The Archer favorite quote
Teaching it isn’t hard. I could do that in less than an hour, while we’re walking back to the village. The difficult thing is to practice it every day, until you achieve the necessary precision. – The Archer – Page 11
Lessons learned from The Archer
1. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
They are people who are not afraid of making mistakes and who do, therefore, make mistakes, which is why their work often goes unrecognized. Yet they are just the kind of people who transform the world… The Archer – Page 18
So many people live in fear of making a mistake and looking dumb to people. In my experiences, the people who overcome this fear and are ok making mistakes are the ones that eventually make a difference. Paulo Coelho in this fantastic book brings out the idea that making mistakes isn’t bad even though we have been trained for so long to make sure we don’t fail.
Our schools train us to get 100% and if you get 90% you are bad or at minimum worse than the person that got 100%. We are constantly trained to believe that making a mistake is the end of the world and yet we all make mistakes. The person that can overcome this training and retrain their mind to understand that a mistake is not a bad thing but another step in the journey will change the world.
2. Inaction is just as important as action.
It requires periods of inaction-a bow that is always armed and braced loses its strength. The Archer – Page 31
I have found it is hard for people to be inactive and rest. So many driven people can’t just sit and relax. They have to be doing something. However, rest and recover are just as important as doing.
I have a friend that can’t stand silence. As soon as silence happens in a conversation he has to say something and usually it is something random and ridiculous because the idea of silence scares him.
If we want to be successful and valuable we have to learn the art of recover and inaction. Silence is just as important as talking, as they say in jazz knowing when not to play is just as important as knowing when to play.
3. Most people need to stop learning and start doing.
Teaching it isn’t hard. I could do that in less than an hour, while we’re walking back to the village. The difficult thing is to practice it every day, until you achieve the necessary precision. – The Archer – Page 11
Most people already know how they just don’t do. I have found that we think we have mastered something simply because we gain a little knowledge and yet mastery takes so much practice. We have become a people with a ton of knowledge but now depth because we don’t practice.
If we would just start practicing more and stop trying to gain more knowledge we would become better people. We are a mile wide and an inch deep. We all know how to be millionaires, we know how to be healthy, but we don’t have the discipline to do it.