There are two kinds of people in this world. The first looks at others who have accomplished things and thinks: Why them? Why not me? The other looks at those same people and thinks: If they can do it...
The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.
The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition. What holds you back? The Physical? Size. Race. Distance. Disability. Money. T...
The next time you are afraid of some supposedly disastrous outcome, remember that if you don’t control your impulses, if you lose your self-control, you may be the very source of the disaster you so f...
The most critical part of this system was the belief that you, the student who has sought out Stoicism, have the most important job: to be good! To be wise. To remain the person that philosophy wished...
The more things we desire and the more we have to do to earn or attain those achievements, the less we actually enjoy our lives—and the less free we are.
The majority of my generation decides to move back in with their parents after college. Unemployment, for them, is twice the national average. According to one 2011 study by the University of Michigan...
The investor and serial entrepreneur Ben Horowitz put it more bluntly: The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal.… The...
The implications of our obstacle are theoretical—they exist in the past and the future. We live in the moment. And the more we embrace that, the easier the obstacle will be to face and move.
The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
The gating resource here was not capital, Thiel said. The gating resource was the ideas and the people and executing it well. It’s not like lawsuits haven’t been brought in the past. It’s something th...
The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that. —MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 6.6 How much better to heal than seek revenge from injury. Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many...
The Way Through Them Objective judgment, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need. —MA...
The Russians call this maskirovka—the art of deception and confusion. It is as old as strategy itself. Undermine your enemy, Sun Tzu advised 2,500 years ago. Subvert him, attack his morale, strike at...
The Obstacles That Lie Before Us There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was...
Take inventory for a second. What do you dislike? Whose name fills you with revulsion and rage? Now ask: Have these strong feelings really helped you accomplish anything? Take an even wider inventory....
Take Evernote, a start-up that offers productivity and organization software, which made the companywide decision to delay spending even a penny on marketing for the first several years of its growth....
THE FOOL WHO FEEDS THE MONSTER. I knew I had to find this century-old drawing, though I wasn’t sure why. As I rode the escalator through the glass canyon of the atrium and into the bowels of the centr...
T he single most important practice in Stoic philosophy is differentiating between what we can change and what we can’t.
Successfully finding and scratching a niche requires asking and answering a question that very few creators seem to do: Who is this thing for? Instead, many creators want to be for everyone . . . and...