June 2023
Are those things that keep you busy truly important in your life and career?
“How it feels to get everything you’ve ever wanted.”
“I can tell you: It feels like nothing.”
If someone admits they made a mistake, have the grace to let it go.
Holding it over them ensures they won’t be quick to admit they were wrong in the future.
Outcome over ego.
As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is evanescent. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp. URL
We seem to avoid silence at all costs, maybe because it reminds us of the emptiness at the core of modern life.
“To a disciple who was forever complaining about others, the Master said, ‘If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth.’” — Anthony de Mello
“It’s so simple to spend less than you earn, and invest shrewdly, and avoid toxic people and toxic activities, and try and keep learning all your life, and do a lot of deferred gratification,”
“If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. If you don’t, you’re going to need a lot of luck.”
– Munger
“The opposite of every truth is just as true! That’s like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it’s all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness. When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
“For every true statement there is an opposite one that is also true; that language and the confines of time lead people to adhere to one fixed belief that does not account for the fullness of the truth. Because nature works in a self-sustaining cycle, every entity carries in it the potential for its opposite and so the world must always be considered complete.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
We spend too much time doing things we don’t like, things that won’t matter ten years from now. We fill our leisure time with mindless social media consumption; we waste it arguing with strangers online.
We live as if our days are infinite, but they’re not. We let the things we hate fill our lives…For what?
To get out of this cycle, figure out what you can eliminate. Focus on what you genuinely desire.
Do not wait to do the things you love. Do it now, not later. Because our time is limited.
“Sometimes all you need for exceptional results is average effort repeated for an above-average amount of time.”
People get all their information from the first few search results, read the books that appear at the top of bestseller lists, and follow whatever topics are trending on social media.
The problem with such “streetlights” is that they reflect the behaviors, and cater to the desires, of the average human, and the average human isn’t very smart. If you want to avoid popular blindspots, avoid getting your info from popularity contests like top search results, “trending” algorithms, and bestseller lists.
If you want to improve the quality of the info that enters your head, end your addiction to the new. Instead of mindlessly scrolling through breaking news, status updates, and the latest gossip, seek out info that’s stood the test of time: classic literature, replicated studies, proven theorems, and fulfilled predictions. Millennia of humanity’s accumulated wisdom await you.