I finished this book in July 2024. I recommend this book 8/10.
Why you should read this book:
The author has taken content from her blog, The Profile, where she looks for the secret ways that the world's most successful people operate and inserted it into ten powerful chapters in this book. Chapters such as: How to be creative, mental toughness, healthy relationships, to name a few. Contrary to many "blogger-turning authors," Polina was previously a writer and knows how to create content that, at the end of the book, will have you energized.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
It takes guts and hard work, but the reward of being different wins.
Change your mind and views, and be open to bringing others close.
Make your identity about you and your name, not your job or title.
🎨 Impressions
It was hard to put this book down, and it was an easy read. The individual stories were good, but I wish the stories contained a bit more detail.
📝 My notes and thoughts
P15. People used to say creativity came from God. Today, they talk about the "muse" (a phrase that remains steeped in divinity, deriving from the Ancient Greek "Muses" or goddesses of inspiration). But, as Stephen King wrote in his memoir. In writing, "There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy dust all over your computer screen. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there, you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in." In other words, the muse, the divine, the magic—it's stuff we wake up to avoid the grunt work that comes with being creative.
P26. Creativity is a muscle. It is about connecting the dots.
P34. "The Buddha famously said that life is suffering." Goggins writes, "I'm not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant, and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss. That's just nature. Each specific life comes with its own personalized portion of pain. It's coming for you. You can't stop it. And you know it." And this is the reason that Goggins believes it's imperative you not only manufacture hardship but seek it out on a daily basis. Choosing the path of most resistance builds authentic confidence. Many of us, Goggins says, want the results without the process. We forget that pain is a necessary to make progress.
P38. Dauwalter has conditioned herself into thinking about pain as a place: She visualizes herself entering "the pain cave." Sometimes, you enter "the pain cave" voluntarily, and other times, life shoves you in there against your will. The reason it's helpful to personify pain is that it serves as a reminder that you're in control when you enter and equally as aware that you can leave. "It's not a place I'm scared to enter," she says. "It's a place I'm excited to find the entrance to."
P44. As author James Clear writes, "Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are (either consciously or subconsciously)." Goggins transformed from a victim into one of the world's toughest athletes. He became his alter ego. But how? "First, you have to face the real you. The real me is David Goggins—I stutter, I have these issues with reading and writing, and I'm fat and insecure. You have to face that in the dark room," he says, " In that dark room is who you are, but in that dark room is where you have to create another human being. In the dark room, you face yourself, you realize you want to be better, you realize you don't want to be this insecure, weak person who has all these problems we all have."
P65. The 5-1 Ratio. The first is to make sure your relationship in life: it's the mundane moments that determine its health and longevity. One of his most concrete findings is that happier couples had a ratio of five positive interactions to every negative interaction. The interactions don't have to be grand gestures. " A smile, a head nod, even just grunting to show you're listening to your partner—those are all positive," Gottman says. That's because this magic ratio enhances the positivity in your relationship. For instance, even if you're tired, you might remind yourself to do something thoughtful or nice for your partner. As long as there are more positive interactions for every negative one, you're in the green zone.
P77. Try this exercise: Start with a blank page and write about a situation that's making you anxious. What have you been telling yourself? Who made you upset? What is the problem? Now, take out another piece of paper and write about the same situation from the perspective of a different character in your life. Gottlieb asks, "What would happen if you looked at your story and wrote it from another person's point of view? What would you see now from this wider perspective?" Sometimes, the story you've been telling yourself about your life doesn't reflect reality at all. This exercise is powerful because it allows you to poke holes and identify your blind spots. When there's uncertainty, Gottlieb says, we try to fill in the blanks so we feel like we have more control. "Unfortunately, we don't fill in the blanks with something positive," she adds. "We tend to fill in the blanks with something terrifying."
P83. Focusing on conflict and intent makes your storytelling better because it introduces friction and tension. You don't have to tell the audience who a character is—you can show them what a character wants. Vince Gilligan, the creator of the hit TV series Breaking Bad, always asks his team of writers these three questions: 1) What does the character want right now? 2) What are they afraid of? 3) What stands between them and their goal?
P120. It takes boldness of execution and an ability to overcome fear, Hadfield says. "Fear is just a symptom of lack of preparation. The best antidote for fear is competence." For instance, when you first learned how to ride a bicycle, you were fearful because you could crash and hurt yourself. Then, as you got better and more confident in your skills, it became silly to be afraid of a bike. Yet the bike itself didn't change—it remained just as dangerous as it always was. You are the one who changed. Competence breeds confidence. "Things aren't scary," Hadfield says. "People get scared."
P130. In a blog post titled "The Three Sides of Risk," author and investor Morgan Housel posits that there are three distinct aspects to risk-taking: 1) The odds you will get hit, 2) The average consequences of getting hit, and 3) The tail-end consequence of getting hit.
P138. Legendary investor Charlie Munger has an "iron prescription" to make sure he doesn't become a slave to his beliefs. "I'm not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it," he says. "I think only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak."
P145. Julia Galef wants you to imagine for a moment that you're a soldier in the midst of battle. You attack, you defend, you protect, but mostly you want to win. Now, imagine playing a different role: a scout. Unlike the soldier, your goal as a scout isn't to defend one side over the other. Instead, you're there to understand, survey the terrain, identify threats and obstacles, and come back with a map that's as accurate as possible.
P166. Taylor Swift is also a master at building loyalty among her fans around the globe. She finds her biggest and most loyal fans and makes them feel like they're the most important people in the room. In the lead-up to her albums 1989 and Reputation, she created a series of events called "Secret Sessions," where she personally scoured the internet for her most loyal fans and invited them to a listening session in her own home. Swift made them cookies, played her newest songs before their release, and took photos with each of the attendees. Another time, she chose a number of fans, learned a little about them from their social media profiles, and sent them personalized presents. She even surprises her fans at their own weddings. Although you may argue these acts of goodwill aren't scaleable, they are the key to humanizing a brand and building lifelong loyalty.
P188. After conducting a content audit, as outlined in the previous section, start by rearranging your physical environment to make it more conducive to generating ideas. When I spoke with James Clear, he told me that he had 17 books on his desk. "I try to sprinkle good sources of information all around," he said. He has books on his desk, next to his bed, and on top of the coffee table in the living room. "I'm never far from a good idea," he said. "Most of them aren't mine, but they're always there for me to build upon and soak up and think about and iterate on. That's how I think about optimizing my environment for having good ideas." Remember, ideas are the lifeblood of human progress—and those ideas aren't typically found in the mainstream. As author Haruki Murakami said, "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."
P195. Dan Gilbert makes the following observation: "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is a transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our lives is change."
P206. Ngannou has learned one thing: He gives himself permission to fail because he knows he has the skills necessary to course correct. " I know that if I fail, I can start over and over and over and over. I have that skill, and you can take everything from me, but you cannot take that."
P209. When someone asks, "So, what do you do?" you will likely respond with your most impressive identity. For many people, the answer is their job title. For five years, my primary identity was "Polina Marinova, writer and editor at Fortune Magazine." But I wasn't in control of that identity. If I ever got fired or laid off, I was at risk of losing my entire self-worth—and losing that is a recipe for psychological disaster. The best thing I did for myself was start writing The Profile in 2017 because it gave me another identity—one that allowed me to be fully myself. It would be the identity that I would eventually choose to embody full-time.
P209. Quindlen's 1999 commencement speech:
Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require. Set aside the messages this culture sends through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain, and its disapproval about how you should behave. "Set aside the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notion of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. Begin with that most terrifying of all things: a clean slate. Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who I am and what I mean to be. This will always be your struggle whether you are twenty-one or fifty-one. I know this from experience. When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again. But I am not nuts; I am happy. I am successful on my own terms. Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. Remember the words of Lily Tomlin: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat."
P217. I've transformed the ten chapters into ten key questions that will help you discover your own hidden genius:
What is the biggest, boldest, most original endeavor you can conceive of?
How can you introduce moments of "elective hardship" into your week?
How many positive interactions have you and your partner had today?
What could you learn if you told your personal story from the perspective of a different character in your life?
In what situations can you adopt a system-based mindset?
Before making an important decision, ask yourself: Is the decision I'm about to make reversible or irreversible?
What is one area of your life where you could examine and update your existing beliefs?
What is a meaningful activity or project you can pursue to better your own community?
How can you improve your content diet this year?
What is something you can create today that allows you to tie your identity to your name?
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