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Posts Tagged ‘Book notes’

Book Note: Inside The Box by David Epstein

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , on June 9, 2026| Leave a Comment »

The book’s main idea is that constraints can be good for us while too much freedom bad. I share his views. But since I’ve came across many of the stories and ideas previously, this book doesn’t bring too much new insights for me. His recent podcasts or interviews are good places to get the gist of the book.

Excerpts:

Years after her Olympic gold, Taormina wrote a short reflection about her Management 577 class for a book about applications of the theory of constraints. The benefit of the process, she wrote, “is the identification of core problems and a logical way to find a win-win solution.” When her athletic career ended, Taormina wrote a well-regarded book on developing a powerful swimming stroke. Tellingly, in the introduction she wrote that swimmers often work on things “that have minimal to zero impact on their times, because they were never accurately told what is most important.” Hunting for bottlenecks isn’t rocket science, but we typically don’t do it in a systemic way.

[On Allende’s routine] Her year, she says, actually starts on January 7, with a ritual of clearing and silencing. That’s when she prepares the room for the next day. She cleans out everything connected to the previous projects…The next day, she lights a candle–which she will blow out at the end of each session–and begins. Her life “turned outward,” as she calls it, ends: no more lectures, or trips for book promotion, or being surrounded by people. She will turn down six-figure checks to give a forty-five-minute talk. Overnight, her energetic world becomes quiet.

She needs the silence. Without it, she cannot hear the voices that she channels onto the page…On January 8, she starts by sitting alone, silent, for several hours, as the noise and confusion of the rest of life fade away. Sometimes it takes weeks before she writes anything that she intends to keep, but it always comes, eventually…The January 8 ritual had brought her back again, and again and again thereafter. Now in her ninth decade of life, she still has a new bestseller out about every eighteen months.

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Book Note: Making Art and Making a Living

Posted in Art, Books, Hobbies, tagged , , , , , , on May 28, 2026| Leave a Comment »

I liked Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals, so I picked up this book about how various artists fund their creative lives. Like his previous book, it offers interesting glimpses into different artists’ lives and their attitudes toward money.

There is no single correct way to fund a creative life. Some people succeed by pursuing creative work on the side. Others need to devote themselves fully before they can make progress. And some people, without external constraints, end up wasting their time. Each of us has to find an arrangement that fits our personality and that we can live with.

Frugality helps as it provides more options. But for certain pursuits, such as professional sports and chess, age and timing also matter. I admire artists who give everything to creating art or mastering their craft. But a chaotic and uncertain life does not suit my temperament. So I chose to focus on building financial security first, before shifting more of my time toward hobbies in my late 30s and early 40s.

Overall, I think that choice has worked out well. The encouraging thing is that it is not too late to begin and improve at many artistic activities. And while I cannot compete in sports at a professional level, there are still enough opportunities to play with others. I can also enjoy simply practising on my own.

Excerpts:

This reader is someone powerfully drawn to a life in the arts and at the same time powerfully stumped by the difficulty of balancing those ambitions with the very real need to pay rent and put food in the fridge. Sure, there are some well-worn paths forward: Get a day job and do your creative work in your spare time. Go to graduate school and try to find a foothold in academia that encourages or at least tolerates your art-making practice. Pursue a sort-of-related career–journalism for writers, say, or graphic design for visual artists–and hope to channel your artistic impulses into this more financially secure profession. Find somewhere extremely affordable to live and get by on a little income as possible. Become a genius at applying for–and winning–grants, fellowships, residencies, retreats, contests, and other funding opportunities. Coax money out of your parents, acquire a patron, or attract a life partner who’s willing to subsidise your art. Or–most elusive of all–make your art pay, by tailoring it to the market place or somehow forcing the culture to come to you.

The dumb truth is that there is no cultural production without financial supports. It is simply not possible to become an accomplished painter or musician or novelist or pet without spending a lot of time experimenting, making false starts, starting over, starting over again, absorbing criticism, thinking, reading, talking, and mooning about the house aimlessly. All this time has to be purchased, one way or another.

Leonard [Virginia Woolf’s husband] writes: “Neither of us ever took a day’s holiday unless we were too ill to work or unless we went away on a regular and, as it were, authorised holiday. We should have felt it was not merely wrong but unpleasant not to work every morning for seven days a week and for about eleven months a year. Every morning, therefore, at about 9.30 after breakfast each of us, as if moved by a law of unquestioned nature, went off and “worked” until lunch at 1. It is surprising how much one can produce in a year, whether of buns or books or pots or pictures, if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for 330 days.

According to a personal secretary employed by the Ives family for a time, “Mr. Ives would come home from a strenuous day in the insurance business, have his meal, and then go [to] the piano and forget all about time until the wee small hours. He would be completely absorbed in his music.”

In truth, it’s not so easy to make one version of your art just for money and then pivot to the other version, the one you make without worrying about money and maybe even in defiance of it. Trying to do both things at once may prevent you from doing either of them well. And if you succeed at one, the world may not let you pivot to the other.

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Book Notes: The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg

Posted in Books, Happiness, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 18, 2026| Leave a Comment »

I like and agree with most things in the book. Perhaps this just reinforces my own bias, or perhaps they are clichéd truisms. I like how the book summarises the relevant topics surrounding excellence in easy-to-read chapters. They are constant reminders of how we can continue to become our best selves. Here’s David Epstein’s interview with Brad Stulberg about the book.

Excerpts:

Excellence is less a destination and more an energizing process of growth and becoming–an ongoing path that yields our best performance and, every bit as important, our best selves.

Excellence combines mastery and mattering. Mastery means developing skill and make progress in activities you deem worthwhile…Mattering is a sense that what you are doing has significance, that your contributions and progress are meaningful. Decades of research show mastery and mattering are key to a life well-lived, or what psychologists call life satisfaction.

Real excellence is quiet, confident, consistent, respectful of the craft, and interested in the process of self-discovery.

In the words of Stuart McMillian, a coach to more than thirty-five Olympic medalists in sprinting and other power sports: “Skill is not an act or action, it is an interaction–between a person, their activity, and their environment. Research shows that the best way to learn something is to feel what it’s like to do it incorrectly and correctly.

Excellence is not a destination; it is a process of becoming. The real reward isn’t a bigger deadlift, a faster mile, or a sturdier table; it’s that you become a better version of yourself.

When we throw ourselves into worthwhile projects and pursuits, we engrave or stamp upon ourselves the type of person we are growing into.

We find meaning when our pursuits offer us autonomy, competence, and belonging and when they align with our values.

“The only thing in life that’s really worth having good skill. Good skill is the greatest passion,” Jerry Seinfeld once said in an interview with The New Yorker. “I know a lot of rich people. So do you. They don’t feel good, as you think they should and would. They’re miserable. Because, if they don’t master a skill, life is unfulfilling.”

How do you know when you’ve found the right seeds? You feel a pull to keep showing up. You may not get better every day, but there is a general sense of growth and progress. You may not love every moment, but there is an emerging satisfaction.

“Heartbreak is unpreventable,” explains the poet David Whyte, “the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control….Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in an attempt to shape a better and more generous self.”

If you want to have a rich and meaningful life then you have to expose yourself. You have to make yourself vulnerable. You have to care. There is no way around it.

You hold your care, ambition, and drive in a container of self-kindness, because if you cannot be kind to yourself when you suffer inevitable heartbreaks and failures, then you would never come back and risk putting it on the line again. You learn to tell yourself, Caring deeply is hard, but we can do hard things.

You come to appreciate that the things you care about are the things that break your heart are the things that give rise to excellence and fill your life with meaning and joy.

Fulfillment, happiness, and satisfaction are not attributes you gain from achieving a goal: they are states that arise in the process of going for one.

There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life. What will change your life is who you become in the process of going for it.

The most realistic and effective approach for sustaining excellence involves viewing the work and as ongoing practice, measuring and judging your level of attention and effort, and letting progress be a by-product of that. Focus less on any single result and more on the trend line.

Over time, people who are chronic multitaskers become worse at filtering out irrelevant information and slower at identifying patterns, and they experience a decline in long-term memory.

Focus is like a muscle: Use it or lose it; even if you were once strong, regaining your fitness takes time and effort. But with patience and repetition, it comes back.

When I asked him about his stick-to-itiveness, he told me it comes down to “disconnecting how you feel from what you need to do.”

When asked about his success, Kipchonge says, “Only the disciplined ones in life are free. When you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and passions.” Williams explains, “I honestly believe discipline is freedom.”

Kipchonge and Williams are alluding to what philosophers call positive freedom, or the freedom to express your potential. But in order for that to happen, you need to sacrifice what philosophers call negative freedom, or freedom from constraints.

The more reps we put in, the more faith we gain in our respective endeavours, and in ourselves. It is not blind or delusional faith. It is faith based on a concrete body of evidence, which is a powerful way to think about confidence.

The actual secret to greatness: Pick your thing. Pick a good system for your thing. Surround yourself with people who support you doing your thing. Do your thing for a decade (or more).

Curiosity is intimately linked to growth. There’s a curiosity to figure out what you are capable of. A curiosity to better know your craft. A curiosity to better know yourself. All are part and parcel of excellence.

Excellence is an infinite game: The goal is the path, and the path is the goal. Whether you basketball or cello, repair cars or build tables, write books or coach teams, your craft can be a vessel for self-discovery.

There are many theories on resilience, but it really comes down to a few core components: leaning into community; allowing yourself to feel sadness and loss while working to maintain hope at the same time; being kind to yourself, patient, and persistent; establishing small routines that support your mental health; and committing to showing up and returning to the work as you trudge through the mess. Remember, the things you care about break your heart. But you’ve got to trust the love of the pursuit is big enough to hold the hurt of failure.

Psychologists distinguish between two types of passion: harmonious and obsessive. With harmonious passion, you are absorbed in an activity because you love how the activity makes you feel. A harmoniously passionate artist creates because she finds joy in the craft. With obsessive passion, you get hooked on an activity because of external rewards and recognition. An obsessively passionate artist creates because she wants to boast about prestigious gallery shows and other accolades.

Joy prevents burnout, promotes longevity, and offers a wellspring of resilience.

The one I’ve come to adopt is that we are all Sisyphus. We are all pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it fall down–again and again and again. Each of us plays our own eighty-two-game seasons. Excellence is about finding fulfilment in the struggle. It’s about exerting ourselves with a smile on our face more often than a frown. It’s about expressing our unique talents and gifts and creating joy, community, and meaning in the process.

We must protect time and space to step outside the day-to-day grind for reflection…Experience plus reflection equals growth.

Excellence is not perfection or winning at all costs. It is a process of becoming the best performer–and person–you can be. When you pursue goals that challenge you, put forth an honest effort, and endure highs, lows, and everything in between, you gain self-respect that nobody can take away.

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Book Notes: Read Your Mind by Oz Pearlman

Posted in Books, tagged , , , , on February 23, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Written by famous mentalist Oz Pearlman, this book is part memoir, part self-help. It highlights how much work it took to reach his fame and seemingly impossible skills, and his ultramarathon running underscores his mental toughness and dedication.

PS: Not sure if he can have genuine friends with his skills, but for usual social interactions he’s likely more likable and can get better results than most people who find it harder to control their emotions.

Excerpts:

Every word and phrase was designed to grab their attention and not let them go. I was setting a path in motion and that is key to tapping into the minds of others. This is Human Behavior 101: learning to anticipate the thoughts of others before they even think them.

Often, getting in touch with your inner mentalist is as easy as thinking about what’s going through the other person’s head.

The first rule of working in the service industry–and all industries…is that the client is always right…And even if they’re not right and truly unpleasant…the best approach is to kill that person with kindness.

The smartest plan is always to de-escalate a situation. A vital rule of de-escalation is that you don’t charge up on someone who’s running hot, who’s already in a fury and wants to fight.

Letting people get a win, giving them that win, or inviting them to feel like they’re in on the trick tells them you’re not trying to steal the attention away from them. It’s a great way to shift the energy, to de-escalate.

It’s important to make people feel like they have agency, that they have choice within the set of parameters you give them.

People want to be seen and heard. They want to feel special. If you can win them over, it flips the script. They want attention, so give them what they want.

What I mean by being the observer is that when I was about to perform…I’d tell myself that I wasn’t Oz Pearlman. Instead, I was Oz the Entertainer, the precursor to Oz the Mentalist. And if people rejected or didn’t like Oz the Entertainer, that wasn’t Oz Pearlman’s problem. I turned myself into a character, meaning I separated myself and my psyche from the task at hand. I was no longer the actor; I was the observer. I made a conscious decision to not internalise how people would react to me because they weren’t reacting to the real me.

If you want to become stronger, whether it’s mentally or physically, you must experience failure. Failure is the foundation for growth. Failing, especially multiple times, gives you the kind of resilience you just don’t get from smooth sailing. Failure is the cornerstone of innovation.

The only thing you have to do to be the most interesting person in the room is to be the most interested person in the room. If you want to be fascinating, be fascinated by others.

When you go through life trying to make someone’s day a little brighter, you’ll find that people naturally want to be in your corner.

An easy and economical way to make people look and feel good is to remember what’s important to them.

Unlike sympathy, which is your reaction to someone’s situation, empathy keeps the focus on them. Sympathy is feeling for someone, whereas empathy is feeling with someone, putting yourself in their shoes and responding from a deeper place.

Achieving goals is all about working backward from the desired outcome, whether it’s personal or professional, and this starts with learning how to define and quantify them.

Often, success boils down to timing, a little bit of luck, and not knowing at that moment that the producer may have already found somebody for your slot. This is why persistence and the ability to keep going is crucial, which is why we’ve already covered how to handle the pain of rejection.

But I loved magic and I used to practice sleight of hand moves with cards for twelve or more hours every day. Learning to control where each card was located in the deck, focusing my entire mind on the position of a finger during a split-second move, over and over and over again in front of a mirror. I had an attention to detail and an unwillingness to settle for anything less than perfection that bordered on the obsessive, but that’s what was required to be a top-notch performer.

…with meditation, you can structurally alter the neuroplasticity of the brain, meaning you’ll create growth in the hippocampus, which basically impacts your memory capacity.

To me, charm is the ability to influence people…

What’s so great about charm is that it doesn’t feel one-sided. When you’re about to charm someone, you both leave the interaction feeling more positive. (Especially when you’re the only passenger that the gate agent accommodates because you were the one of two hundred who was kind.)

Active listening is flat-out charming.

Regardless of what kind of tyrant you’re dealing with, whether it’s a toddler or someone acting like a toddler, you’re not going to move forward if you get caught up taking their abuse personally. Treat them with respect, with kindness, while asking them questions to clarify the root cause of an issue and showing them that you’re on the same team.

When there are times that your natural charms aren’t enough, remember to lead with empathy and do everything in your power to de-escalate tense situations with kindness, repetition, and acknowledgement. Because at the end of the day, when you can show people that they’re seen and heard, they will eventually come around. And if they don’t? At least you didn’t make a bad situation worse.

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Book Notes: Shot Ready by Stephen Curry

Posted in Books, Hobbies, tagged , , , , , on November 5, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Curry’s book delivers. It offers valuable advice and insights into his journey from childhood to NBA veteran. On first read, I may have enjoyed it even more than Kobe’s Mamba Mentality.

From the back of the book: “Shot Ready is a powerful distillation of Stephen Curry’s transformative philosophy of success — centred on preparation, constant improvement, creativity, connection, mindfulness and joy — delivered in his incomparable voice and style. Stunning designed and illustrated with more than 100 gorgeous photographs, Shot Ready is an intimate narrative and a practical blueprint for any reader who wants to unlock their own potential.

Excerpts:

We practice not until I get the shot right, but until I can’t get it wrong.

I fell in love with the grind. You have to. With the sacrifices that it takes to be great, you have to find joy in the work you do when no else is around…But when I talk about “the grind,” I’m simply describing the most important hours in any pursuit, the ones we invest in ourselves. I do this work in the gym in isolation—there’s no defense, no live action—but, even alone, I practice with a shot-ready mentality, training as if the stakes are high and the clock is low, so that I can rehearse finding balance in the midst of great intensity.

Being shot ready requires practice, training, and repetition, but it rewards that work with an unmatchable feeling of transcendence. My peak experience of joy is when I can lose myself in the poetry and rhythm of a fast-paced game—when there’s no time to think, and there are nine other guys flying around me, but I have the ball in my hands and somehow know exactly where it is going to go. This joy is only possible because of what I do in this gym, the hours I invested in practice and watching film. And then when the moment of truth arrives, I can let go. It is the ultimate freedom.

When the season’s over and I come back to a small gym like this, I refresh and return to my basic love of the game. And a key part of that love of the game—my love of play—is the pleasure I get in finding ways to play better.

We all have an off-season, a time to retreat for a while from the main action of our lives…this gift of time offers us the chance to either stay where we are or create new possibilities for the next season of life. In my off-season I put myself in a quiet gym and break my game down to its basics. Working on my fundamentals allows me to see—with clarity and honesty—where I need to grow.

Making life harder in practice makes things easier in life.

I keep talking about joy in the work for a reason. There are 450 NBA players who suit up to play a regular season, every single one of them chasing the same thing: the championship trophy. We each take our own path to that goal, but there is a common oath the best of those players share: We will do our best to outwork everyone else. When you’re playing at this level, when everyone is keeping the same promise to themselves, or trying to, what can set you apart is joy. The ups and downs of any job can steal joy from you—whether it’s a day-to-day pilfering or one big disappointment that leaves you wiped out. Protect your passion. It is joy that will sustain your commitment to greatness and the work it requires. But joy is more than a great motivator. It is both the means—that things that drives your effort—and the end, the glorious payoff of all that work.

No matter how long they’d been playing, the great ones had the confidence that they were the best, but they all wanted to get better.

If something is handed to you or a task comes easy, you won’t get the chance to develop the drive you need to sustain excellence…Be comfortable with who you are as a player, but relentlessly build on those strengths.

…success usually has a lot of failure wrapped up in it…we only truly fail when we shrink away from challenges to stay in a comfort zone.

But he taught me that you have to rigorously train your body in the proper form on close shots before you move out the arc. The repetition is how you lock in your mechanics…consistency at the point of release is the key to great shooting.

…obsessing over failure is just a distraction from the work of improvement.

It’s never about proving other people wrong. It’s about proving yourself right.

I play with joy because that’s who I am, but deep down I have an intense competitive fire. Behind the playfulness is a killer instinct that not many people recognize. But Kobe did.

As a player you have to constantly evolve.

But I want to be remembered as somebody who worked hard.

You become who you think you are. Be the best in your mind and don’t apologize for it.

Surround yourself with harder-working people…All of us always watching the others to keep pace we were going at and the intensity that we had. Constantly leveling up. It was such a healthy environment to just get better.

Success will never come without stress, but controlled breathing can help you train your response to that stress.

It’s important to make the most of obstacles and setbacks, no matter when they come. Adversity reveals who you have become and who have yet to become. What a gift to find at the back end of your career—another chance to discover who you are and who you can be.

As I move into the tail end of my career, I have confidence that I can continue to thrive. But the questions come: “Are you thinking about retirement?” I do think about it, but perhaps not in the way they think I do. There is a timeline, but it’s not a source of dread. It’s a gift. The gift is that the timeline gives me more motivation for the now. To take advantage of every opportunity and edge that I have. Because of course I know the ball will stop bouncing eventually. But not yet. The gift of the timeline is that it keeps me in the moment.

You can’t slow down time, but you can value it. Make it purposeful.

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Book Notes: Golden & Letters to a Young Athlete

Posted in Books, Hobbies, tagged , , , , , on October 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »

“What’s hard isn’t just the work. What’s hard is giving everything you have with no guarantees but the love of the game. It takes what it takes. Every day. Of your whole life. And even then, it might not be enough.” – Chris Bosh

Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry is a biography of Curry. Somehow It didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But it prompted me to revisit Chris Bosh’s book: Letters to a Young Athlete, which I still enjoy. It’s full of good advice from someone who’s been through the journey. I hope Steph’s new book, Shot Ready, will offer more insights on his mindset.

Excerpts from Golden:

It’s not the time he puts in, or how gruelling the load. Housen is amazed at the ethical difficulty. Curry practices the difficult until it becomes normal. He sets the bar so high in practice that his dazzling is monotonous in the games…

He doesn’t work on 3-pointers, he works on 3-pointers from deep after three-pronged dribble moves. He doesn’t practice free throws. He practices left-handed floaters from the free throw line. And once the insane has become normalised, he turns up the heat. He’ll wear a mask to simulate altitude, tiring himself out faster–and saving the wear and tear on his body–so he can get comfortable shooting 3s while fatigued. After the stop-back became normal, as did the step-to-the-side 3, he worked incessantly until he got down the side-step-ping, around-the-back 3-pointers.

Excerpts from Letters to a Young Athlete:

How an athlete plays when they’re exhausted tells you everything about who they are as a competitor. The successful ones don’t even think about being exchanged. They’re so used to it that all they think about is performing.

You become capable of the grind by surviving the grind.

But I’ve always believed that how you do anything is how you do everything. If you make excuses or take shortcuts in one part of your life or your game, it’s very hard not to do it everywhere else.

Maybe the biggest difference between great athletes and mediocre ones is the learned ability to distrust that malfunctioning empty light in their brains.

Pain is temporary; glory is forever. If you want to excel, you have to get used to the pain. You have to get used to exhaustion. I can’t promise you that it will ever be a comfortable feeling, but I can guarantee you that you can become familiar enough with it that you can visit that mental and physical space on your path to getting better and not have to worry that you’ll crumple under the pressure.

Finding a reason for hunger when you have every reason to feel full–that’s what separates good from great.

You don’t get peak mental performance without taking care of your body. Sleeping right. Eating right. Exercising. Those investments in yourself don’t stop paying off when you stop playing the game–they will pay dividends for your whole life.

Criticism is a tax on success. If you’re getting criticised, even unfairly, take a second to appreciate it–it means you’re doing something right.

Criticism is easy. Putting in the work is hard. Anything you do to get better at your craft–one extra rep, one extra practice shot, one extra hour of film–is more important and more significant than a thousand pieces of criticism.

Winning and losing are both imposters, and I say that to you as someone who danced with both for four consecutive years. I’m not being flip. When you have real mental strength, you know that your worth and your deep-down happiness don’t depend on the scoreboard. Winning doesn’t give you that peace of mind, and losing doesn’t have to take it away.

What’s hard isn’t just the work. What’s hard is giving everything you have with no guarantees but the love of the game. It takes what it takes. Every day. Of your whole life. And even then, it might not be enough.

I love the way Jerry Seinfeld put it once: “Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with…it’s work, it’s exercise. Find the torture you’re comfortable with and you’ll do well.”

There’s no way of knowing exactly what it’s going to cost when you set out on the journey. Maybe that’s just why the journey is so hard–and so rewarding when you reach your destination. Maybe all you can say is: it takes what it takes.

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Book Notes: The Mind of a Champion & Badminton

Posted in anime, Books, Health and wellness, Hobbies, tagged , , , , on August 7, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I started learning badminton recently, partly inspired by the Blue Box anime and partly because I think it’s a hobby I can enjoy into old age with family and friends. It’s also a sport in which many Asians excel. Whether it’s singles, doubles, or mixed, it’s easy to find players to root for. But as I wrote before, I much prefer being a participant over a spectator, and I feel I have room for one more sport.

Lately, I’ve been watching more badminton videos and just finished reading The Mind of a Champion by Viktor Axelson. Interestingly, both Viktor and Taiki share a similar reason for loving the sport. [Viktor:]”I liked that I was master of my own destiny, that the outcome would be decided by my performance on court. It was up to me and only me.” Badminton seems like a perfect fit for someone who values agency.

Excerpts:

Is it your thoughts that are telling you that you can’t continue? Or is it in fact your body saying stop?

“Be nice to the people you pass on your way up because you’ll pass them again on your way down”. In other words, it’s okay to be all in, to show both frustration and celebrate success on court – of course while being respective to my opponent. But off court, a more humble or low-key attitude was the way to go.

I find it helpful to remind myself that 20 or 40 years from now, no one will recall who wrote what on social media. That thought forces me to stay rational when I read or hear something about myself. At the end of the day, it’s not important.

It is those kinds of negative thoughts I have worked on eliminating, and I think I succeeded at a young age because I was raised in the belief that envy doesn’t do anything good for you.

It made me realise that when I was struggling being happy about the success of my competitors, it was human nature. They are universal thoughts, but I could practice and learn how to handle them when they appeared. So, I would practice feeling happy if my fellow players were successful. And it actually felt energising. Today it has become an integral part of who I am.

Had I been able to give 17-year-old Viktor a piece of advice, I would have said to him: “Stand by yourself and your choices. Listen to what people say, but never let yourself be limited by others.” To reach high performance is about courage. Most people are so focused on fitting in that they forget that if they do like others, they will be like one of many others. I would tell myself to own up to being different and experimental.

Regardless of which limitations other people see in you, never let the opinion of others get in the way of chasing your dream.

Seek inspiration from others even if they have a different background or come from a different culture than yours. Find your own unique path or approach.

For me there is not one right way: There are many paths to greatness.

Depending on how the match evolved, I would have to adapt, see myself from the outside and be able to tell myself to change the tactics. “Be kind to yourself when you make mistakes.” “Stay calm and be patient in the duels.”

He said: “Let’s focus on what we can do from here. And not let what has already happened ruin the day”.

If there is something nagging you off the court, it can affect your physical state. If you have a negative focus on court or even before your match, there is a risk that you will make more or bigger mistakes on the court. Simply because you are “pre-programmed” to think negative thoughts. I assume this phenomenon is not isolated to neither badminton nor sports, but could also have an impact on your life and career.

Here it is helpful that my overall goal is not to achieve certain results, but to become as good as I possibly can. To achieve my full potential.

Is this how I am chasing my full potential? I know it’s an abstract goal. I know that no one knows what the result will be. I don’t even have the answer to that myself. It works for me because I have a series of sub-goals. They are measurable and evaluated as honestly as the rest of my life.

People should not be measured by their mistakes, but by what they do to correct them.

Having the right mindset is not something you learn once and that’s it. B.S. and I talk about how I can never become complacent because I win. “It’s about keeping your room clean,” as he says. This means I must use exactly the same tools, even if I feel good. It forces me to think about why things are going well. I must consistently evaluate my development – even when I am progressing.

We should never fear losing, but fear not learning from our losses.

Getting better requires you to try things that mean you fall a little short or risk doing so in the moment.

What if I could decide how much and when I wanted to practice? What if my need for optimisation could finally be satisfied? What if my potential would never face a single limitation? What if the optimal conditions actually existed? What if it was entirely up to me, and I never had to settle for anything less than perfect? That’s my best answer to the question: to chase the optimal conditions for my development.

If I don’t eat right, I can’t last the distance in my sport. So, when I optimise on all parameters, it’s both about pushing and taking care of my body. That’s why food is a tool to help my body perform. It might sound harsh, but I don’t eat for pleasure. I eat what is optimal for me and I am very strict about my diet. I am always very aware of what and when I eat.

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Book Notes: Second Act – What Late Bloomers Can Tell about Reinventing Your Life by Henry Oliver

Posted in Books, Health and wellness, Reflection, tagged , , on July 17, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I consider myself a late bloomer. During my teens, I was immature in handling relationships, and I’m still amazed at how silly some of my past senseless actions were when I reflect on them. It seems my maturity has always lagged a step behind my peers. I would like to think I’m more mature now, yet I suspect that in a few years, I might cringe at some actions I take today. This suggests I am still changing, hopefully for the better. While not everyone may become more productive or successful later in life, I think it’s beneficial to believe we can always grow. As Henry Oliver might say, I hope to continue becoming my true self as I age.

Excerpts from the book:

Personal transformation happens through cultural immersion, sampling the world and changing our surroundings. In new circumstances, gradually sampling our way into a new mode of thinking, living or working, we can change our opportunities, perhaps even change ourselves.

Late bloomers are serious, perhaps, intense, obsessive, occasionally eccentric, volatile, or weird. Not infrequently, the people around them don’t quite understand who they are capable of being. Their earnestness can make them seem strange, off-putting, and makes it difficult to see how and where their talent could flourish: their capability often hides in plain sight…Their ambitions are usually secret, or unknown to themselves for a long time. They pursue their interests quietly. Their ability and confidence growth with experience.

Our time is not guaranteed to be well spent. How many people every year are lost to weariness, laziness, mental decline, exhaustion, redundancy? As Jimmy Carter wrote in his memoir of post-presidential life, The Virtues of Aging, ‘Each of us is old when we think we are – when we accept an attitude of dormancy…a substantial limitation on our physical and mental activity…As I know from experience, this is not tied very closely to the number of years we have lived.’

Addiction to success, habit, and love of status had prevented them from travelling or seeing their children. One important type of late bloomer is someone who successfully changes the balance of their life.

[Late bloomers] They tend to be smart (which doesn’t have to mean successful at school), self-educating and self-directing. They follow their own interests and take lifelong education seriously. They never stop teaching themselves; often, they set their own agenda…Another thing that characterises many late bloomers is a period of withdrawal for reflection.

[Jerry Seinfeld on producing Seinfeld] If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micro-managed it – every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.

Rather, knowledge was sought for its ability to improve our character: ‘A man always makes himself greater as he increases his knowledge.’

Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail, and resolve again. We should do this not just for ambition, for ‘hope of a better fortune’, but because ‘the time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise’ and all we can do then is remember our lives; and ‘virtue will be all that we can recollect with pleasure’. We should keep working and keep trying, keep expanding our perspectives and horizons, our stock of knowledge and our range of experiences, not just for aspiration, but so we will know at the end of our lives that we did.

First, the culture we live in has a huge influence on our work: our circumstances change who we become. Second, our mental powers do not inevitably decline as we age: the more work we produce, the more likely we are to be successful.

It matters who you surround yourself with and what circumstances you put yourself in. Influence builds up over time.

‘The feeling of being in a great culture isn’t smoothness – it’s the feeling of solving hard problems with people you admire.‘

This is not the direct influence of peer pressure but the indirect influence of sampling the world via your network.

Different people are influenced by different things. Some people are more strongly influenced by their parents but not by their peers, and vice versa. Some people are going to be strongly susceptible to the influence of music but not painting. Many people are what Belsky calls a ‘mosaic’ – rather than fitting a neat pattern, we are influenced by different things in different ways.

That is why key transitional moments in life affect us differently. Just as the war affected the young delinquents in various ways, so will retirement, children, redundancy and other moments of change affect people.

We should aim to be comfortable at being incompetent when we try new things. The more we branch out, the more we can discover what we are really good at. We had to be incompetent for a long time while we developed our current expertise, and sometimes we should be willing to be incompetent again.

Late bloomers spend a lot of time cultivating themselves. They often experience life as a long, organic process, where decisions emerge out of previous experience. They are always becoming themselves.

‘The best predictor of exceptional creativity is productivity. It’s lots of hard work.’

‘Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated the potential of drawing as a form of research and as a medium for the generation of new ideas.’ Michelangelo’s drawings are full of repetition. He draws the same figures over and over with slight variations in posture, pose, angle. It’s how he encoded basic forms into his memory and how he discovered ways of being original.

Ask yourself as Audrey Sutherland did, ‘What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?’

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