That’s why the philosophers warn us not to be satisfied with mere learning, but to add practice and then training. For as time passes we forget what we learned and end up doing the opposite, and hold...
Take it. Eat it until you’re sick. Endure it. Quietly brush it off and work harder. Play the game. Ignore the noise; for the love of God, do not let it distract you. Restraint is a difficult skill but...
Phil Libin, the cofounder of Evernote, has a quote I like to share with clients: People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.
Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to...
Part of the reason why a certain skill often seems so effortless for great masters is not just because they’ve mastered the process—they really are doing less than the rest of us who don’t know any be...
Ordinary people shy away from negative situations, just as they do with failure. They do their best to avoid trouble. What great people do is the opposite. They are at their best in these situations....
It is said of the Jews, deprived of a stable homeland for so long, their temples destroyed, and their communities in the Diaspora, that they were forced to rebuild not physically but within their mind...
It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world. Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and...
It comes in many forms. Idly dreaming about the future. Plotting our revenge. Finding refuge in distraction. Refusing to consider that our choices are a reflection of our character. We’d rather do bas...
In its own way, the most harmful dragon we chase is the one that makes us think we can change things that are simply not ours to change.
In its own way, the most harmful dragon we chase is the one that makes us think we can change things that are simply not ours to change. That someone decided not to fund your company, this isn’t up to...
In The Book of Five Rings, he notes the difference between observing and perceiving. The perceiving eye is weak, he wrote; the observing eye is strong. Musashi understood that the observing eye sees s...
In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote: The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his loft...
Eventually, all of us will pass away and slowly be forgotten. We should enjoy this brief time we have on earth—not be enslaved to emotions that make us miserable and dissatisfied.
Bill Walsh says, Almost always, your road to victory goes through a place called ‘failure.
As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.
As Gavin de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear, When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection...
As Chris Hedges, the philosopher and journalist, wrote, In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is com...
Are you okay being alone? Are you strong enough to go a few more rounds if it comes to that? Are you comfortable with challenges? Does uncertainty bother you? How does pressure feel? Because these thi...
Amazon, for its part, has a couple of other easy suggestions for you if the advice write a hypothetical press release doesn’t quite work for your situation. Their CTO, Werner Vogels, suggests trying t...