📚 Roger's Highlights

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Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends’ compliments, and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense. Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don’t feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and—particularly for people shooting to become expert performers—that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality.

Peak

Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool

but couldn't remember where he had put the formula. Pressed by Halley, Newton agreed to redo the calculations and produce a paper. He did as promised, but then did much more. He retired for two years of intensive reflection and scribbling, and at length produced his masterwork: the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, better known as the Principia. Once in a great while, a few times in history, a human mind produces an observation so acute and unexpected that people can't quite decide which is the more amazing—the fact or the thinking of it. Principia was one of those moments. It made Newton instantly famous. For the rest of his life he would be draped with plaudits and honors, becoming, among much else, the first person in Britain knighted for scientific achievement. Even the great German mathematician Gottfried von Leibniz, with whom Newton had a long, bitter fight over priority for the invention of the calculus, thought his contributions to mathematics equal to all the accumulated work that had preceded him. “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach,” wrote Halley in a sentiment that was endlessly echoed by his contemporaries and by many others since. Although the Principia has been called “one of the most inaccessible books ever written” (Newton intentionally made it difficult so that he wouldn't be pestered by mathematical “smatterers,” as he called them), it was a beacon to those who could follow it. It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified the attractive force that got them moving in the first place—gravity. Suddenly every motion in the universe made sense. At Principia's heart were Newton's three laws of motion (which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction) and his universal law of gravitation. This states that every object in the universe exerts a tug on every other. It may not seem like it, but as you sit here now you are pulling everything around you—walls, ceiling, lamp, pet cat—toward you with your own little (indeed, very little) gravitational field. And these things are also pulling on you. It was Newton who realized that the pull of any two objects is, to quote Feynman again, “proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them.” Put another way, if you double the distance between two objects, the attraction between them becomes four times weaker. This can be expressed with the formula

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

In a similar way, to maximize the value of the advice in this book, you must have a purpose in your life. For that reason, I want to describe to you the best process I know to develop a purpose, and illustrate it with the example of how I used this process in my own life. Mine was a rigorous process, and I recommend it to you as well.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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