Van Gogh didn’t paint for money either. He only sold two paintings in his whole lifetime. Robert:.
If they come from another culture, it is all the more important to understand this culture from within their experience.
What separates Masters from others is often something surprisingly simple. Whenever we learn a skill, we frequently reach a point of frustration – what we are learning seems beyond our capabilities. Giving in to these feelings, we unconsciously quit on ourselves before we actually give up.
Read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit.
Do not be afraid to exaggerate the role of willpower. It is an exaggeration with a purpose. It leads to a positive self-fulfilling dynamic, and that is all you care about. See this shaping of your attitude as your most important creation in life, and never leave it to chance.
What I fear is not the enemy’s strategy but our own mistakes.
Great strategists do not act according to preconceived ideas; they respond to the moment, like children. Their minds are always moving, and they are always excited and curious. They quickly forget the past – the present is much too interesting.
As I live I must die daily My old nature I must kill.
Remember: You have only so much energy and so much time. Every moment wasted on the affairs of others subtracts from your strength. You may be afraid that people will condemn you as heartless, but in the end, maintaining your independence and self-reliance will gain you more respect and place you in a position of power from which you can choose to help others on your own initiative.
Whistleblowers get fired and shot or crack up. You have to decide what you want to do. Do you want a career, or do you want to be an advocate? And where I’ve been an advocate, I do it not in my backyard. If I’m going to fight, I don’t do it in the backyard. In other words, I can get more done by not doing it in the backyard. I can train my students in the right way to do things.
Being more careful is not what we need; that is just a screen for our fear of conflict and of making a mistake. What we need is double the resolve – an intensification of confidence. That will serve as a counterbalance.
Sometimes this fear of speculation masquerades as skepticism. We see this in people who delight in shooting down any theory or explanation before it gets anywhere. They are trying to pass off skepticism as a sign of high intelligence, but in fact they are taking the easy route – it is quite simple to find arguments against any idea and knock it down from the sidelines.
Power is essentially amoral and one of the most important skills to acquire is the ability to see circumstances rather than good or evil.
Most people believe that they are in fact aware of the future, that they are planning and thinking ahead. They are usually deluded: What they are really doing is succumbing to their desires, to what they want the future to be. Their plans are vague, based on their imaginations rather than their reality. They may believe they are thinking all the way to the end, but they are really only focusing on the happy ending, and deluding themselves by the strength of their desire.
If you feel lost and confused, if you lose your sense of direction, if you cannot tell the difference between friend and foe, you have only yourself to blame.
It is the height of stupidity to believe that in the course of your short life, your few decades of consciousness, you can somehow rewire the configurations of your brain through technology and wishful thinking, overcoming the effect of six million years of development. To go against the grain might bring temporary distraction, but time will mercilessly expose your weakness and impatience.
Although it was pure luck that the book Improvement of the Mind fell into his hands, it took someone with such focus to recognize immediately its worth and exploit.
If you lose contact with this inner calling, you can have some success in life, but eventually your lack of true desire catches up with you. Your work becomes mechanical. You come to live for leisure and immediate pleasures. In this way you become increasingly passive, and never move past the first phase. You may grow frustrated and depressed, never realizing that the source of it is your alienation from your own creative potential.
We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.
If you have the kind of intelligence and instinct that will point you in the right direction, playing the rebel will not be dangerous. But if you are mediocre... you are better off learning from your predecessor’s knowledge and experience, which are based on something real.