The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.
The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.
Life is growth. You grow or you die.
I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.
When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly.
You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break. I.
Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete.
How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?
Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart. In.
I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.
Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks – marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling – seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.
Like it or not, life is a game.
But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu.
It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.
There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought. Signs.
He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to-equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.
The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.
I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.
History is one long processional of crazy ideas.