If you want to get better in the sport, you need to work on your specific weaknesses, not those of someone who is successful.

Mathew Fraser won first place at the 2016 and 2017 Reebok CrossFit Games, earning him the title of “Fittest Man on Earth.” He won the Rookie of the Year award at his first CrossFit Games in 2014 and placed second in 2014 and 2015. He’s been a CrossFit athlete since 2012, after retiring from a career in weightlifting during which he was an Olympic hopeful.

What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?

Without a doubt, I would say my dawn simulator [Philips Wake-Up Light]. It is an alarm clock that wakes you up with light instead of sound. Because of this change, you feel as if you are waking up on your own and aren’t groggy.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?

My biggest failure has become one of the things that I am most well known for: taking second place at the CrossFit games two years in a row. The first year, I was a rookie and had zero expectations, so placing second felt like a victory. The next year, the reigning champ had retired, and I rested on my laurels, figuring I was a shoo-in for the title. I took second again, and it was a devastating loss. Because of that failure, I worked harder than I ever had in my life the following year, and the results led to the largest margin of victory ever at the CrossFit games in 2016. I never want to change my 2015 season, because it was a lesson I will reflect on the rest of my life.

I have found that my absolute best is the best possible outcome. That is a “win.”

Katrín Tanja Davíðsdóttir is an Icelandic CrossFit athlete. She is the 2015 and 2016 CrossFit Games women’s champion, which christened her “Fittest Woman on Earth.” Katrín is the second woman to repeat as champion, following in the footsteps of her countrywoman, Anníe Þórisdóttir.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by John Wooden is one of my absolute favorites. My grandpa was a basketball player back in the day, and he gave me this book a couple years ago. Wooden’s approach to training resonates a lot with me and my coach, Ben Bergeron. Reading the book, I found myself constantly nodding in agreement. His philosophies don’t only apply in the gym or on the competition floor but to life in general. I always feel like sports are a microscopic view of life. The same principles and lessons apply, but they are more apparent in sports. My favorite part about this book, though, might be the foreword from one of Wooden’s former players, Bill Walsh. The way he talks about their relationship and what he learned from his coach is absolutely beautiful and still sits with me.

The other book is The Champion’s Mind: How Champions Think, Train, and Thrive by Jim Afremow. This was the first sports psychology book I ever picked up, and it was the exact right moment for me. It was the summer of 2014, right after I failed to qualify for the ’14 [CrossFit] Games. That summer, I could have easily fallen into a mindset of “I don’t belong, I am not good enough, I failed …” but the book gave me a better perspective. I wasn’t a failure. I had just failed at a certain event. Past tense. What could I do in this exact moment to get better? It got me focusing on giving my absolute best in any given situation without the pressure of constantly stacking myself up to others. The same time I started reading this book, I started working with my coach, Ben, and he really focuses on all of the same things. He would talk to me before training, after workouts, sometimes during, and all of it started coming together. The new mindset allowed me to truly fall in love with the process.

Think for yourself. Everyone has a unique picture of how things work and function, and yours is as valuable as anyone’s.

Kelly Slater has been called “the world’s best and best-known surfer” by Businessweek. He has been crowned World Surf League champion a record 11 times, including five consecutive titles from 1994 to 1998. He is the youngest (at age 20) and the oldest (at age 39) to win the title. Kelly has also won 54 World Championship Tour victories. His company, the Kelly Slater Wave Company, produces the longest man-made, high-performance open-barrel waves for surf training.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity by Daniel Reid. It’s a wealth of knowledge, almost like a personal health bible, about real-life things that you can put into practice to improve your physical, mental, and emotional health. The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran was one of the first “spiritual” books I read as a teenager, which gave me plenty of seeds for thought from short, but to-the-point, topics. Some books can overwhelm with details, which you can easily forget. The Prophet made me think about my point of view, and it filters a lot of subjects that I maybe didn’t previously see the whole picture around.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?

I narrowly lost a world title in surfing in 2003 after basically having locked it in the month prior. The loss felt horrible at the time, but it drove me to clear up a lot of things in my head and life that were holding me back … around love and truth and family and work, which ultimately helped me to win five more world titles.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal. —Henry Ford

Temple Grandin is an author and speaker on both autism and animal behavior. She is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University and also has a successful career consulting on animal welfare and livestock-handling equipment design. She has been featured on the BBC special The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow, and her 2010 TED Talk, “The World Needs All Kinds of Minds,” now has nearly five million views. Articles about her have appeared in Time magazine, The New York Times, Discover magazine, Forbes, and USA Today. HBO made an Emmy Award-winning movie about her life starring Claire Danes, and she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?

When I first started my career designing facilities for handling livestock, I mistakenly believed that there was an engineering fix for every problem. With the right design and engineering, all problems associated with moving animals could be solved. A big failure of one of my projects taught me that the root causes of problems have to be addressed. In 1980, I was hired to design a conveyor system that would move hogs to the third floor of an old meatpacking plant in Cincinnati. The hogs were having difficulty walking up the long ramps. With much enthusiasm, I took this job and designed a conveyorized chute. It was a total failure. The pigs sat down and flipped over backward. Further observations indicated that most of the hogs that had difficulty climbing the ramp came from a single farm. Fixing the problems at this farm would have been much easier and cheaper than the big conveyor mess I had created. A change in pig genetics would have solved most of the problems.

Every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece.

Dr. Michael Gervais is a high-performance psychologist who has worked directly with Olympic gold medalists, world-record setters, and the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks, where he helped integrate meditation and mindfulness techniques. He is also the co-founder of Compete to Create (alongside Coach Pete Carroll), whose mission is to help people become the best they can be. A published author in peer-reviewed journals and recognized speaker on optimal human performance, Michael has been featured by media worldwide and is the host of the Finding Mastery podcast, where he interviews world-class performers and deconstructs paths to mastery.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. He introduces the insights that he learned from surviving imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. He outlines methods to discover deep meaning and purpose in life.

The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. His 81 Zen teachings are the foundation for the religion of Taoism, aimed at understanding “the way of virtues.” Lao Tzu’s depth of teachings are complicated to decode and provide foundations for wisdom.

Mind Gym by Gary Mack is a book that strips down the esoteric nature of applied sport psychology. Gary introduces a variety of mindset training principles and makes them extremely easy to understand and practice.

Stop doing whatever else I am doing because it isn’t actually work, and go and write something.

Neil Gaiman is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living postmodern writers. He is a prolific creator of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. His fiction has received the Newbery, Carnegie, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Eisner awards. I first became fascinated by his imagination with the Sandman graphic novels in the ’90s, followed by Neverwhere and American Gods. His other bestsellers include The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The Graveyard Book (my favorite audiobook of all time), Coraline, and others. Neil’s commencement speech, “Make Good Art,” is mandatory listening for anyone who hopes to be creatively successful over the long haul.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? What questions do you ask yourself?

• Have I had enough sleep?
• Have I eaten?
• Would it be a good idea to go for a short walk?

And once those have been answered, or fixed, if there’s an actual situation that’s overwhelming:

• Is there anything I can do to fix this?
• Is there anyone who actually has information or advice about this I can call and talk to?

It’s often the case that people want to help you or work with you. But they can’t if you insist on holding on the tight control.

Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it into a global platform for disseminating ideas worth spreading. Chris was born in rural Pakistan, and grew up in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and England. He graduated from Oxford University with a degree in philosophy and politics, and then entered journalism. In 1985, he formed a startup to launch a computer magazine. Its success led to more launches, and his company Future Publishing grew rapidly under the slogan “media with passion.” Chris expanded to the United States in 1994, where he built Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine, and creator of the popular games website IGN. The combined companies eventually spawned more than 100 monthly magazines, employing 2,000 people. In 2001, Chris’s nonprofit foundation, the Sapling Foundation, acquired the TED Conference, and Chris left his businesses to focus on growing TED. Under his stewardship, TED has broadened its scope to include not only technology, entertainment, and design but also science, politics, business, the arts, and global issues. In 2006, TED began free distribution of its talks on the web and more than 2,500 talks are now available.

What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?

David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. It’s a remarkable argument for the power of knowledge—as not just a human capability but as a force that shapes the universe.