A Joosr Guide to It's Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden

Key takeaways

Decide how good or great you want to be, then aim beyond that toward what seems out of reach.
Accepting that you won’t be right all of the time can be empowering and should be embraced if you want to move ahead of the pack.
There are valuable lessons to be learned from our mistakes and the criticisms of others.
It’s okay to be silly and try to come up with solutions to problems by thinking outside of the box.
Ambition trumps talent.

Don’t ever lose the passion you have for your goals. It is the people with the most passion, and therefore the most ambition, who use any talents they may possess, or any lessons they learn, to catapult them toward success in business and in life.

you move past mental blocks and come up with a solution to your problem.

Losing your inhibitions and being playful can help

High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought.” In other words, take a break from being serious and try being a little playful.

Those not willing to explore new ideas will remain stuck in trying to preserve what they already have. Those who take risks by implementing innovative ideas into their business often end up achieving much more than those who don’t.

Making mistakes and being wrong can actually be liberating and empowering.

If you think the criticism is wrong, you always have the power to reject it, but if you think it is something that will help you improve on the job, by all means take advantage of it.

A mistake or failure can be hard to swallow; they certainly don’t feel good while we’re experiencing them. But, if we change our perspective when it comes to mistakes and view them in the right light, we can get over the discomfort of the moment and move on, incorporating what we’ve learned.

Take, for example, Benjamin Franklin, who famously said, “I haven’t failed; I’ve had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work.”