“Focus on who you are and what you do well. That is how you succeed. NBA sharpshooters like Kyle Korver and J. J. Redick get paid absurd amounts of money to do one thing: catch and shoot. That’s it. Catch the ball and shoot the ball. And I don’t say that to diminish them. But that is what got them to where they are, and it’s where their greatness lies. Well rounded is overrated. Use your self-awareness to double down on what you do best. Find the one thing you do better than anyone else and continue to pour into that. That is a dying idea. Simon Sinek, believes that we’ve lost the desire—and ability—to excel in one thing. “Giving a lot of one’s self to a small number of things,” he wrote, “seems to have been replaced by giving a little bit of one’s self to a large number of things.”

Excerpt From: Alan Stein. “Raise Your Game.”

“The traditional paradigm for achieving any goal emphasizes discipline and willpower. If we want to succeed, we must (a) religiously follow our plan and (b) resist any distraction that tempts us off plan. Discipline supplies the power to say yes every day to doing the hard stuff. Willpower provides the determination to say no to the bad stuff. We admire, often to the point of amazement, anyone who displays these two virtues to accomplish something difficult or extraordinary: the sibling who loses sixty pounds and keeps them off; the neighbor who accomplishes her lifelong dream of fluency in Italian; the addict who kicks the habit.”

Excerpt From: Marshall Goldsmith. “The Earned Life.”