When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes – but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned. Ego is self-anointed, its swagger is artifice. One is girding yourself, the other gaslighting. It’s the difference between potent and poisonous.
When success begins to slip from your fingers – for whatever reason – the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.
The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.
The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better.
Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room – until you change that with results.
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.
You’re not as good as you think. You don’t have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.
People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.” It’s.
We will learn that though we think big, we must act and live small in order to accomplish what we seek. Because we will be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status, our ambition will not be grandiose but iterative – one foot in front of the other, learning and growing and putting in the time.
I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The.
In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer.
To argue, to complain, or worse, to just give up, these are choices. Choices that more often than not, do nothing to get us across the finish line.
Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.
What matters to an active man is to do the right thing; whether the right thing comes to pass should not bother him. – GOETHE.
What we desire makes us vulnerable.
Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. – RICHARD FEYNMAN.
As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It’s easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not rawtalent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.
There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.