There is another helpful consideration about death from the Stoics. If death is truly the end, then what is there exactly to fear? For everything from your fears to your pain receptors to your worries and your remaining wishes, they will perish with you. As frightening as death might seem, remember: it contains within it the end of fear.
Rockefeller had sangfroid: unflappable coolness under pressure. He could keep his head while he was losing his shirt. Better yet, he kept his head while everyone else lost theirs.
In fact, the best way to get what we want might be to reexamine those desires in the first place.
The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor once said. This is how we fight the ego, by really knowing ourselves.
One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible.” Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, pg 21.
Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power.
We wrongly assume that moving forward is the only way to progress, the only way we can win. Sometimes, staying put, going sideways, or moving backward is actually the best way to eliminate what blocks or impedes your path.
When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it’s like a piece of our soul is gone.
This too shall pass” was Lincoln’s favorite saying, one he once said was applicable in any and every situation one could encounter. To.
Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm.
The unrestricted person, who has in hand what they will in all events, is free. But anyone who can be restricted, coerced, or pushed into something against what they will is a slave.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 4.1.128b–129a.
Is it ten thousand hours or twenty thousand hours to mastery? The answer is that it doesn’t matter. There is no end zone. To think of a number is to live in a conditional future. We’re simply talking about a lot of hours – that to get where we want to go isn’t about brilliance, but continual effort. It means it’s all within reach – for all of us, provided we have the constitution and humbleness to be patient and the fortitude to put in the work.
Let’s be clear: competitiveness is an important force in life. It’s what drives the market and is behind some of mankind’s most impressive accomplishments. On an individual level, however, it’s absolutely critical that you know who you’re competing with and why, that you have a clear sense of the space you’re in.
This is why Musashi and most martial arts practitioners focus on mental training as much as on physical training. Both are equally important – and require equally vigorous exercise and practice.
Just as we commonly hear people say the doctor prescribed someone particular riding exercises, or ice baths, or walking without shoes, we should in the same way say that nature prescribed someone to be diseased, or disabled, or to suffer any kind of impairment. In the case of the doctor, prescribed means something ordered to help aid someone’s healing. But in the case of nature, it means that what happens to each of us is ordered to help aid our destiny.
Always prepared for disruption, always working that disruption into our plans. Fitted, as they say, for defeat or victory.
But he knew plenty of distracting sinkholes too: gossip, the endless call of work, as well as fear, suspicion, lust. Every human being is pulled by these internal and external forces that are increasingly more powerful and harder to resist.
It’s about what happens not just in round one but in round two and every round after – and then the fight after that and the fight after that, until the end. The Germans have a word for it: Sitzfleisch. Staying power.
Only you know the race you’re running.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it.