We’ve all been told that you have to start young, specialize quickly and get in 10,000 hours of practice or you will not succeed. Yo Yo Ma starting to play the cello at age 4. Tiger Woods showed interest in golf at 6 months old and won the Masters for the first time at age 21. Prodigies, however, are the outliers of those who achieve success, not the rule, says David Epstein, author of the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”

I have an inner critic who is incessantly telling me I’m not good enough, I’m not trying hard enough, or that I’m not meeting its expectations. Sound familiar? In “The Inner Game of Tennis,” Timothy Gallwey describes ways of calming that inner critic and what doing this can do for your tennis game and, ultimately, your life.

Why do we fixate on a few negative or critical comments, when we hear hundreds of positive ones? It seems one bad event, or even a not-so-great event, can discolor our day. Yet all of the positive and pleasant things go unnoticed or can’t be recalled, according to John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, authors of “The Power of Bad.”