You don’t need a rarified job, you need a rarified approach to your work. The ability to concentrate intensely is a skill that must be trained; creative insight in professional life is about making a commitment to training this ability every single day. To make the most out of your deep work sessions focus on only a few important goals, build strict rituals, and implement a fixed-schedule to determine what rules and habits are needed to satisfy your constraint.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking big, looking for a world-changing mission without the career capital to back it up or you’ll get stuck making little progress. If you just show up and work hard, you’ll soon hit a performance plateau and fail to get any better. Developing work you love means patiently building ‘Career Capital’ (rare and valuable skills) towards a tentative mission through deliberate practice.

We spend our lives lost in thought, not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. Meditating is not merely thinking with their eyes closed, it is a skill that takes training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. During the normal course of life your mind will determine the quality of your life; changing your perception of the world is often as good as changing the world itself.

People don’t buy what you do, people buy why you do it. Defining why you do something is difficult, as we usually rely on metaphors, imagery and analogies in an attempt to communicate how we feel. Therefore, guiding principles have to be actionable verbs: “always do the right thing” (integrity), or “look at the problem from a different angle” (innovation).

Experiencing impatience is one of the first symptoms of not being in the present moment, not doing what you are doing, and not staying process-oriented. Become a good observer of your own actions: instead of focusing on an abstract end goal—which adds a lot of undue pressure—focus on the process, observe how you do, and make a corrective action. Understand that perfection is relative, and everything that you spiritually acquire expands your true self and becomes part of you forever.

A [personal] manifesto on how to live a happy life. Anna Quindlen draws on her own life experience and outpours how she has come to find happiness in her life. A source of inspiration when you're looking, or motivation to write your own life manifesto.

Eric Maisel provides twenty-two categories of anxiety management techniques to combat our tendency to incorrectly appraise situations as more important, more dangerous, or more negative than they in fact are. People waste enormous amounts of time avoiding things that make them anxious, sometimes a lifetime; the first step is to remember that you get to do the appraising. We need to worry less about looking good to ourselves and spend more time honouring our commitments to ourselves, fulfilling our goals, and realizing our dreams.