When successful people from different fields offer the same advice, I listen. Often they have different vocabulary around an idea, but when you break it down you realize they’re talking about the same thing.
Below is an example of Charlie Munger, Carol Dweck, and Susan Cain, offering the same core advice: Become a Learning Machine.
If you want to go to bed smarter than you woke up, you need to learn something new each day. It doesn’t matter how smart you are today; what matters it that you learn something new and useful. If you can simply repeat that day after day, you will find that you outperform others.
It can be hard to grasp this concept because the differences at first are small. Only as the days turn into weeks, the weeks into months, the months into years, and the years into decades will you look back and wonder how it happened.
Charlie Munger:
I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
Carol Dweck says:
You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.
And this tidbit from Susan Cain, also fits:
…identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly.