Sublime

If you live avoiding risk, you’re risking missing out on life.

When you steal, don’t just copy and paste the work of your predecessors. Once you have mastered the form, bring those influences together in a new way. Curate before you create. If you do this well, you won’t be merely cribbing other people’s work and passing it off as your own. You will be building on it and making it better.

The point Wooden was making was that creating effective habits, down to the smallest detail, is what makes the difference between winning and losing games. Each habit might seem small, but added together, they have an exponential effect on performance. Just one habit, at the top of any field, can be enough to give an edge over the competition.

A lot of people follow me on Quora, Medium, Twitter, and Instagram because of the writing advice I share. Data tells me this is one of my high performing “content buckets.” But within this book, I just told you about a poetry book I wrote called Slow Down, Wake Up. If you enjoy me as a writer, maybe you’ll check it out. I’m not pretending my poetry

To keep your momentum and motivation up, get in the habit of accomplishing small victories along the way.

Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.