June 2022

Say no (a lot).

Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Find one thing that makes you wiser every day.

What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee.

Don’t judge other people.

Study the lives of the greats.

Forgive, forgive, forgive.

Make a little progress each day.

Journal.

Prepare for life’s inevitable setbacks.

Look for the poetry in ordinary things.

To do wrong to one, is to do wrong to yourself.

Always choose “alive time.”

Associate only with people that make you better.

If someone offends you, realize you are complicit in taking offense.

Fate behaves as she pleases…do not forget this.

Possessions are yours only in trust.

Don’t make your problems worse by bemoaning them.

Accept success without arrogance, handle failure with indifference.

Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom. (Always).

Focus is, in many ways, the opposite of busyness. While busyness manifests itself as anxiety, a hectic rush between errands, mess and chaos, focus is calm, clear and quiet.

Focus is an outward manifestation of an attentional state that says, “What I’m doing now is what is important, everything else will have to wait.” Busyness is the mindset that flits between tasks and ideas, both things that are being worked on in the moment and worries about things that cannot be dealt with right now.

The key to overcoming busyness is to start saying no. Not to everything, mind you, but to the things that aren’t important. This isn’t easy—social pressures and cultural expectations may demand you say yes to a lot of things. However, avoiding the trap of busyness requires it.

“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.” ​— Kahlil Gibran

“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.”

• Amelia Earhart

The only way to become good at something is to practice the ordinary basics for an uncommon length of time. Most people get bored. They want excitement. They want something to talk about and no one talks about the boring basics.

In a world of social media, we glorify the results and not the process. We see the kick that knocked someone out but not the years of effort that went into perfecting it. We see the results, not the hard work.

The difference between good and great results is often found in consistently doing the boring things you know you should do exactly when you feel like doing them the least.

Unfortunately, most of us, most of the time, don’t have a bias toward action. We don’t start a conversation with the cute stranger we’ve been admiring. We don’t ask for the raise we feel we’ve earned. We don’t move to the city we’ve been dreaming of since childhood. And we don’t do these things because not doing them is easier than acting. That’s not to say the outcome will be better. It will almost always be worse. But the comfort of the discontented status quo is much less scary than the potential of the unknown.

“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu

The smallness of your mind make you think you are big.

“Living your life the way you want is not selfish. Forcing other people to live their lives the way you want is selfish.”

“If you react negatively to a situation, now you have two problems.”

“I remember my grandfather telling me how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape the aloneness.” ​— Jim Harrison