Knowing what not to think about. What to ignore and not to do. It’s your first and most important job.
Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance.
Marcus liked to point out that Alexander the Great – one of the most passionate and ambitious men who ever lived – was buried in the same ground as his mule driver.
Responsibility requires a readjustment and then increased clarity and purpose. First, setting the top-level goals and priorities of the organization and your life. Then enforcing and observing them.
Temperance. That’s the key. Intellectually, we know this. It’s only in flashes of insight or tragedy that we feel it.
It doesn’t make you a bad person to want to be remembered. To want to make it to the top. To provide for yourself and your family. After all, that’s all part of the allure. There is a balance. Soccer coach Tony Adams expresses it well. Play for the name on the front of the jersey, he says, and they’ll remember the name on the back.
There was always the allure of another, better house. There were always distractions, always so many things to do – and the writer’s block and insecurity that plagues creative types traveled with him wherever he went.
Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything. We cannot buy into myths we make ourselves, or the noise and chatter of the outside world. We must understand that we are a small part of an interconnected universe. On top of all this, we have to build an organization and a system around what we do – one that is about the work and not about us.
More does nothing for the one who feels less than, who cannot see the wealth that was given to them at birth, that they have accumulated in their relationships and experiences.
It was Cicero who said that to study philosophy is to learn how to die.
At the gym that his father built on the second-floor porch, young Roosevelt proceeded to work out feverishly every day for the next five years, slowly building muscle and strengthening his upper body against his weak lungs and for the future. By his early twenties the battle against asthma was essentially over, he’d worked – almost literally – that weakness out of his body.
Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
There’s nothing shameful about sweeping. It’s just another opportunity to excel – and to learn.
It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head.
Killing ourselves does nothing for anybody.
You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming –.
Give yourself clarity, not sympathy.
We tell ourselves that we need the right setup before we finally buckle down and get serious. Or we tell ourselves that some vacation or time alone will be good for a relationship or an ailment. This is self-deceit at its finest. It’s far better that we become pragmatic and adaptable – able to do what we need to do anywhere, anytime. The place to do your work, to live the good life, is here.
Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life.
Eagerly anticipating some future event, passionately imagining something you desire, looking forward to some happy scenario – as pleasurable as these activities might seem, they ruin your chance at happiness here and now.