Confucius wrote that the “gentleman is self-possessed and relaxed, while the petty man is perpetually full of worry.
No harshness, no deprivation, no toil should interfere with our empathy toward others.
Our duty is rarely easy, but it is important. It’s also usually the harder choice. But we must do it.
I was there to deface billboards, specifically billboards I had designed and paid for. Not that I’d expected to do anything like this, but there I was, doing it.
Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life,” he once said. “I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way.
Don’t spend much time thinking about what other people think. Think about what you think. Think instead about the results, about the impact, about whether it is the right thing to do.
Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only they truly live. Not satisfied to merely keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. Only an ingrate would fail to see that these great architects of venerable thoughts were born for us and have designed a way of life for us.” – SENECA.
The reality is that while the Internet allows content to be written iteratively, the audience does not read or consume it iteratively. Each member usually sees what he or she sees a single time – a snapshot of the process – and makes his or her conclusions from that.
It’s much easier to control our perceptions and emotions than it is to give up our desire to control other people and events.
If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
Let’s be honest. Most of the time we don’t find ourselves in horrible situations we must simply endure. Rather, we face some minor disadvantage or get stuck with some less-than-favorable conditions. Or we’re trying to do something really hard and find ourselves outmatched, overstretched, or out.
In the pay-per-pageview model, every post is a conflict of interest.
Sometimes, staying put, going sideways, or moving backward is actually the best way to eliminate what blocks or impedes your path.
The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.
If your purpose is something larger than you – to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself – then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult.
You don’t convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there.
Richard Branson likes to say, is that “business opportunities are like buses; there’s always another coming around.
In other words, through our perception of events, we are complicit in the creation – as well as the destruction – of.
She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn’t driven by passion, but by reason.
The more difficult the task, the more uncertain the outcome, the more costly talk will be and the farther we run from actual accountability.