Three fears lead directly to underachievement: fear of failure, fear of success, and fear of making a mistake. Any of these can paralyze initiative. When all three are working, initiative grinds to a halt. How many of these fears plague you?

Talking about goals won't get you there any more than going to church will get you to heaven. If you do not passionately believe in where you are going, don't give goal-setting a bad name by using the word goal to describe listless me-too-ism... To really make progress toward your goals you have to stop setting goals because everybody else is.

Businesses must adapt in order to survive. It is a law. Businesses, however, still too often invest resources in technology, systems and hardware related to change efforts, without investing similarly in managing the associated human factors.

In this interview, he talks about many factors that "tell us what we can do if we're this gender, or this color or whatever," and that these forces "endure into our adulthood... that move us toward accepting what is going on around us, and what others do, as the way it ought to be. The term 'over-achiever' means you are 'out of line.'"