It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.
The authority you establish must emerge naturally from your character, from the particular strengths you possess.
We are often raised as dependents then given over to teachers. It's experience and exploration that can transform us and lead to mastery.
I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I'm older - I'm in my early 50s - so you'll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.
The things that transfixed you as a child, that you found most exciting was not a passing fancy, but a message about what you're supposed to do.
Transforming yourself into a deep listener will not only prove more amusing as you open your mind to their mind, but you will gain the most invaluable lessons about human psychology.
Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you've ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It's a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.
If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.
Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.
With colleagues in the work environment, we fail to see the source of their envy or the reason for their manipulations; our attempts at influencing them are based on the assumptions that they want the same things as ourselves.
As social animals we humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive.
Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don't. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around.
Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.
Plumbers can be masters, the guy who did my patio is a master, some people are masters at raising really great children.
A person who is truly authentic doesn't need to play a role in life, we think, but can simply be him - or herself.
Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.
In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we're planning what we'll say next, some exciting story of our own.
I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what's going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.