Your attention is one of your most critical resources.
At the end, this isn’t about deferring pride because you don’t deserve it yet. It isn’t “Don’t boast about what hasn’t happened yet.” It is more directly “Don’t boast.” There’s nothing in it for you.
You’ve got to get yourself – and your perceptions – under control.
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has described this duality well – it’s possible to bask in both your relevance and irrelevance to the cosmos. As he says, “When I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also big. I’m big because I’m connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me.” We just can’t forget which is bigger and which has been here longer.
The Stoics liked to use the metaphor of fire. Writing in his journal, Marcus once reminded himself that “when the fire is strong, it soon appropriates to itself the matter which is heaped on it, and consumes it, and rises higher by means of this very material.
It’s time you understand that the world is telling you something with each and every failure and action. It’s feedback – giving you precise instructions on how to improve, it’s trying to wake you up from your cluelessness. It’s trying to teach you something. Listen. Lessons.
Take your situation and pretend it is not happening to you. Pretend it is not important, that it doesn’t matter. How much easier would it be for you to know what to do? How much more quickly and dispassionately could you size up the scenario and its options? You could write it off, greet it calmly.
We can channel this, too. We needn’t scramble like we’re so often inclined to do when some difficult task sits in front of us. Remember the first time you saw a complicated algebra equation? It was a jumble of symbols and unknowns. But then you stopped, took a deep breath, and broke it down. You isolated the variables, solved for them, and all that was left was the answer.
He lives in a bubble in which no one can say no – not even his conscience.
Action is commonplace, right action is not.
Behind mountains are more mountains.
Don’t be a person of too many words and too many.
The height of cultivation runs to simplicity. – BRUCE LEE.
Always think about what you’re really being asked to give. Because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don’t even want. Remember, that’s what time is. It’s your life, it’s your flesh and blood, that you can never get back.
What’s essential is invisible to the eye.
That we are scared of obstacles because our perspective is wrong – that a simple shift in perspective can change our reaction entirely.
This insight lives on today in Warren Buffet’s famous adage to.
To be both a craftsman and an artist. To cultivate a product of labor and industry instead of just a product of the mind. It’s here where abstraction meets the road and the real, where we trade thinking and talking for working.
The process is about doing the right things, right now. Not worrying about what might happen later, or the results, or the whole picture.
One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all.