“Crossing the Rubicon: Wisdom Trails with the Old Monk” by Krishna Kumar Marayil is a thought-provoking book that lingers in the mind, urging deep reflection on the path to a virtuous life. Letting go of behaviors that once brought success can be challenging, yet this book compellingly argues for embracing authenticity. Through engaging anecdotes, it highlights why shedding outdated patterns is essential for true growth. Interestingly, this theme resonates with several books I have read recently, including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, The Culture Code, Gita for the CEO, Be Water, My Friend, and Hidden Potential.

My key takeaways from the book are:

• Pick our battles: Some races are best to forsake. Life is not about relentless chasing; success comes from setting our own pace
• Wanting to stay in control is not the answer to avoiding failure: Worry begins when we try to live in a future that has yet to arrive. Trusting the path we are on allows us to find beauty in each step and truly live in the present, rather than postponing fulfilment to an uncertain future.
• Discard masks and stay true to ourselves: The temptation to adopt a false persona distances us from our true nature. Avoid being overly accommodating or easily provoked. Authenticity fosters composure, freedom, and ultimately leads to meaningful success.
• Create an alter ego: Embody a superhero mindset to tackle seemingly insurmountable challenges and pursue our dreams. An alter ego provides the freedom to explore different facets of our personality, navigate difficulties, and unlock hidden potential.
• Silence is a great source of strength in conversations: When someone falls silent, it might be their path to self-discovery through self-reflection. Directing silence inward enhances self-awareness and helps find answers to problems.
• Bring our inner devil to the surface: Confronting fears and questioning self-doubt leads to powerful self-reflection. Addressing our inner critic allows us to break free from limitations, challenge the status quo, and pursue our dreams.
• Embrace the virtuous life: Act from a place of clarity and wisdom rather than being driven by desires. Ambition can be a great motivator, but is rooted in desire. Looking for a sense of recognition outside ourselves leads to restlessness. Shifting focus from personal gain to what benefits others brings clarity, peace, and fulfilment.

Crossing the Rubicon is a compelling guide to self-discovery and transformation. It challenges us to shed past habits, embrace authenticity, and find fulfilment in the present. Through engaging insights and practical wisdom, the book inspires a shift from mere ambition to a purpose-driven, virtuous life.

I discovered Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant through a leadership program’s recommended reading list for 2024. Having admired Grant’s insights in Give and Take and Think Again, my respect for him deepened with this latest book.

Grant builds on a powerful premise: potential isn’t defined by where we start but by how far we are willing to go. This resonates deeply with me – I’ve seen friends achieve extraordinary success over the years, surpassing what once seemed unimaginable.

Skills of Character: Getting Better at Getting Better

The starting point to unlock hidden potential is character. The stereotype is to think of character as a set of principles that people acquired and enacted through sheer force of will. We have the opportunity to view character less as a matter of will and more as a set of skills. It is the learned capacity to live by our principles.

Character is often confused with personality. Personality is our predisposition – basic instincts for how we feel, think and act. Character is our capacity to prioritise our values over instincts. If personality is how we respond on a typical day, character is how we show up on a hard day.

1. Creatures of Discomfort: Embracing the unbearable awkwardness of learning. Summoning the courage to face discomfort is a character skill – an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon our tried-and-true methods, to put ourself in the ring before we feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to seek growth is to embrace, seek and amplify discomfort.
2. Human Sponges: Building the Capacity to Absorb and Adapt. Growth is less about how hard we work and more about how well we learn. Absorptive capacity is the ability to recognise, value, assimilate, and apply new information. It depends on two key habits – first is being proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills and perspectives (rather than being reactive), and second is focusing on information that fuels our growth (rather than feeding our ego).
3. The Imperfectionists: Finding the Sweet Spot between Flawed and Flawless. Perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. First, they obsess about details that don’t matter. They are so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Second, they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Third, they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realise that the purpose of reviewing their mistakes isn’t to shame their past self. It’s to educate their future self. They key is to shift our attention from impossible  ideas to achievable standards – and then adjust those standards over time.

Structures for Motivation: Scaffolding to Overcome Obstacles

1. Transforming the Daily Grind: Infusing Passion into Practice. Whereas burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when we are overloaded, bore out is the emotional deadening we feel when we are under-stimulated. Deliberate play and timely breaks are some of the ways to bring joy to our daily work.
2. Getting Unstuck: The Roundabout Path to Forward Progress. Skills don’t grow at a steady pace. Improving is like driving up a mountain. As we climb higher and higher, the road gets steeper and steeper, and our gains are smaller and smaller. When we run out of momentum, we start to stall. To move forward, we may have to head back down the mountain. Once we have retreated far enough, we can find another way – a path that will allow us to build the momentum to reach the peak.
3. Defying Gravity: The Art of Flying by Our Bootstraps. When we are facing a daunting task, we need both competence and confidence. One way to build competence to teach what we want to learn. We remember it better when we recall it and we understand better after we explain it. We can build confidence by coaching – that is offering encouragement to others that we need for ourselves.

Systems of Opportunity: Opening Doors and Windows

1. Every Child Gets Ahead: Designing Schools to Bring Out the Best in Students. Changing the school culture from winner take all to opportunity for all can create an education system that helps all students reach their potential.
2. Mining for Gold: Unearthing Collective Intelligence in Teams. Collective intelligence is a group’s capacity to solve problems together. It depends less on people’s cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. Collective intelligence raises as team members recognise one another’s strengths, develop strategies for leveraging them, and motivate one another to align their efforts in pursuit of a shared purpose. Unleashing hidden potential is about more than having the best pieces – it’s about having the best glue. Meetings are hijacked by people who talk and some of the best ideas may never be heard. To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we are better off shifting to brain-writing where everyone write down their ideas before they are taken up for discussion. Instead of a hierarchical organizational structure that is based on a ladder system, building a lattice system where employees have access to multiple leaders can unlock hidden ideas among introverts.
3. Diamonds in the Rough: Discovering Uncut Gems in Job Interviews and College Admissions. Instead of looking at past experience or past performance, we should find out what they have learned and how well they can learn.

Hidden Potential challenges the notion that talent is innate, emphasizing instead the power of character, motivation, and opportunity in unlocking growth. Adam Grant explores how embracing discomfort, fostering adaptability, and rethinking perfection can accelerate personal development. He also highlights structural changes—both in organizations and education—that can help individuals and teams achieve more than they ever imagined. The book is a compelling guide to transforming potential into performance.

My coach referred me to a book on Bruce Lee’s philosophy written by his daughter Shannon Lee and titled after his famous quote “Be Water, My Friend”. I have often resolved to be fluid and adapt to situations to succeed amid adversity, this book provided me with science and philosophy that leads to benefits of fluidity.

The Water Way: Embrace the characteristics of water – being formless, shapeless and taking the shape of the container it is placed in. Always look for paths to flow around obstacles rather than being stuck in resistance. The basic principles of water that can guide our way:

• No limitation: be unstoppable
• Be aware: be fully present and accountable in the face of challenging scenarios and people
• Be pliable: be flexible to adapt to situations
• Have appropriate tension: on-guard position that is both relaxed yet active
• Be purposeful
• Be whole

The Empty Cup: The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness. Learning will not happen when we approach a problem thinking we already know the root cause. Adopt choiceless awareness – approach all that is happening around us without judging it, without making a choice or creating a story about it while maintaining full awareness of it. The notion of emptying our cup is the idea of letting go of the past and the future in favour of the present.

The Eternal Student: When we embrace the water way and empty our cup all the time, we make new discoveries every day and will be in a constant state of learning.

The Opponent: To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Life is not a competition, it is a co-creation. There are no winners and losers, overcoming the six diseases below will help us move from a sense of striving to the simple, active state of living:

• The desire for victory
• The desire to resort to technical cunning
• The desire to display all that has been learned
• The desire to awe the enemy
• The desire to play the passive role
• The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by

The Obstacle: We will always encounter obstacles in pursuit of our dreams. We need to be aware of the negative emotions that blunt our resolve to succeed – worry makes a problem out of the problem, pessimism makes a problem harder by implying it is impossible to solve, fear stops us from attacking the problem as we are afraid of failing, doubt gives an excuse not to solve the problem. The way to walk on when faced with obstacles is to gather our will power and stay focused on our dream.

The Rainstorm: No matter what, you must let your inner light guide you out of the darkness. There will be times we will be hit hard by adversity, we must keep faith and stay focused on our purpose.

The Living Void: The four stages of cultivation that can lead us to the state of nirvana embracing the water way:

• Stage 1 – Partiality: This is where most of us start and this is unconscious behaviour. There is inexperience and wildness in what we do, without refined technique and skill. We may get things done but without awareness.
• Stage 2 – Fluidity: We reach this stage when we have acknowledged that we have a lot to learn and begin work on ourselves. It is a stage of budding conscious awareness. We are open, engaged in learning and bettering ourselves. We learn how to accept the ever-changing nature of life and to work with rather than against it.
• Stage 3 – Emptiness: In this stage of maturity, we are unlimited. We stand at the centre point of possibility with the ability to move in any direction. This is no longer tactical readiness but rather total awareness with instantaneous expression. At this stage, some magical things start to happen:
  • Our pace quickens
  • We feel powerful
  • We feel safe
• Stage 4 – Jeet Kune Do: Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.

Be Water, My Friend is more than just a book about Bruce Lee’s philosophy—it is a guide to living with adaptability, resilience, and purpose. By embracing the fluid nature of water, emptying our cup to stay open to learning, and overcoming obstacles with unwavering focus, we cultivate a mindset that enables growth and transformation. Life isn’t about rigid control but about flowing with challenges and opportunities alike. The ultimate goal is to reach a state of mastery where we move with effortless awareness—using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.