My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Want to reach your potential? Achieve success on your terms? This book offers a variety of strategies to get you there.

There were perspectives on success, learning and improvement that I found interesting and consistent with what I experienced in my life. For example, I wish that I was not so afraid to make mistakes when I was younger. I also wished that I dreamed bigger than I did. I believe its important to have a network of advisors and mentors.

Parts of the book were more interesting to me than others. However it is well written. I particularly enjoyed the stories about Seth Curry and R.A. Dickey and their routes to playing at professional levls in their respective sports. Dickey’s story about how he finally succeeded as a major-league pitcher is particularly inspiring.

Listed below are portions of the book I found worthy of note…

Potential is not a matter of where you start but of how far you travel.

This capacity to absorb, filter and adapt enables sponges to grow and thrive. And it’s a capacity that matters a great deal for humans too.

A key to being a sponge is determining what information to absorb versus what to filter out.

Seek discomfort. Instead of just striving to learn, aim to feel uncomfortable. Pursuing discomfort sets you on faster path to growth. If you want to get it right, it has to first feel wrong.

Seek out new knowledge, skills and perspectives to fuel your growth—-not feed your ego.

Strive for excellence, not perfection. Practice wabi sari, the art of honoring beauty in imperfection. Did you make yourself better today?

Deliberate practice is the structured repetition of a task to improve performance based on clear goals and immediate feedback. Deliberate play = deliberate practice + free play (Seth Curry)

It’s better to disappoint others than to disappoint yourself.

Compete against yourself. The risk of competing against others is that you can win without getting better.

Instead of relying on a single expert or mentor, remember that the best directions come from multiple guides.

Hundreds of experiments show that people improve faster when they alternate between different skills (interleaving).

It turns out that if you are taking a new road, the best experts are often the worst guides. Experts often have an intuitive understanding of a route, but they struggle to articulate all the steps to take.