And from what we know, he truly saw each and every one of these obstacles as an opportunity to practice some virtue: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity. The power he held never seemed to go to his head – neither did the stress or burden. He rarely rose to excess or anger, and never to hatred or bitterness.
There was no grand narrative. You should remember – you were there when it happened.
Sometimes when we are personally stuck with some intractable or impossible problem, one of the best ways to create opportunities or new avenues for movement is to think: If I can’t solve this for myself, how can I at least make this better for other people?
All that you behold, that which comprises both god and man, is one – we are the parts of one great body. – SENECA.
What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.
It’s worth saying: just because you are quiet doesn’t mean that you are without pride. Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous.
The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.
Persistence is an action. Perseverance is a matter of will. One is energy. The other, endurance.
To be or to do?
We are still striving, and it is the strivers who should be our peers – not the proud and the accomplished. Without this understanding, pride takes our self-conception and puts it at odds with the reality of our station, which is that we still have so far to go, that there is still so much to be done.
Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It’s a release valve. With enough exposure, you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary, even innate, fears that are bred mostly from unfamiliarity.
To whatever we face, our job is to respond with: hard work honesty helping others as best we can.
Blank spaces, begging to be filled in with thoughts, with photos, with stories. With what we’re going to do, with what things should or could be like, what we hope will happen. Technology, asking you, prodding you, soliciting talk.
The next step after we discard our expectations and accept what happens to us, after understanding that certain things – particularly bad things – are outside our control, is this: loving whatever happens to us and facing it with unfailing cheerfulness. It is the act of turning what we must do into what we get to do.
When, as the football coach Bill Walsh explained, “self-confidence becomes arrogance, assertiveness becomes obstinacy, and self-assurance becomes reckless abandon.” This is the ego, as the writer Cyril Connolly warned, that “sucks us down like the law of gravity.
This is the skill that must be cultivated – freedom from disturbance and perturbation – so you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them.
While you’re sleeping, traveling, attending meetings, or messing around online, the same thing is happening to you. You’re going soft. You’re not aggressive enough. You’re not pressing ahead.
Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible.
What do these figures have that we lack? What are we missing? It’s simple: a method and a framework for understanding, appreciating, and acting upon the obstacles life throws at us.
You always planned to do something. Write a screenplay. Travel. Start a business. Approach a possible mentor. Launch a movement. Well, now something has happened – some disruptive event like a failure or an accident or a tragedy. Use it.