonists that they would have flourished far more if they had been allowed to exist outside the control of their mother country. In Paine’s view, Britain’s maternal role had crippled the colonists’ ability for self-determination.

As historian Bernard Bailyn points out, Paine helped people to think about the unthinkable and stimulated them to think of a different future. This is the catalyst that he provided. His peer Benjamin Rush recalled that the effect of his work were immediate and extensive upon the American mind. General George Washington acknowledged that the pamphlet was working a wonderful change in the minds of colonists. Historian Joanne Freeman suggests that Paine’s text shattered the psychological resistance to the idea of independence, and invited people to the political conversation who had not been part of it before.

By promoting simplicity in government and championing individualism, Common Sense expedited the American cause for liberty because it made revolution a possibility. Independence did not arrive as a result of Paine’s pamphlet, but its rhetoric was powerful enough that it helped transform British colonists into American revolutionaries.

As you can see, creating a catalyst requires an understanding of the situation that you’re in and where you want to go. Most importantly, it requires an understanding of what is missing. As an investor, what helped me to recognize catalysts is playing the following thought experiment. I re-visit historical turning points and try to figure out what I could have known at the time, before the change happened. This helps me understand when turning points are about to occur.

Investing is similar to tai chi, says Chinese investor Guo Guangchang. You need to take action when you feel the change in momentum. “Your advantage comes from your ability to feel the change faster,” he explained in an interview with the Financial Times, “and take decisive action quicker.” In essence, the goal of tai chi is to find the right moment when to strike.

There are many ways to identify what is needed to move forward. It is not precisely a process that you can follow. Finding the catalyst that will accelerate your growth requires a good understanding of yourself, the situation you’re in, and where you want to go. But once you have identified a potential catalyst, you need to act on it.

Everyone understands the importance of routine and serendipity. However, it is the merging and balancing of the two that is important to grasp. In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang are seemingly opposite forces that are still complementary and interconnected. In the same vein, the balance of routine and serendipity are essential to being creative in your work. Of course it is not obvious where we strike the balance. Nobody knows except you. But balancing the two are essential to leverage your creativity.

After settling in as a freelance composer in Vienna, Mozart followed a rigorous plan to manage his time. In a letter to his sister in 1782, he explained how he structured his days:

My hair is always done by six o’clock in the morning and by seven I am fully dressed. I then compose until nine. From nine to one I give lessons. Then lunch, unless I am invited to some house where they lunch at two or even three o’clock, as, for example, today and tomorrow at Countess Zichy’s and Countess Thun’s. I can never work before five or six o’clock in the evening, and even then I am often prevented by a concert. If I am not prevented, I compose until nine… At half past ten or eleven before going home — it depends on her mother’s darts and on my capacity to endure them! … I often go on writing until one — and am up again at six.

To be effective at what you do, you need to manage your time. On a daily basis, a routine sets your day and builds momentum for everything that you do. Recurring habits on any timeline are vital to get to the desired outcome.

I met Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in graduate school. It was inspiring to see how calm and focused he seemed. He told us that he takes different routes to work every day. By doing that, he observes ordinary life, which helps him see things he would otherwise overlook. He shared that while his mornings are entirely scheduled, he keeps his afternoons open to wander around and leaves room for unexpected meetings or encounters that would otherwise not happen. This is an approach that I’ve adopted that has helped me to be more creative.

After his family was kicked out of their home, seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln needed to find work to support them. Later in life, he borrowed money from a friend to start a business, but went bankrupt the same year. For the next seventeen years, he worked to pay him back. He also couldn’t get into law school, and shortly after his engagement, his fiancé died. When he ran for Congress, he lost, and when he ran for the Senate twice, he lost both. Lincoln, unlike most people in those circumstances, embraced his tragedies and learned from them. Indeed, it was a long path to becoming the 16th President of the United States. But all his failures shaped his character in a way that made him successful throughout his life.

If we are afraid to fail, we will never try something new. Every failure has something to teach us. It is rare for things to work out right away, anyway. Failure is part of the necessary evolution of making anything happen.

With over 1,000 patents to his name, Thomas Edison is remembered as one of the most prolific inventors of his time. But he didn’t start out that way. When Edison grew up, they told him that he was “too stupid to learn anything.” As an inventor, he failed thousands of times. He tried to build a device for communicating with the dead. He developed a talking doll, but the voice was so horrible it sent the owners away. When a journalist asked him about how he understands failure, he replied, “I have not failed 10,000 times — I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

We shun failure so much because we personalize it. We don’t see failure as a learning opportunity. The problem is when we get tainted with failure. We don’t like rejections. When we stop trying, we’re preparing for the ultimate failure — inaction. Failure is an integral part of doing anything, especially if you are trying to do something new.

It is also important to focus on what you did and not the outcome. I easily get frustrated when I fail at something. I used to personalize the failure and see the temporary defeat as a reason that I couldn’t do something. Obviously, this is the wrong approach. Even if it doesn’t seem that you are learning, you are, either consciously or subconsciously. It is more important that you focus on continuing your experiment. It is through repetition that we learn how to do something well.

I used to think that I would have all the answers in my head, or just by reading books that I could find them. But then I realized that all the solutions are out there, and I can’t think through everything on my own. I need to build something and test out assumptions in the world.

Like Edison, we have to see every failure as a lesson worth learning. We should analyze our mistakes and make sure we won’t repeat them again. The more we prototype, the more we can learn and find where we are wrong. The faster we can do that, the better. Tom Chi, formerly of Google X, refers to this as rapid prototyping, which increases your rate of learning by running experiments.

It is important to stress how valuable getting feedback is for that. We should never quit, but that doesn’t mean that we need to bang our head against a wall. In theory, if after a while one experiment is not going anywhere, it is time to close the chapter and start another test. In practice, when do we know it is time to stop and try a different approach? It is not obvious without critical feedback.

When young F. W. Woolworth worked as a store clerk, he was interested in improving the business. He approached his boss with feedback, asking him to make a ten-cent sale to reduce inventory. His boss agreed. It was a resounding success, but his boss remained skeptical. Maybe it was luck. Soon, Woolworth approached him again with a new idea, this time asking him for capital to open a store. This store would only sell five- and ten-cent items. His boss didn’t like the idea. He deemed it too risky. “There are not enough items to sell for five and ten cents,” he told him.

His boss wasn’t willing to experiment. When it came to his business, only his way worked: the way it had always worked. He was stubborn and let a friendly and future competitor that wanted to collaborate slip away. Woolworth persisted with his idea and found another way to open the store. His store became a successful chain across the country.

Like Woolworth, we need to experiment with our ideas. We need to regard feedback as a gift. It’s like a barometer that gives us a snapshot of our current state. As mentioned in part one, we should actively solicit feedback and ask those that we can trust to give us honest feedback.

If you want to learn how to fail faster, learn to approach twenty random people every day on the street and find a way to strike a conversation with them. Make twenty phone calls to friends and try to sell them something you’re working on. Soon, you’ll love rejections or stop internalizing them.

Learn this lesson from Ernest Shackleton who, despite the odds, attempted the impossible. On August 1, 1914, the day Germany declared war on Russia, he departed with his ship, the Endurance, on his third trip to the South Pole. He dared to do something incredibly audacious: cross Antarctica via the South Pole. Ultimately, his team got trapped in ice and was forced to abandon the ship. They made it to an uninhabited island where there was little hope that they would be rescued. So they boarded a 22-foot lifeboat and made it back to civilization with all crew members alive. On his fourth trip, he failed, too. Sadly, this time he had a heart attack and died. While Shackleton’s expeditions failed, we still remember him for his phenomenal courage. While failing, at least he dared greatly.

At 90 years old, Jiro is not your typical restaurant owner. He is chef and owner of the Japanese restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro. Devoting himself to his craft for his entire life, he is considered one of the best sushi chefs in the world. Patrons from across the globe pay top dollar, reserving a seat months in advance, and travel thousands of miles just to eat at his tiny restaurant in the Ginza district of Chuo, Tokyo.

After being abandoned by his father when he was nine, Jiro worked and apprenticed at a sushi restaurant. His meticulous work ethic has stayed the same; his focus has intensified. It is his intense focus that Jiro credits for how he has become one of the greatest sushi chefs of our time. His quest for excellence would have been impossible if he had allowed himself to be distracted with other things. By continuously focusing on his craft, he innovated the art of sushi.

“All I want to do is make better sushi,” he revealed in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary on his life and craft, “I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top.” His answer to what is the key to success? “You must dedicate your life to mastering this skill.”

Usually when we are focused on something, we become engaged to the point that we forget time — a state called “flow.” A person with flow is autotelic and pursues an activity for its own sake instead of shooting for an external goal.

We are always tempted to do many things at the same time. Multitasking is praised in today’s society. When we browse the internet, we keep dozens of tabs open. The question is how do we focus when we are so easily distracted? If we are constantly switching between tasks, it is very difficult to concentrate. To achieve focus, we need to learn to say no. In fact, learning how to say no by learning to prioritize and eliminate options is the best way to guard your time.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he was shocked to see the extensive list of products. He slashed the product line by 70% — leaving just four products. He required focus to be able to make “insanely great” products.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in 1997, Jobs shared his take on the matter: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”

What do we do so often? We get distracted. We increase our options and never get to focus as a result. We are not willing to sacrifice to avoid the fear of missing out. Focus means refusing temptation. As an entrepreneur, it is tempting to do a lot of things at the same time. However, I have realized that when I do this, I fail to achieve any form of excellence.

I realized that creative work often requires a chunk of time to be blocked off, so I built this as a habit. If I jump around from one task to the next, I am not really applying my time in a focused way. It is obvious that I have done a lot of things, but what have I created? Creative work often requires leaps in imagination and insights that are hard to reach if you are constantly distracted.

The following has been a good routine for my daily focus. Every evening, I pick three things to work on the next day. Only working on those three things ensures that every day stays focused. It helps me to crystallize the most important things that I have to get done.

Alternatively, turning off your cell phone or not using the internet for a couple of hours can be quite amazing. Whenever I’m on an airplane, I use the offline time to get a lot of work done. There is no better way to focus than eliminating unnecessary distractions. The less options we give ourselves, the easier we can focus.

On his Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg lists “Eliminating Desire” as one of his interests. “I just want to focus on what we’re doing,” Zuckerberg explained in an interview with Lev Grossman for Time magazine, “When I put it in my profile, that’s what I was focused on,” he continued. “I think it would be very easy to get distracted and get caught up in short-term things or material things that don’t matter. The phrase is actually ‘Eliminating desire for all that doesn’t really matter.’”

The idea of eliminating desire originates from Buddhism. They argue that the freedom from suffering that results from desire is achieved through eliminating desire altogether. Desire is anything that we want but that doesn’t really matter. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that eliminating desire is important, as it allows us to differentiate between actions informed by reason versus desire.

Whether it is distractions or addictions, we are all susceptible to short-term desires that have no lasting impact on our future. Technology makes it incredibly easy to get distracted. Politics is mired in short-term thinking. Politicians are not incentivized to think beyond their own legislative period.

One way to focus on what matters is by creating deadlines. It is easy to spend time on things when we don’t account for our time. We can easily justify how we spent time in retrospect. Deadlines force us to prioritize and deliver.

In his essay On the Shortness of Life, Seneca advised that reaching the highest achievements is a matter of investing your time well. “People are frugal in guarding their personal property,” he wrote, “but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” As he understood the problem, it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long if you know how to use it.

When DeWitt Clinton and his team implemented its grid system in Manhattan, it was initially met with criticism for its monotony and rigidity. His plan required changes in how roads were funded and built. It also required a multigenerational commitment. The team surveyed the streets of Manhattan and decided to lay out the future streets in a gridlock, since it was practical and convenient. The team had to account for 155 streets and 12 avenues. His plan turned out to be visionary.

Clinton also advocated for the Erie Canal, a huge project that connected the East with the Midwest. By encouraging immigrants to build cities along it, the Erie Canal turned New York City into a powerhouse. Clinton realized his audacious goals by keeping the end goal in mind.

When Elon Musk started Tesla, he also thought about the endgame. As Jim Cantrell, who was on the founding team of SpaceX, explained on Quora, “What I found from working with Elon is that he starts by defining a goal and he puts a lot of effort into understanding what that goal is and why it is a good and valid goal.”

With Tesla, his main goal was to accelerate the advent of sustainable transportation. He published his master plan on Tesla’s blog. The first step was to establish a niche by building a sports car, a luxury car that only a small percentage of car buyers would be able to afford. His next step used money from that to build a more affordable car. Next, the company would use that money to build an even more affordable car.

To plan for the endgame, you need to be what investor Peter Thiel calls a definite optimist: someone that has a definite idea about how the future will form and then plans for it in advance. What makes a definite optimist unique is that they favor firm convictions. Instead of having many options, they reduce their options and works in the future that is most compelling to them.

While interviewing Sebastian Thrun, who had worked on self-driving cars at Google X, he told me about Udacity, his startup that re-imagines the university model, offering an alternative with vocation-style courses. He had learned from Google co-founder Larry Page to aim high. I’ll never forget what he told me: “You might as well pick something big, because the amount of work you put in is the same that you put into something small.”

To be a definite optimist, we need to be bold. It is not simply enough to have a plan. We also need to have the courage to follow through. If we shy away from what is difficult, someone else will take on that challenge. Learning to face the uncomfortable will expand our comfort zone exponentially.

When Philippe Petit was 16 years old, he discovered his passion for the high wire and incorporated it into his public performances in Paris. With every performance, he became more audacious. In 1971, Petit walked between the towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral, and two years later he crossed the Sydney Harbor Bridge. His biggest coup? In 1974, he walked on a high wire, 1,300 feet above the ground, that he had suspended between the two towers of the World Trade Center.

We don’t have to be as audacious as Petit to demonstrate courage. We simply have to be willing to take risks. Nothing is a sure thing. There is always uncertainty attached to what we do. Instead of shying away from it, we need to embrace it and be willing to take those risks.

My great grandmother lived in Poland during WWII, and by 1944 the war was almost over. While my great grandfather was fighting in the war, she left her home to get food for her children. On the way, a Russian woman snatched her, wanting to bring her to a concentration camp. The woman instructed her to stand in front of a house while she searched for more people. My great grandmother measured the reality before her. If she didn’t make it back home, her kids would starve. It was a matter of life or death. She mustered all her courage in order to sneak away, escaping the orders of the Russian woman. Until it became dark, she hid in a house, later reuniting with her children.

We get scared of doing the bold thing. The blank canvas scares us, as painter Vincent Van Gogh put it, but the truly passionate painter scares the blank canvas.

The idea of approaching a woman used to terrify me. Finally, I decided that that was no longer how I wanted to live my life. I decided that whenever I would run into someone that I felt compelled to talk to, I would override my fear. I would still feel the fear of rejection and tell myself why it wouldn’t work, but over time, as I practiced approaching more women, I learned that getting rejected is part of the process of doing anything.

Author Tim Ferriss has a great strategy to manage your fears. As he argues, “typically, people don’t overcome their fears because the fears are nebulous and undefined.” What we have to do in the first step is to define each potential worst case scenario. Next, we need to write down the steps we can take today to prevent the worst case scenario from happening in the first place. Lastly, we need to come up with a strategy that can help us to cope if the worst case scenario actually happens.

It helps if we emphasize the action and not the outcome. Obviously, we need to ponder the negative consequences of our actions, but if we always attach expectations to the outcome we desire, we are more likely to be cautious.

You must learn to love rejection if you want to do anything worthwhile. Being afraid of rejection makes people act so cautiously that it makes it impossible to do anything. Learn to regard every failure as a temporary defeat from which you can learn and grow. The alternative is to remain stagnant or to continue repeating the same mistake.

In the 1860s, Claude Monet and his friends, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-August Renoir, and Paul Cézanne, were trying to sell their art. Broke and hungry for attention, they met every evening at the Café Guerbois in Paris, where they deliberated and discussed how to distribute their art. Their art was different, so different it didn’t fit into the existing establishment.

The establishment, the Salon, was the most prestigious art exhibition in Europe at the time. It showcased traditional paintings that were accurate and obvious in composition. Its conservative audience knew what they were going to see when they visited. At first, Monet and his friends attempted to have their art displayed there, but it was an uphill battle since the Salon did not cultivate their type of art.

Besides, due to the competitive nature of the Salon, rejections were the norm and those artists that were displayed had limited space. When they occasionally were accepted to exhibit their work, it created an outrage among the audience. If they wanted to get more pieces into the door, they needed to conform to the aesthetic standards of the time. It was time to find a new way to market.

After many rounds of coffee and deliberations, the artists recognized that they had tried to sell a niche product to a mass audience, when what they needed was to find a niche audience for their particular product.

At their first exhibition, they displayed 165 paintings, and less than 200 people showed up on the first day. However, over the next month, they gained attention from a small group of visitors.

By avoiding competition, they served an exclusive audience. “We are beginning to make ourselves a niche,” Pissarro wrote in a letter to a friend. “We have succeeded as intruders in setting up our little banner in the midst of the crowd.”

Over time they captivated their viewers and expanded to a wider audience. Today, their art is known as Impressionism. Each piece sells for amounts that their creator’s would have imagined impossible.

These days, with the help of the internet, the price of accomplishing anything has steadily fallen, and that raises the number of competitors. To create something of value requires ingenuity. So how do you find your niche to stand out from the crowd?

Like Monet and his friends, we need to find a niche that leverages our strengths and interests. Ideally, we should provide value in a way that avoids us competing with anyone. The most competitive markets are often the most saturated and offer the least amount of return. Finding your niche is about understanding what you can offer for what the world currently needs.

A good way to start if you don’t know your strengths and interest is to be pulled by what naturally draws your curiosity. Consider this lesson from British primatologist Jane Goodall. Since she was a child, she was interested in the outdoors, but it was when she received a monkey as a stuffed animal that she had an inkling of what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Living on a farm, she spent time in a henhouse watching how hens lay eggs. She founded the Alligator Society, a club for teenagers where members had to identify different animals.

On her first trip to Africa, she spent time with a famed anthropologist, where she began to study chimpanzees — a passion she never lost. She figured out how to spend time with the chimpanzees without appearing threatening, and soon they tolerated her presence.

The more time she spent with the animals, the more they began socializing with her. After she had been accepted, she was able to learn more about their behavior. For example, she noticed how they use tools. Throughout her work with the chimpanzees, she discovered chimpanzee behavior that had been unknown before. She is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in her field.

The more we understand our different interests and strengths, the more likely we will be able to carve out our niche by combining them. Finding your medium is a process of self-discovery and never happens in isolation. In order to unlock our unique skillset that can allow us to contribute to the world, we must ask ourselves, What is the value I can provide?

As mayor of New York City, Fiorello LaGuardia had to learn how to delegate as the city and the country were in the midst of the Great Depression. The stock market had collapsed, and unemployment was at a record high. The budget was severely underfunded. Yet LaGuardia excelled despite this because he understood his role as a mayor and how to work with others.

Thanks to his close relationship with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a good portion of federal money flowed into the city’s annual budget. His public programs were wide-reaching. He built bridges, health clinics, and playgrounds. He cleared slums and provided cheaper housing opportunities to the poor. He frequently held radio programs to maintain a healthy relationship with his constituents. In collaboration with Robert Moses, he created some of the most beautiful parks in the city, which provided New Yorkers an eden to retreat to from city life. LaGuardia was able to play his part and empower others.

As an African proverb suggests, if you want to go far, go with others. As individuals, there is only so much we can do. If we try to do everything on our own, we will just get frustrated and burnt out at failing to achieve what we set out to do. We will inevitably lose sight of what we are uniquely capable of. To learn how to find our niche, we need to be conscious of what other people are doing.

Keep in mind that many of today’s problems require convergences of many disciplines, rather than one specialized training. The Institute of Future calls this a T-shaped convergence of specialized expertise and understanding of a range of disciplines. It’s difficult to stand out if you follow the crowd. Position yourself in a way that leverages your unique strengths.

Flight was one of humanity’s oldest aspirations. As one of the first people to think about how to turn that aspiration into reality, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out the logistics of flying in his notebooks. His drawings resembled a parachute or helicopter. Aristotle and Newton tried, but never figured out how to fly. Ancient Romans tested flying by attaching feathers to the backs of their slaves and pushing them from great heights.

In 1868, the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain concluded in its third annual report that “with respect to the abstruse question of mechanical flight, it may be stated that we are still ignorant of the rudimentary principles which should form the basis and rules for construction.” It was thought impossible.

Until two brothers came along — Wilbur and Orville Wright — whose building on the work of others aspired to invent a flying machine. Men had made hot air balloons and dirigibles, but they were susceptible to weather and unsafe. The accident of the Hindenburg Zeppelin killed almost half of its passengers. George Cayley had invented engines, steerable parts, and fixed wings, but couldn’t put them together in the right way. By observing birds, Otto Lilienthal learned how to build gliders that were able to fly and logged over 2,000 flights. Samuel Pierpont had built a heavier-than-air machine, but it didn’t carry a man. Octave Chanute recorded his studies and observations of past attempts of flight, which laid the foundation for future pioneers in aviation.

Although the Wright Brothers lacked formal education, they possessed the conviction that it was possible to build a flying machine. When they started out, they were still running a bicycle shop. Their attempt to make human flight possible was merely a hobby.

In 1901, when one of the brothers delivered a speech to the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago, he explained that manned flight was possible. They gained more insights after one year, and two years later they had built a propeller.

Four years later, on December 14, 1907, it happened. They asked their friend John Daniels to record this historic moment. When the machine started, Wilbur assisted his brother briefly, but towards the end of the track, the aircraft took off. The flight lasted a mere 12 seconds, but it was enough to make history.

As the brothers explained later, it was “the first time in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its power into the air in free flight, had sailed forward on a level course without reduction of speed, and had finally landed without being wrecked.”

Orville sent a telegram to his father that day. “Success. Four flights Thursday morning all against twenty-one mile wind. Started from level with engine power alone. Average speed through air, thirty-one miles. Longest 57 seconds. Inform press. Home Christmas.”

Their younger brother pitched the news to The Dayton Journal, a local news editor, but was rejected. “If it had been fifty-seven minutes,” the editor reasoned, “then it might have been a news item.” The New York Times and The Washington Post did not find the story newsworthy, either. French newspapers called it a bluff. Nobody believed that two brothers from Ohio had solved the problem of flight.

The Paris edition of The New York Herald in February 10, 1906 wrote, “The Wrights have flown, or they have not flown. They possess a machine, or they do not possess one. They are in fact either fliers or liars. It is difficult to fly. It’s easy to say, ‘We have flown.’”

“It is a fact,” The Washington Post declared in the same period, “that man can’t fly.” When the Wright Brothers proved them wrong and had their first successful launch, the world still failed to pay attention.

This is what we are up against when we push our ideas forward. There are always people who will oppose change and innovation. There is always someone that you are up against. We have to learn to deal with that.

When Galileo was advancing his science, he was up against the Church for supporting Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the universe. The Church allegedly declared that theory as foolish, absurd and heretical. The church believed that Earth couldn’t move. They actively discouraged Galileo from pursuing his theory or from spreading it any further. In fact, he was banned from talking about it. After a long trial, the Church made him gave up his theory and sentenced him to a prison term, confining him to his villa in Arcetri, where he lived until his death.

The guardians of the status quo oppose change and innovation. Take Charles Martin Hall, who reduced the price of Alcoa and was sued by the U.S. government. When American airline Pan Am offered tourist-class seats to its passengers, other airlines petitioned and asked the government to ban Pan Am.

When there is a new insight that can change the world, there is resistance. For example, with the invention of anesthesia, you would think that people would be happy. Yet elderly surgeons believed pain was a necessary evil.

The examples of changes in history that made its predecessors uncomfortable are endless. Whenever we push for something new, there will always be the old guard waiting to crush it. In 18th century France after a decline in agricultural employment, economists were worried about the consequences. François Quesnay and his fellow ‘physiocrats’ argued that manufacturing produced no gain in wealth and that switching from agriculture to industry would decrease a country’s wealth. They believed only farming reaped true wealth. Today, only one percent of the population works in agriculture, leaving the rest of us to take up more creative jobs.

If we are going to do anything worthwhile, we have to accept that we will be challenged — by those who don’t understand or have no interest in it and those who won’t profit from it. People who don’t take any interest in your ideas are generous in criticism.

Researchers Richard Zeckhauser and William Samuelson found that people have a bias towards staying in the status quo even when that entails higher risks. When they asked students to choose between investing into a moderate-risk company or a high-risk company, 60% chose the former. But when the money was already in a high-risk company, most students preferred the status quo, and only 44% transferred the money to a moderate-risk company.

We will fight harder on preventing losses than making gains, because we typically fear losses twice as much as gains. That’s why, as Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize recipient in Economics, argues, loss aversion is a powerful force that favors minimal changes away from the status quo. We can observe this in corporations, where the risk of getting fired if a new insight fails is far greater than the promotion if one is right. And if the new invention works out, there are often many people who take credit for it.

How do we fight the old guard? One of the best and clearest ways is to build an alternative by which you replace it. It’s easier said than done, but the trick is to focus on building something that is exponentially better than the current model. It won’t be easy, but you’ll have an easier time persuading everyone else.

There are other ways to combat the status quo that sometimes work. Consider how French Enlightenment philosophers did it using ridicule. Early on in life, Voltaire wanted to be a playwright, but his father opposed it and wanted for him to work in a public office. At first, Voltaire obliged and tried to fulfill his father’s wish. He was a law student, later a lawyer’s apprentice, and still later secretary to a French diplomat. He strived to be an independent man of letters. Eventually, he retreated into the libertine sociability of Paris and established himself as a popular figure through his wit and popularity.

In his most famous work, Candide, he satirized and ridiculed off the philosophy of Optimism espoused by Leibniz and the Pope. He made fun of a Dutch orator who cared more about his theological doctrine than helping people. Voltaire exaggerated the irrationality of certain beliefs and mocked the aristocratic belief in natural superiority by birth. What inspired him to do it? It was Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which had political criticism embedded in its text. Voltaire eviscerated the status quo in writing and changed people’s perception of how society is supposed to work.

There are always guardians of the status quo, those people who don’t understand what you are doing. Those people who don’t have any interest to support you. Keep in mind that everyone has an opinion about everything — they’re the cheapest commodity. Instead of fighting them head-on, find a weapon that works to your advantage.

“The next morning was beautiful,” Lafayette recorded in his journal, “Everything around me … combined to produce a magical effect and fill me with indescribable sensations.” After months of preparation, overcoming resistance from home and obstacles from abroad, he had finally arrived as he sailed beyond the reach of his pursuers. “When I felt American soil under my feet for the first time that night,” he wrote, “my first words were an oath to conquer or die for America’s cause.”

Despite being a foreigner to America, his passion for liberty was strong and his heart belonged to the New World. For him, America was destined to become a safe and venerable asylum of virtue, tolerance, and liberty. He joyfully swapped his life of luxury at home for the life of a volunteer, filled with sweat and toil.

Like Lafayette, you must find what stirs your soul. We all have had these moments of excitement about an adventure that was just about to start. The trick is to find something that makes us lose sense of time, something that nurtures our curiosity. If there is no burning desire, we will falter as soon as problems appear.

Before joining the American cause, Lafayette needed to push through resistance at home. Upon hearing Lafayette’s plan to embark on a journey to America, his family forbade him to set sail, reminding him of his duty to his then-pregnant wife. King Louis also forbade Frenchmen to serve in any colony. The British and French royal families did everything they could to prevent his voyage. He was undeterred.

Abroad, his commission into the Continental Army involved more than just taking a large ship and loading it with men and supplies. At the request of General George Washington, Congress had stopped giving military commissions to foreigners. Unattached to the country and ignorant of the language, Washington argued that foreigners were ill-suited to give orders to soldiers. Only once his friends exaggerated the importance of his mission was he admitted.

We are all facing similar obstacles when we pursue our dreams. Think about your relationship with obstacles. Do you shrink when you are confronted with doubt? Instead of wondering whether we should give up our mission, what if we spent that time and energy working on following through?

Upon landing in America, Lafayette quickly proved himself worthy on the battlefield. And his devotion to the cause of liberty extended beyond his commission into the Continental Army. Upon returning to France, he lobbied alongside Benjamin Franklin to send additional troops to America. Even Washington, who was initially against giving military commissions to foreigners, praised Lafayette for having a large share of bravery and military ardor.

The lesson of this story is to take initiative, rather than procrastinating and waiting for the perfect moment. If you wait, it is often an indication that you’re unsure of what you want to do. Stop prolonging your dream because you don’t think you have yet what it takes to make it a reality.

Our pursuit of perfectionism goes all the way back to the times of the ancient Greeks. They were obsessed with the idea of what constituted beauty. In 450 B.C., Greek sculptor Polyclitus developed a technique that allowed sculptures to be modeled after athletes. From then on, artists displayed a sense of perfection in their sculptures.

It is normal to strive for perfection. We model our lives after certain ideals — which is not bad in and of itself. It’s when we get hung up on the setbacks when we fail to achieve them that it becomes a problem. The pursuit of perfection can blind us from seeing progress. Instead of aiming for perfection, we should aim to get it done.

If we aim for perfection, it will never be reached. Even excellence requires a continuous effort — it’s the result of executing thousands of small steps.

There are so many reasons why getting started is difficult. Sometimes the task at hand looks so daunting that we are overwhelmed and it’s unclear what to do. There are simple remedies for this, like dividing huge tasks into smaller steps, so that instead of trying to uproot a forest, you begin with a tree.

Often, however, we easily overthink instead of getting started. It is easy to overthink and delay action. I often ponder different options for every decision. We need to embrace the reality that when we close one door, many more will open. Most decisions are reversible, and waiting for the perfect circumstances to line up, delaying momentum, is self-sabotage.

On the eve of a decisive battle, one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s generals approached and cautioned him not to proceed, as circumstances were not right. Napoleon only laughed and told the general that if circumstances were not right, he would create the right circumstances. While you wait for perfect conditions, others are deciding for you.

Instead of obsessing over the ideal, focus on finding ways to improve yourself, however small. How can you improve your immediate environment? Open a window, or try different lighting. If you fail to start, you get left behind. Starting small and focusing on actionable steps that you can perform every day is key. As they say in Silicon Valley, shipping beats perfection.

The first two steps in realizing our dreams is having a vivid imagination in our head about what it is that we are dreaming about. But understanding your dream is only one aspect of it.

What’s more important than understanding where you want to go is understanding what needs to get done. We need to be willing to make sacrifices. Like Lafayette, we need to make a commitment. If we keep our options always open, we will never achieve excellence. Excellence requires constant pursuit in one direction. We need to be clear about the direction in which we are heading.

Obviously, there is room to experiment when we don’t exactly know yet what we want to do. The moment, however, that both your head and your heart are on the same page, it is time to make a commitment. Realizing one’s dreams is difficult enough, so we should align everything in a way that can help develop stamina to get there. The process of getting to where you want to be and finding your purpose is a marathon, not a sprint.

Action is how we apply our learning and thinking. Without it, our learning exists only in our mind, our ideas are merely wishes, and our learning only knowledge. We need to learn how to apply our learning and act on our thoughts.

It is often that we create reasons why we can’t apply our learning and thinking. “I don’t have time,” “I would, but …” and the list goes on. We have invested time to learn ideas and practical ways of thinking, but for some reason we cannot bring ourselves to act. These are the mental obstacles we must overcome to help us transform our thoughts into reality.

The problem is we have obstacles that prevent action. We have ideas in our head, but struggle to turn them into reality. We have built bad habits that prohibit growth. We shy away from risks and avoid what is uncomfortable. We tell ourselves lies about why we cannot get started. There are so many reasons why we cannot turn our ideas into reality.

The purpose of this part is to help you develop more bias for action. When we understand why we fail to perform, we can take the steps to become more action-oriented. When we learn to take responsibility, we realize that it is all up to us. While we may not have the perfect circumstances and conditions, there are new opportunities to grow every day.

The chapters on thinking that were offered here were meant to help you to structure your thinking, but they only offered a peek into how our minds work. The mind is a fascinating subject to study and there is so much about it that we still don’t understand. The goal was to stimulate your thinking in order to develop a more independent spirit and calm head.

If we isolate ourselves and only live in our world, at some point we won’t have anything to think about except our own thoughts. Our thinking is also interconnected with our actions, and the more we can connect the two, the more we can improve both our thinking and action.

Destroying the negative thought patterns that limit our lives is an endeavor that doesn’t happen overnight. Everyone has different thought patterns that affect them adversely. If we steadily increase our awareness of our negative thought patterns, we can take steps to reprogram our mind. When we have a better sense of how our mind works, we can solve the mental blockages that limit our potential.

We need to build systems to become aware of our thought patterns so we can reinforce positive ones and cut out the negative ones. For something as complex as the mind, obviously the few lessons that were offered here can only stimulate your thinking at best. The work is with you to make it a habit to watch and empower your thoughts constantly.

As a student of philosophy under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, investor George Soros was very contemplative. Thinking played an important part in his life, but he didn’t know yet how to direct his thinking, so he wasted a lot of time replaying certain ideas in his head.

As he started his career on Wall Street, he slowly realized that thinking is more useful when you also act. Once he discovered that he could learn more through action than contemplation, he leveraged his thinking.

In Soros on Soros he shared, “I became an active thinker where my thinking played a major role in deciding what actions to take and my actions play an important role in improving my thinking.”

We often do this, we think all the time, but we fail to act. Without feedback, our thinking is stuck in an infinite loop. Thinking just for the sake of thinking is what we must not do. Like Soros, we need to develop a 2-way feedback loop between thinking and action. We need to apply our thoughts and combine them with action. We need to have certain ideas leave our heads and be tested in the real world.

Thinking is powerful, but ultimately it requires action to turn into its most powerful shape. This way, we can improve our actions through our thinking and our thinking through our actions. Knowledge is powerful when it is applied. Ideas are powerful when they are applied. Nothing works without execution.

One year after the 2008 financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth II visited the London School of Economics to inquire about the origin of the crisis. Experts were worried that the crisis could lead to an economic depression worse than the Great Depression.

The British Academy promptly convened a forum in search of its answer. After bringing the world’s leading economists together, they explained, in simple terms, that it was the failure of the collective imagination around the world to understand the risk of the system as a whole. The best analytical minds failed to calculate the financial risk. In other words, everyone minded their businesses and there were no incentives to adjust the interconnected imbalances. The experts acknowledged that some were able to predict the crisis, but none its timing and ferocity.

As Niels Bohr exclaimed, it’s hard to make predictions, especially when they concern the future. In a speech in 1974, Margaret Thatcher predicted that it would take years and not within her lifetime before a woman will become Prime Minister. Five years later, she was the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The lesson: do not look to the past to predict the future.

After inventing the phonograph, Edison was certain that it was going to be useful, but less certain about how. He drew up a list with all the possible use cases: dictation machine, audio books for the blind, talking clocks, etc. Only as an afterthought did he record the idea of playing recorded music. Similarly, the Chinese invented gunpowder, but did not foresee its application for a gun.

Making predictions is difficult. In 1943, Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, predicted the demand for computers in the future: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Alfred Nobel underestimated the application of his invention of dynamite. “My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men find out that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.”

From fortune tellers to stock market speculators, a whole industry is predicated on knowing how the future will unfold. Is it really that easy? In 1903, automobile maker Mercedes lacked the foresight to predict the future of the automobile industry. They thought that no more than one million automobiles would be on the streets. Why? Because it seemed impossible to train that many chauffeurs.

“Hysteria has now disappeared from Wall Street,” The Times of London printed on Nov. 2, 1929, just before the stock market would start to collapse. If you asked most people in the past about the future, it’s unlikely that they would have described the world today as it is.

There is one past, but many possible futures. There are different interpretations of the past, but there is only one past. While only one future materializes, there are different possible futures. The past cannot determine the future because the future is new in that it deviates from the past — often incrementally, but sometimes radically.

In a world of uncertainty that is constantly changing, humility is the best companion. Throughout his life, George Washington struggled with his ego. An ambitious young man, he was constantly tempted by vanity. He liked wearing his uniform and impressing the ladies. Over time, however, he learned about the importance of staying humble. He realized that serving others and not just promoting himself would bestow more honors on him.

On a cold December day in 1783, a victorious Washington surrendered his military commission to Congress. “Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theater of Action,” he announced in his address to Congress, “and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

Instead of seizing power, as was common in those days, he gave it away. He understood that the principles upon which the young country that he helped to found stood above his sense of prestige. His humility and surrender signaled to the world that the United States was founded on different principles.

We live in an uncertain world. According to Nassim Taleb, a Lebanese-American scholar, it only takes one observation to invalidate a general statement. It’s difficult to make predictions because we live in a complex system, where small inputs can have big changes in the world.

In 2013, I was invited as a young scholar to attend George Soros’ The Institute of New Economic Thinking’s inaugural conference. It was held in Hong Kong, and existed for the purpose of providing solutions for the 21st century. While I was there, I explored new avenues of economic thinking alongside other doctoral candidates.

The most compelling conversation I had at the Institute occurred with the President of the Institute, Rob Johnson. He told me how growing up in a family of sailors had taught him to be humble. As a sailor, when you go offshore, there is no choice but to be humble. Whether it’s a thunderstorm or big seas, you know that God can take your life. (If you’d like to hear it for yourself, my interview with him is archived on Pensive.)

The world is full of risks, and those that are mindful of them thrive in it, while it washes away its skeptics.

When I lived in San Francisco, on weekends I would join my friends at hackathons. While working on a solution, we would sometimes discuss the future of decentralized systems, AI and robotics. These days, a lot of people are wary of robots, which trigger images of the Terminator or Ava of Ex Machina, although I liked Ava. While there are many possible futures, we realized that it is important to be in control of your destiny and work on creating a part of the future that we want to see.

When Diogenes, one of the fathers of Cynic philosophy, lived in Athens, he criticized many cultural conventions of the city. He lived a simple life and criticized social values in the towns that he regarded as corrupt. He made it his life’s goal to criticize established customs. He lived a homeless life, having a habit of eating and sleeping wherever he felt like, turning poverty into a virtue.

He also criticized and embarrassed Plato, disputing his interpretation of Socrates, and publicly mocked Alexander the Great. There is a fine line between criticizing for the sake of criticizing and giving useful feedback. His negativity barred him from having a bigger impact on this world.

We all complain at times. It’s an easy way to steam off emotions or thoughts. When something is not working, we complain about it. If something isn’t working, the easiest thing to do is to complain or blame someone else. Your mind is like a garden, and if you allow negative thoughts to grow, they will multiply. We need to cut the negativity and focus on solving the problem.

Instead of thinking negatively, we need to learn to think critically. Critical thinking looks at the underlying problems that we are facing. Negative thinking, in comparison, is easier to do and releases tension, but doesn’t solve our problems.

Consider this story. A couple of tiny frogs organize a running competition to race to a high tower. As the race starts, onlookers start to laugh at them. They discourage the frogs, saying that none of them will be able to finish the race. One by one, the frogs fall away, yet one frog marches onwards and makes it all the way to the tower. The crowd was shocked. How did the frog do it? His secret was that he was deaf and he could not hear anyone. Be like the victorious frog and ignore negative influences.

In the early 20th century, Gertrude Stein brought together artists and everyone attached to art for informal discussions. At 27 Rue de Fleurus, she and her brother had the foresight of creating a salon, which became the first modern art museum. They collected paintings by Gauguin, Manet, and Renoir, and early pictures by Picasso, Matisse, and many more. She befriended Pablo Picasso and other influential artists. The salons ended up becoming intimate gatherings that served as forums for the top thinkers, writers, and artists of the day. For everyone involved, it was a great learning environment.

When I landed in New York to study, I couldn’t afford to live on campus. I lived in a bunk bed in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn. Nevertheless, I would make the most of it by talking to people there every day which would improve my English. One semester later, I moved into the Kolping House, a Catholic-run residence house for young students and professionals. Every day of the week, there were shared meals, and people would sit in the library discussing different things. It was a great environment, and I learned a lot from the people I lived with.

Be mindful whom you let into your life. The people you surround yourself with have significant influence on your life. Be especially selective whom you let into your inner circle. You always have a choice when you are not in a good environment. You are not a tree — you can walk away.

Negativity is a destructive habit that closes us off from opportunities. At times, we need to realize that we are the source of negativity when we complain. At other times, when people doubt us, like the victorious frog, we need to be deaf to the negativity of others.

W e used to live in a zero-sum, linear and local world. In our world of smartphones and connected devices, of constant updates and new versions, a world that is seemingly marching without respite toward greater complexity, it is difficult to imagine that old world and what it meant to live back then.

The majority of the slightly over 100 billion people that have ever lived on earth lived in a world without rapid progress and economic growth. That world carried its set of assumptions, dynamics, properties, and rules.

We used to have a negative bias when thinking about the future, because all the data around us confirmed that the natural state of mankind, as English philosopher Thomas Hobbes succinctly described it, was a war of every man against every man, in which the life of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

From the Upper Paleolithic to 1900, according to Human Progress, a project of the Cato Institute, the average global life expectancy at birth stood at thirty years. People lacked access to basic products and services that we take for granted today. Millions of people died of poverty, war, and plagues. Whatever change did happen was mostly cyclical. An emperor ruled a land and was succeeded by another. The yield of crops changed based on the climate of the season, while droughts and floods took turns destroying them. There were periods of hope and periods of darkness.

Zero-sum thinking was common in a world where people gained through taking value from others instead of creating it. When the world was trapped in a stationary mode where progress was limited, the people in that world were more preoccupied with dividing up the already existing pie rather than focusing on making a greater one.

Most people lived a life of subsistence where existing beyond survival was an illusion. Despite working from sunrise to sunset, starvation for ordinary folks was common. Violence was a constant threat. Roman playwright Plautus described how man is a wolf to another man. In a world of separation rather than cooperation, a competitive mindset prevailed.

Linear thinking was common. People used the same tools. It was a linear life in that not much happened. When something did happen in the other parts of the world, news did not spread. A common man’s tools didn’t improve every year, and he probably couldn’t afford most of the existing technology. Options were limited, as you most likely followed the profession that was handed down to you by your family.

Local thinking was also prevalent. People lived in the same location, first as hunters and gatherers, later as peasants or laborers. People’s place of birth determined their life’s path. The world that they entered at birth looked almost the same when they died. Today, we are yearning to discover the stars, but it wasn’t that long ago when people yearned to explore a new continent. A discovery in one part of the world could never be instantly transmitted everywhere else. For the most part, people were unaware of each other’s existence. Only when satellite imagery was applied to cartography in the 20th century could we say our planet has been fully discovered. We live in a global world that requires a different type of thinking.

Consider this story of the three starving soldiers. When they visit a town, everyone hides their food. One of them gets an idea and pleads with one of the neighbors if they could use her cauldron and firewood to make a stone soup. The woman agrees, as she is intrigued by the idea. The soldiers gather stones and water and start to make the stone soup. As the news spreads, people gather around the soup; some ask if they can help and offer ingredients. Some offered potatoes, others carrots, one offered garlic — until the soup was ready to eat.

Envy sustains the scarcity mindset because we constantly think that we are missing out. Like the soldiers we need to shun a scarcity mindset, and focus on the resources we do have, and the opportunities in front of us that we can take right now, instead of seeing how much or how little we have in comparison to others.

Every day, I get a reminder that asks me what I am grateful for. Often I realize that I have more than I need. A scarcity mindset limits our options. Instead, we must wake up to the changes that are happening in the world and think in abundance. That starts by appreciating more of what we already have.