I took William Zinsser’s advice that you write to yourself and you hope that there are people out there who are like you.
Let probability and sample size do the heavy lifting.
What do markets do? They consolidate, they breakout, they extend, they overextend, they back and fill, they consolidate, and repeat the process. That’s all you need to know about the markets.
To change the world you’ll need a pen.
Good writers show rather than tell. Stories are told in action. Life stories are no different.
And when you find love, or when you are mature enough to understand it, the feeling you get is gratitude.
In exchange for our humility and willingness to accept the charity of God, we are given a kingdom. And a beggar’s kingdom is better than a proud man’s delusion.
Instead of asking what it feels like to follow God or be used by God, we should be asking who God is, and whether we really know Him. Everything else will take care of itself.
The people I used to be surrounded by are getting along without me. Somehow, that really bugs me.
If you want to bond with your friends, do something very hard with them, something that you won’t be able to do alone.
It is worthy of note that the Chinese and Japanese characters for money and gold are the same.
We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace whimsy, that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.
I stay away from churches in which I feel like I have to pretend I’m a better person than I am. That sort of thing moves my faith backwards.
For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.
People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.
The times in my life when I have been most happy haven’t been the times when I have had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I’ve been in love or in community or right with people.
There’s no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.
Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.
We don’t know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.