You can only see this if you want to see it.
Take it. Eat it until you’re sick. Endure it. Quietly brush it off and work harder. Play the game. Ignore the noise; for the love of God, do not let it distract you. Restraint is a difficult skill but a critical one.
They work quietly in the corner. They turn their inner turmoil into product – and eventually to stillness.
Especially when the leaders in your supposed community make it clear that that is exactly how they feel about you when it comes down to the crunch. But no, ignore that. It is in this moment that we must show the true strength of will within us. A few years ago, in the middle of the financial crisis, the artist and musician Henry Rollins managed to express this deeply human obligation better than millennia of religious doctrine ever have:.
To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call.
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. – COLIN POWELL.
Done enough times, done with sincerity and feeling, routine becomes ritual. The regularity of it – the daily cadence – creates deep and meaningful experience.
How do you prevent derailment? Well, often we fall in love with an image of what success looks like.
Will we fall short of our own standards? Yes. When this happens, we don’t need to whip ourselves, as Clamence did, we must simply let it instruct and teach us, as all injuries do.
Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty. The greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void, facing it instead of scrambling to make it go away. The question is, when faced with your particular challenge, do you seek the respite of talk or do you face the struggle head-on?
Build a life you don’t need to escape from.
This is what the ego does. It crosses out what matters and replaces it with what doesn’t.
We don’t need pity – our own or anyone else’s – we need purpose, poise, and patience.
That’s the answer of a confident person, a person at peace even in difficulty.
It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says.
The more time kids spend online, studies show, the worse their grades are. According to Nielson, active social networkers are 26 percent more likely to give their opinion on politics and current events off-line, even though they are exactly the people whose opinions should matter the least.
Man is pushed by drives, but he is pulled by values – Viktor Frankl.
Opportunities are not usually deep, virgin pools that require courage and boldness to dive into, but instead are obscured, dusted over, blocked by various forms of resistance. What is really called for in these circumstances is clarity, deliberateness, and methodological determination.
Many of our problems come from having too much: rapid technological disruption, junk food, traditions that tell us the way we’re supposed to live our lives. We’re soft, entitled, and scared of conflict. Great times are great softeners. Abundance can be its own obstacle, as many people can attest.
You rush in to stamp out the sparks and end up fanning them into flames. This is the risk.