He came up with a good test anytime he felt himself being pulled by a strong desire: What will happen to me if I get what I want? How will I feel after?
Not that all beauty is so immediately beautiful. We’re not always on the farm or at the beach or gazing out over sweeping canyon views. Which is why the philosopher must cultivate the poet’s eye – the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.
What is bad luck? Opinion. What are conflict, dispute, blame, accusation, irreverence, and frivolity? They are all opinions, and more than that, they are opinions that lie outside of our own reasoned choice, presented as if they were good or evil. Let a person shift their opinions only to what belongs in the field of their own choice, and I guarantee that person will have peace of mind, whatever is happening around them.
What matters is how you’re going to deal with this situation right in front of you and whether you’re going to be able to move past it and onto the next one.
He would make much of his fortune during these market fluctuations – because he could see while others could not. This insight lives on today in Warren Buffet’s famous adage to “be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” Rockefeller, like all great investors, could resist impulse in favor of cold, hard common sense. One.
There are two kinds of people in this world. The first looks at others who have accomplished things and thinks: Why them? Why not me? The other looks at those same people and thinks: If they can do it, why can’t I?
Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. – LAO TZU.
What’s essential is invisible to the eye. That is: Appearances are misleading.
It takes an artist’s eye to see that the end of life is not unlike a ripe fruit falling from its tree. It takes a poet to notice the way “baking bread splits in places and those cracks, while not intended in the baker’s art, catch our eye and serve to stir our appetite.
Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on.
Where is Good? In our reasoned choices. Where is Evil? In our reasoned choices. Where is that which is neither Good nor Evil? In the things outside of our own reasoned choice.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 2.16.1 T.
This is the mark of perfection of character – to spend each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, laziness, or any pretending.
At the end of each day he would ask himself variations of the following questions: What bad habit did I curb today? How am I better? Were my actions just? How can I improve?
Find the positive in the situation, but also sit with your pain and accept it, remembering that it is a part of life. That’s how one conquers grief.
Most people never learn that their accomplishments will ultimately fail to provide the relief and happiness we tell ourselves they will.
Or you create an alterative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp. The.
You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. Or, like Rockefeller, choose not to.
Why bother getting mad at causes and forces far bigger than us? Why do we take these things personally? After all, external events are not sentient beings – they cannot respond to our shouts and cries – and neither can the mostly indifferent gods.
There is no stillness to the mind that thinks of nothing but itself, nor will there ever be peace for the body and spirit that follow their every urge and value nothing but themselves.
That’s the nice thing about the present. It keeps showing up to give you a second chance.