Nor am I “leading” in any way that the military manuals would recognise or commend. I’m just slogging miserably beside the others. But we are one, each giving his all. I catch a second wind, and I feel my brothers-in-arms catch theirs too. By.
The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. The.
But convey this, above all, to your men: let them not yield preeminence in valor to the Spartans, rather strive to outdo them. Remember, in warfare practice of arms counts for little. Courage tells all, and we Spartans have no monopoly on that. Lead your men with this in mind and all will be well.” TWENTY-THREE It was the standing order of my master on campaign that he be woken two hours before dawn, an hour prior to the men of his platoon.
Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.
Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it.
When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. A crack appears in the membrane. Like the first craze when a chick pecks at the inside of its shell. Angel midwives congregate around us; they assist as we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius.
When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens.
You become an artist once you start saying that you are an artist.
At the beginning, the author’s writing was like a selfie: a disposable plea for attention that was all about him and his life. But since he hadn’t done much living, there wasn’t much substance.
We’re facing dragons too. Fire-breathing griffins of the soul, whom we must outfight and outwit to reach the treasure of our self-in-potential and to release the maiden who is God’s plan and destiny for ourselves and the answer to why we were put on this planet.
Who profits from a king’s fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?
The pain of being human is that we’re all angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.
Bhagavad-Gita tells us we have a right only to our labor, not to the fruits of our labor.
Improvisation is not a wild scramble at the last minute. You are not pulling plans out of thin air. Improvisation is the payoff of scrupulous preparation and drill.
Figure out where you want to go; then work backwards from there.
This is how Resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it’s colorful; Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we’re the supporting partner, shouldn’t we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike on our spouse’s coattails? And if we’re the supported partner, shouldn’t we step out from the glow of our loved one’s adoration and instead encourage him to let his own light shine?
Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual – in his phrase, “someone who reads books” – the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.
We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us.
The capacity for empathy and self-restraint will serve us powerfully, not only in our external wars but in the conflicts within our own hearts.
Resistance is diabolical. It can harness our drive for greatness and our instinct for professionalism and yoke them, instead, to a shadow profession, whose demands will keep us from turning our energies toward their true course.