Find canvases for other people to paint on.
The Daodejing, for instance, actually translates as The Way of Virtue.
Throw out your conceited opinions, for it is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.” E PICTETUS, D ISCOURSES, 2.17.1.
False ideas about yourself destroy you. For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool. You put yourself beneath someone you trust.
Who then is invincible? The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 1.18.21.
The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.
This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!
Failure and adversity are relative and unique to each of us.
Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our.
And what is up to us? Our emotions Our judgments Our creativity Our attitude Our perspective Our desires Our decisions Our determination.
Life is a process of breaking through these impediments – a series of fortified lines that we must break through.
There is a beautiful dialogue called “Icaromenippus, an Aerial Expedition” by the poet Lucian in which the narrator is given the ability to fly and sees the world from above. Turning his eyes earthward, he sees how comically small even the richest people, the biggest estates, and entire empires look from above. All their battles and concerns were made petty in perspective.
Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment. The question we must ask for ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?
Reflecting on what went well or how amazing we are doesn’t get us anywhere, except maybe to where we are right now. But we want to go further, we want more, we want to continue to improve.
They must internalize the fundamentals of their domain and what surrounds them, without ossifying or becoming stuck in time.
Freedom? That’s easy. It’s in your choices. Happiness? That’s easy. It’s in your choices. Respect of your peers? That too is in the choices you make.
Many centuries later, Jackie Robinson would express the idea even more succinctly. “A life is not important,” his tombstone reads, “except in the impact it has on other lives.
Do you think you are the only one who hopes to achieve your goal? You can’t possibly believe you’re the only one reaching for that brass ring.
This can’t harm me – I might not have wanted it to happen, but I decide how it will affect me. No one else has the right.
The thing that provoked you wasn’t real – but your reaction was. And so from the fake comes real consequences.