築夢踏實
夢想能夠啟發、激勵、促使你去成就大事。然而，要讓夢想成真，就必須讓夢想從虛無縹緲進入現實世界。
| 執迷是成就一切的動力 |
如果你觀察任何領域裡的任何高成就人士背後的故事，你將發現他們並非隨便或偶然地接觸到他們在做的事。要為你自己設定出乎尋常的高目標，然後達成它們，你必須對你在做的事有所執迷，以至於所有其他干擾都被淹沒。除此之外別無他法。
所以執迷究竟是什麼呢？你可以用許多不同的方法詮釋它，但是執迷的基本原理是，你答應自己要付出百分百的力氣做到某件事。當你允許自己徹徹底底追求你最狂野的夢想，執迷就出現了。
當你決心成為特定領域活動中最頂尖的頂尖人物，你將開始從事別人認為太難或太過分的事。你的職業生涯將充滿活力，而你也將全心全意專注在你從事的事情上。
聽起來可能很奇怪，當你決心在你的場域──無論是什麼領域──出人頭地，並開始付出大量時間和力氣做到這件事，你身邊的人的第一個反應很可能是建議你應該慢下來，調整自己的節奏。他們可能覺得你的執迷已經失控了，他們甚至可能認為你的執迷正快速成為你應該消滅的性格缺陷。如果發生這種情況，你應該要準備好捍衛自己的權利，讓自己成為例外。
| 接受大師訓練 |
如果你有導師，便可以避開他們犯過的錯。 更好的是，好的導師會加速你的學習。與其花數千小時精通某種能力，對的導師會引導你做事，你可以用更快速度達成世界級的表現。
找導師的唯一問題是充其量也只有一半一半的機會──有時結果很好，但也有很多時候導師不會帶來太大助益。從一代傳到下一代的家族企業，很能說明這種情況。超過 7 成的家族企業，在第二代失敗，儘管在他們家裡就有一流的導師。
真正讓導師發揮作用的「祕製醬汁」，在於他們必須在一旁引導你整個旅程，而不只是幫助你取得技術性技能。換句話說，導師成為你的朋友，真心希望你勝出時，導師才能發揮作用。如果你的導師只是被指派給你，敷衍了事，就不會有太大作用。非正式的指導遠比正式指派的指導有用。
| 集思廣益 |
史丹福大學資訊科學系三年級學生謝爾蓋被要求在春季迎新會時協助新生。他被指派帶一個名為賴瑞的新生參觀校園──這大概是集思廣益在真實世界中最好的例子。他們兩個一開始磁場就不對，發現彼此幾乎在所有事情上都意見分歧，因此覺得對方很討人厭。
然而，實際上他們倆因為意見相左而獲得很多樂趣，於是倆人成為了朋友。他們都喜歡電腦，但是共同點僅止於此。謝爾蓋喜歡參加派對，但賴瑞安靜而內向；謝爾蓋討厭靜靜坐著；賴瑞曾煞費苦心地用樂高積木建造了一台大小仿真的印表機。
賴瑞在整理畢業論文時，他和謝爾蓋實驗了幾種搜尋網路的新方法。賴瑞認為，比較有趣的是追蹤一個網站與其他網站的連接頻率，而不僅僅是搜索關鍵字而已。謝爾蓋表示同意，於是這兩個學生寫了一個名為「BackRub」的程式，用來計算返回原始網站的連結數量。
不久，看似不可能成為朋友的兩個人，用大量廉價的電腦塞滿賴瑞的宿舍房間，來運作BackRub程式，導致史丹福大學的網路幾乎癱瘓，因此他們被請出宿舍，搬到其他地方住。他們把電腦搬到朋友的車庫裡，在那裡他們抓緊機會繼續進行他們的計畫。
想當然爾，如今每天有超過10億人使用BackRub，不過它已經改名為「Google」了。 謝爾蓋．布林和賴瑞．佩吉在創立公司時很少達成任何協議。問題是，如果兩位創辦人對所有事情的看法都保持一致，那麼Google是否還會成為今天的模樣？很清楚的是，他們需要彼此的長處，並且在一起努力之下，建立了世界上最成功的公司之一。
| Obsession Is the Driving Force of Achievement |
If you look behind the scenes for any high achiever in any field, you'll find they don't approach what they're doing casually or accidentally. To set incredibly high goals for yourself and then achieve them, you have to be obsessed with what you're doing to the point it drowns out all the distractions. There is no other way to do it.
So what exactly is obsession? You can define it lots of different ways but the basic idea of obsession is you make a personal commitment to put 100 percent of your energy into achieving something. Obsession results when you give yourself permission to go all out on your wildest dreams.
When you commit to becoming the best of the best in your specific field of activity, you'll start doing the things which others consider to be too hard or too excessive. Your career will also be energized and you will be totally engrossed by what you're working on.
As strange as it may sound, whenever you make a commitment to excelling in your field – whatever it may be – and start following through by putting in massive time and effort to do just that, the first reaction of those around you will probably be to suggest you should slow down and pace yourself. They may feel like your obsession is getting out of hand. They may even suggest your obsession is fast becoming a character flaw you should expunge. If that happens, you should be willing and ready to defend your right to become exceptional if you can.
| The Importance of Curiosity |
If you get a mentor, you can often avoid making the same mistakes they made. Even better, a good mentor will accelerate your learning. Instead of spending thousands of hours mastering some competence, the right mentor will guide your practice so you get to world-class performance levels faster.
The only problem is having a mentor turns out to be a 50-50 proposition at best – sometimes it works great but there will also be lots of times where mentors don’t turn out to be much of a boost at all. This is well illustrated by family- owned businesses which get passed from one generation to the next. More than 70 percent of them fail in the second generation, despite having superb in-house mentors located right in the home.
The real "secret sauce" in getting mentors to work is they have to be closely involved in guiding your overall journey rather than in just helping you gain technical skills. In other words, having a mentor works when they become friends with a deep personal interest in seeing you excel. They don’t work so well when your mentor is just assigned to you and is only going through the motions. Informal mentoring is far more helpful than formal structured mentoring.
| Synergize |
Probably the best real-world example of synergy ever seen was when a 3rd year Stanford University computer science student named Sergey was asked to help new students at spring orientation. He was assigned to show a freshman named Larry around the campus. Sergey and Larry didn't hit it off right away, and found each other quite obnoxious because they disagreed on pretty much everything.
However, they actually had so much fun contradicting each other Sergey and Larry became friends. They both liked computers, but that was about it. Sergey liked to party, but Larry was quiet and reserved. Sergey hated to sit still; Larry had once painstaking built a life-sized printer out of LEGO bricks.
When Larry was putting together his dissertation, he and Sergey experimented with new ways to search the Internet. Larry thought it would be interesting to track how often a website was linked to other websites, rather than just search for keywords. Sergey agreed, and the two students wrote a piece of software they called "BackRub" since it counted the number of links back to the original website.
Soon the two unlikely friends were filling Larry's dorm room with so many cheap computers to run BackRub that Stanford's network nearly shut down, so they were invited to move somewhere else. They took their computers and moved them into a friend's garage, where they continued to work on their project at every chance.
Of course, today, more than a billion people use BackRub every day, although it's now called Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page rarely agreed on anything when they were starting the company. The question is whether Google would be where it is today if the two founders had seen eye to eye on everything. Clearly, they needed each other's strengths, and by working together they have managed to build one of the world's most successful companies.
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