Reflect, then,” he said, “that your ancestors set up those trophies, not that you may gaze at them in wonder, but that you may also imitate the virtues of the men who set them up.
There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
Great commanders look for decision points. For it is bursts of energy directed at decisive points that break things wide open. They.
Seneca put it best when he said, “Life is long if you know how to use it.” Sadly, most people don’t – they waste the life they’ve been given. Only when it is too late do they try to compensate for that waste by vainly hoping to put more time on the clock. Use today. Use every day. Make yourself satisfied with what you have been given.
Too many people think that great victories like Grant’s and Edison’s came from a flash of insight. That they cracked the problem with pure genius. In fact, it was the slow pressure, repeated from many different angles, the elimination of so many other more promising options, that slowly and surely churned the solution to the top of the pile. Their genius was unity of purpose, deafness to doubt, and the desire to stay at it.
So yes, hitting bottom is as brutal as it sounds. But the feeling after – it is one of the most powerful perspectives in the world.
The health of our spiritual ideals depends on what we do with our bodies in moments of truth.
In other words, through our perception of events, we are complicit in the creation – as well as the destruction – of every one of our obstacles. There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
Keep constant guard over your perceptions, for it is no small thing you are protecting, but your respect, trustworthiness and steadiness, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear, in a word your freedom. For what would you sell these things?” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 4.3.6b–8.
What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Nietzsche said.
Each fighter, to become great, he said, needs to have someone better that they can learn from, someone lesser who they can teach, and someone equal that they can challenge themselves against.
Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.
We can learn to perceive things differently, to cut through the illusions that others believe or fear.
It is a timeless fact of life that the up-and-coming must endure the abuses of the entrenched.
Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.
Bear and forbear.
Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness.
Because you will lose in life. It’s a fact. A doctor has to call time of death at some point. They just.
Act with fortitude and honor,” he wrote to a distraught friend in serious financial and legal trouble of the man’s own making. “If you cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication, do not plunge deeper. Have the courage to make a full stop.
It’s the opening credits montage. It’s a scene in a novel. It feels good – so much better than those feelings of doubt and fear and normalness – and so we stay stuck inside our heads instead of participating in the world around us.