Many of the things that upset us, the Stoics believed, are a product of the imagination, not reality. Like dreams, they are vivid and realistic at the time but preposterous once we come out of it. In...
Make something people want. —PAUL GRAHAM
Just because your mind tells you that something is awful or evil or unplanned or otherwise negative doesn’t mean you have to agree.
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 a...
It's not with ideas, my dear Degas, that one makes verse. It's with words.- the poet Mallarmé to Degas
It is not enough to have great qualities; we should also have the management of them. —LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. The cumulative effec...
If you’re like me, you’ve sat and stared in fascination at the pictures of the ruins of Detroit that get passed around the internet.
He was patient because he knew that difficult things took time.
Face the symptoms. Cure the disease. Ego makes it so hard—it’s easier to delay, to double down, to deliberately avoid seeing the changes we need to make in our lives. But change begins by hearing the...
Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned
Doing great work is a struggle. It's draining, it's demoralizing, it's frightening. We talk to fill the void and the uncertainty. The greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void, facing i...
As Laura Ingalls Wilder put it: There is good in everything, if only we look for it.
Apply yourself to thinking through difficulties—
We all thought that money would be the answer, that success was the highest prize, that the undying love of a beautiful person would finally make us feel warm inside.
How we react to them, and whether we keep our composure.
Him. You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. [A] crisis provides the opportunity for u...
Don’t just want fuel. You need it. You can’t go
Who knows—maybe a downturn is exactly what’s coming next. Worse, maybe you caused it. Just because you did something once, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do it successfully forever. Reversals and regr...
The novelist Anne Lamott describes that ego story well. If you are not careful, she warns young writers, station KFKD (K-Fucked) will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out