Nick DiMaggio’s Reviews > The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence > Status Update

I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday — the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness — is where success, let alone happiness, emerges.

In most situations, we need to be aware of what is happening around us, and our processor is built to handle this responsibility. On the other hand, armed with an understanding of how intuition operates, we can train ourselves to have remarkably potent perceptual and physical abilities in our disciplines of focus. The key, of course, is practice.

If you want to be the best, you have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to your advantage. That said, there are times when the body needs to heal, but those are ripe opportunities to deepen the mental, technical, internal sides of your game.

One of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition. There will inevitably be times when we need to try new ideas, release our current knowledge to take in new information — but it is critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are.

A man wants to walk across the land, but the Earth is covered with thorns. He has two options — one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals.

While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.

One has to investigate the principle in one thing or one event exhaustively… Things and the self are governed by the same principle. If you understand one, you understand the other, for the truth within and the truth without are identical.