We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything.” Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy, pg 99.
The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you “push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
Determination, if you think about it, is invincible. Nothing other than death can prevent us from following Churchill’s old acronym: KBO. Keep Buggering On.
It generates a vision, helps us resist the passions of the mob, makes space for gratitude and wonder.
Doing new things invariably means obstacles. A new path is, by definition, uncleared. Only with persistence and time can we cut away debris and remove impediments. Only in struggling with the impediments that made others quit can we find ourselves on untrodden territory – only by persisting and resisting can we learn what others were too impatient to be taught.
The most critical part of this system was the belief that you, the student who has sought out Stoicism, have the most important job: to be good! To be wise. “To remain the person that philosophy wished to make us.” Do your job today. Whatever happens, whatever other people’s jobs happen to be, do yours. Be good.
Snark encourages the fakeness and stupidity it is supposedly trying to rail against.
Each new work competes for customers with everything that came before it and everything that will come after.
We spend a lot of time thinking about how things are supposed to be, or what the rules say we should do. Trying to get it all perfect. We tell ourselves that we’ll get started once the conditions are right, or once we’re sure we can trust this or that. When, really, it’d be better to focus on making due with what we’ve got. On focusing on results instead of pretty methods.
As Goethe once observed, the great failing is “to see yourself as more than you are and to value yourself at less than your true worth.
Doing great work is a struggle. It’s draining, it’s demoralizing, it’s frightening – not always, but it can feel that way when we’re deep in the middle of it.
Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.
Life speeds on the bold and favors the brave.
Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you’re convinced the world revolves around you.
Pageview journalism treats people by what they appear to want – from data that is unrepresentative to say the least – and gives them this and only this until they have forgotten that there could be anything else. It takes the audience at their worst and makes them worse.
How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you’re doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?
Bad luck is actually a chance for us to make up some time. We’re like runners who train on hills, or at an altitude so they can beat the runners who expected the course would be flat.
If something is in our control, its worth every ounce of our efforts and energy. Death is not one of those things. It is not in our control how long we’ll live or what will come and take us from life. But thinking about mortality creates real perspective, and urgency. It doesn’t need to be depressing. Because its invigorating.
If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one.