69 Harvard's best, sacrifice, and emotional derailing

No. 69 – 29 Mar 2024

Welcome to the 69th edition of the True Progress Newsletter, a weekly newsletter on beating fear and anxiety for optimal performance.

If you’d like to share this newsletter issue via text, social media, or email, just click here, then copy and paste the link from your web browser.

Article

Harvard Business Review (HBR) has published countless articles from leading psychologists, professors, practitioners, and scientists on resilience-building, eliminating self-doubt, and beating imposter syndrome. We've summarized them for you and they're quite telling.

— Read more​

Quote

Kobe Bryant, on mastery and balance:

"If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it. A lot of people say they want to be great, but they're not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. They have other concerns, and they spread themselves out.... Greatness isn't easy to achieve. It requires a lot of time, a lot of sacrifices. It requires a lot of tough choices. It requires your loved ones to sacrifice, too. So you have to have an understanding circle of family and friends. People don't always understand just how much effort from how many people goes into one person chasing a dream to be great. There's a fine balance between obsessing about your craft and being there for your family. It's akin to walking a tightrope. Your legs are shaky, and you're trying to find your center. Whenever you lean too far in one direction, you correct your course and end up over leaning in the other direction. So you correct by leaning the other way again. That's the dance. You can't achieve greatness by walking a straight line."

Emotion Signpost

Neuroscience and brain-imaging research shows that properly naming an emotion is critical to managing and taming it.

It's key to decreasing fear and anxiety, becomes a pause for reflection, and increases understanding of yourself and others.

Here are 2 to explore:

Earnest

Definition | Characterized by or proceeding from an intense and serious state of mind.

Example | She was so earnest it was hard not to believe her.

Origin | Middle English ernest, from Old English eornost; akin to Old High German ernust earnest.

Reserved

Definition | Restrained in words and actions.

Example | He was by nature a reserved man but not a cold one.

Origin | Middle English: from Old French reserver, from Latin reservare ‘keep back’, from re- ‘back’ + servare ‘to keep’.

Question

To improve at anything, discipline is crucial.

But to truly master it, you also need emotion skills.

Often, it's our frustration, impatience, boredom, fear, stress, and anxiety that derail us and make us complain and quit.

The journey is full of ups and downs.

The real power comes in knowing how to navigate our emotions so they don't stop us from reaching our goals.

It starts with allowing yourself to feel your emotions.

What can you start doing today to stop running away from your feelings and let them in?

Till next week,
— Carlos & Stef