Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln.
The Tail End” by Tim Urban on the Wait But Why blog – if you only read one article this month, make it that one. It.
If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.
Time is wasted because there is so much time available.
Refuse to accept partial completeness.
Out of clutter, find simplicity. – Albert Einstein.
No one owes you anything.
The struggle ends when the gratitude begins.
Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them. – BILL COSBY.
Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” – Greg McKeown, Essentialism.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. – PABLO PICASSO.
Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example.
Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.
As a builder, as an entrepreneur, how can you create something for someone else if you don’t have even enough glancing familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
I have had so many spectacular failures, but looking back, I can see how each of them led me a little closer to doing what I actually wanted to do. Years before I was ready to write a book of my own, I bungled two opportunities to co-write cookbooks with other people. These mistakes haunted me, and I was sure I’d never get to write another book. But I waited, and I persisted, and after 17 years I wrote the book I’d always dreamt of.
As chef Mehdi Chellaoui says, “I use lemon like I use salt.” Mario Batali would agree: if something is missing, it’s probably acid.
Exact numbers aren’t needed to realize that we spend too much time with those who poison us with pessimism, sloth, and low expectations of themselves and the world. It is often the case that you have to fire certain friends or retire from particular social circles to have the life you want. This isn’t being mean; it is being practical. Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic.
So much of the job is more emotion and ‘heart work’ than it is ‘head work.’ The head comes in after, to look at what the heart has presented and to organize it. But the initial inspiration comes from a different place, and it’s not the head, and it’s not an intellectual activity.