So much of the distress we feel comes from reacting instinctually instead of acting with conscientious deliberation.
The economics of the Internet created a twisted set of incentives that make traffic more important – and more profitable – than the truth.
The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.
Always prepare ourselves for more difficult times. Always accept what we’re unable to change. Always manage our expectations. Always persevere. Always learn to love our fate and what happens to us. Always protect our inner self, retreat into ourselves. Always submit to a greater, larger cause. Always remind ourselves of our own mortality.
It’s not that we need to believe that God is great, only that God is greater than us.
We don’t abandon our pursuits because we despair of ever perfecting them.” – EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 1.2.37b.
The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.
It is not enough to have great qualities; we should also have the management of them. – LA ROCHEFOUCAULD I.
Welcome to the power of perception. Applicable in each and every situation, impossible to obstruct. It can only be relinquished.
The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up. – CHUCK PALAHNIUK.
We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers.
Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.
An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before. To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing. When given an unfair task, some rightly see it as a chance to test what they’re made of – to give it all they’ve got, knowing full well how difficult it will be to win. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we are our most creative.
False ideas about yourself destroy you. For.
As the Quaker William Penn observed, “Buildings that lie so exposed to the weather need a good foundation.
Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.
That’s how it seems to go: we’re never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we’ve achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us, and can ruin us. Compelled.
As Gavin de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear, “When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?
Just because the conditions aren’t exactly to your liking, or you don’t feel ready yet, doesn’t mean you get a pass. If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
I know you had nothing to do with the injustice that brought me to this jail, so I’m willing to stay here until I get out. But I will not, under any circumstances, be treated like a prisoner – because I am not and never will be powerless.