Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything.
Speculation led to disaster, he realized, and he needed to always ignore the mad crowd and its inclinations.
Since the vast majority of our words and actions are unnecessary, corralling them will create an abundance of leisure and tranquility.
She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn’t driven by passion, but by reason.
Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist.
Pride takes a minor accomplishment and makes it feel like a major one.
People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeles...
Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. You need to be abl...
No one is crushed by Fortune, unless they are first deceived by her … those who aren’t pompous in good times, don’t have their bubbles burst with change. Against either circumstance, the stable person...
Most trouble is temporary… unless you make that not so. Recovery is not grand, it’s one step in front of the other. Unless your cure is more of the disease. Only
Lots of people, as the poet and artist Austin Kleon puts it, want to be the noun without doing the verb. To make something great, what’s required is need. As in, I need to do this. I have to. I can’t...
Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if—especially if—it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Fe...
Leave passion for the amateurs. Make it about what you feel you do and say, not what you care about and with to be.
It’s much easier to control our perceptions and emotions than it is to give up our desire to control other people and events.
It is just one word: Conspiracies. What follows is Machiavelli’s guide for rising up against a powerful enemy, for ending the reign of a supposed tyrant, for protecting yourself against those who wish...
In your actions, don’t procrastinate. In your conversations, don’t confuse. In your thoughts, don’t wander. In your soul, don’t be passive or aggressive. In your life, don’t be all about business. —MA...
In struggling with his unfortunate fate, Demosthenes found his true calling: He would be the voice of Athens, its great speaker and conscience. He would be successful precisely because of what he’d be...
If we’re going to succeed in achieving our goals despite the obstacles that may come, this strength in will must be built.
If an unjust prison sentence can be not only salvaged but transformative and beneficial, then for our purposes,
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...