February 2022
“The nature of illusion is that it’s designed to make you feel good. About yourself, about your country, about where you’re going – in that sense it functions like a drug. Those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say, but for puncturing those feelings.”
— Chris Hedges
“For people who achieve great things, they often maintain a very ordinary mentality. In other words, if you keep an ordinary mind, accept yourself as you are, and do well for yourself, you can often do things well. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things.”
“There are three things you cannot buy. Fitness: You have to keep fit, whether you’re rich or not. Diet: You cannot pay someone to be on a diet for you. I think that diet is the biggest sacrifice in my life. Then, looking after your soul. No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself. This is something you can do through culture and philosophy.”
— Brunello Cucinelli
There is somebody out there less talented than you
Who is just willing to be a bit crazier than you.
Who is willing to just work a little harder than you.
Who is willing to get just a little more uncomfortable than you.
Who is willing to ask for what they want.
Who is willing to put themselves out there and take a risk.
One day you will meet this person.
And they will beat you.
Stop pretending to be too cool for school.
Stop worrying about what other people will think about you.
Stop just doing the bare minimum because you have the talent to do so.
Now is the time to get a little uncomfortable.
Now is the time to look a little foolish.
Now is the time to put in just that little extra.
Make that post.
Record that video.
Make that call.
Ask the question.
One of my favorite quotes for a long time has been this.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
It’s ok to be unreasonable sometimes.
Progress depends on it.
In fact YOUR progress depends on it.
A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
“The most important step in becoming successful in anything is to first become interested in it.”
— Sir William Osler
The things people love about you aren’t necessarily the things you want to be loved for. They decide they like you for reasons completely outside your control, of which you’re often not even conscious: it’s certainly not because of the big act you put on, all the charm and anecdotes you’ve calculated for effect. (And if your act does fool someone, it only makes you feel like a successful fraud, and harbor some secret contempt for them — the contempt of a con artist for his mark — plus now you’re condemned to keep up that act forever, lest he/she Realize.) … At some point you have to accept that other people’s perceptions of you are as valid as (and probably a lot more objective than) your own.
“Everything interacts and is dependent on other things. We must think more thoroughly about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it.”
To maximize your life enjoyment, you should die with no money left over. Spend your money while you can get the most experiences from it, not when you are old. Give away what you are going to give away (to kids or charity) while you can enjoy and direct it, and when it makes the most difference to the receiver.’
–Die with Zero
Whose definition of success are you chasing?
If your idea of success/victory is having/getting something that your friends/neighbours don’t have, its mostly a sickness.
Some people face more losses and disappointments than others, due to luck, circumstances, judgment, or even a tendency to take a lot of risks. But no matter who you are, failure will find you. The question is not whether you will fail but how you will use your failures.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
— Mary Oliver
The mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.
You are only as sick as your secrets.
“There is and can be no ultimate solution for us to discover, but instead a permanent need for balancing contradictory claims, for careful trade-offs between conflicting values, toleration of difference, consideration of the specific factors at play when a choice is needed, not reliance on an abstract blueprint claimed to be applicable everywhere, always, to all people.”
“We like to think we have conscious control over our behavior, but the more we learn, the more we know that that’s not entirely true. We’re less in control than we’d like.”
Freedom comes from the ability to let go – to need less. Your inner strength is directly proportional to what you can live without.
There is nobody in the world more powerful than the person who wants nothing. What power can one possibly have over them?
Privilege is invisible to all those who have it.
Not many people have consistent discipline when times are good. Even fewer in times of stress.
Anyone can do something once. Not everyone can do it consistently. Eating healthy for a meal is common. Eating healthy all week is not. Working out occasionally is common. Working out a few times a week is not. Going to bed on time is easy. Doing it for a week is not.
Positioning yourself for future success is simple but not easy. The hardest part is the discipline required to do otherwise ordinary things for an extraordinarily long period of time, even when the results are barely noticeable.
When people say you need to love the process, this is what they mean.
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Forget time management – we have enough time. The resource that is truly limited is your attention.
Your attention is gold – stop wasting it by just being busy.
we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.
“My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” — Charles Darwin
When people seem uncommonly disciplined, look for a powerful ritual hiding in plain sight. It’s not that they have more discipline than you or I, but they were able to turn that discipline into consistency with a ritual. Short-term results come from intensity but long-term results come from consistency. Turning intensity into consistency unlocks a powerful asymmetry.
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
“Why?
“Because you’re thinking about it!”
The Focusing Illusion is responsible for a lot of our unhappiness. It is the key to understanding why you pay more attention to your thoughts about how to live than living itself.
self-care is about giving the world the best of you instead of what’s left of you.
If you survey enough people all advices cancel to zero.