Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life

This is the final result of this skill: influencing other people to act in accordance with their own values and beliefs as they pursue dreams of their own.

As she said, it is her actions, and not her position or career trajectory, that are the truest signs of her identity (“What I do in my life defines me”).

Successful people make it their business to be conscious of what and who matter most. Their actions flow from their values. They strive to do what they can to make things better for the people who depend on them and on whom they depend, in all the different parts of their lives.

Refine them so that they measure results.

He says that predetermined tracks are bunk and that you’ve got to chop through the weeds to make your own path. Tierney is an avid learner and a true student of his own life. He continually feeds his curiosity by observing people and the world around him.

Learning requires mistakes and reflection on those mistakes. So prepare to do some thinking about yourself and your world. Accelerating your growth in a skill requires looking back as much as you can at what works and what doesn’t. You really cannot take intelligent new action toward important goals without looking back a little.

Greitens constructively applied the principle of taking small steps that are under your control as you progress toward a big, compelling goal; focusing on results while being creative about the means to achieve them.

it isn’t always a matter of sacrificing one part for another.

In all of his talks, Tierney questions this conventional wisdom, arguing that there is bad overhead (say, paying for swank office space) and good overhead (such as investing in technology to track results). Tierney counsels philanthropists not to place restrictions on how their donation can be spent (Sheryl Sandberg, for one, heeded this sage advic