“Amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic.”
This week, try experimenting with saying “I don’t understand. Can you explain that to me?” more often.
When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) you have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.
BrainPickings.org.
“Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.”
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.
“9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings”
Anything about Alan Watts:
He now discusses war, leadership, business, and life in his top-rated podcast, Jocko Podcast.
unifying disasters and crisis, like 9/11 or the World War II Blitz bombings on London, often results in dramatic decreases in suicide, violent crime, mental illness symptoms, etc.
You never want to . . . thread the needle and get through a thin patch in your research just because you’re such a prose artist.”
His Message at a High School Commencement “You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school: You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.”
you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.”
“You can tell the true character of a man by how his dog and his kids react to him.”
introduced me to GiveWell.org, a site that conducts in-depth research to determine how much nonprofits and foundations actually accomplish (in terms of lives saved, lives improved, etc.) per dollar spent.
The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine.
[from Anaïs Nin]. It says, ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’
Girls are often told, ‘Oh, you could get hurt,’ and the specter of getting hurt takes on these huge proportions. For boys, that’s not emphasized. And yet, girls and boys are physically the same before puberty. They break the same, and they’re as able as each other, if not girls being more able at that time. The fact that girls are told and treated as if they’re more fragile doesn’t make sense at all. It primes them to be very over-cautious. . . .”
‘What’s the worst that can happen? Well, the worst that can happen is that I’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I’d be eating oatmeal. And I’d be fine.’”
‘People-pleasing is a form of assholery,’ which I just loved, because you’re not pleasing anybody. You’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re also not giving them the dignity of their own experience and [assuming] they can’t handle the truth. It’s patronizing.”
“Codependence is often used incorrectly. It’s when you look to other people to decide how you are feeling.”
Whitney’s Definition of “Love” “My definition of ‘love’ is being willing to die for someone who you yourself want to kill. That, in my experience, is kind of the deal.”
Joseph Campbell—The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The Art of Learning [by Josh Waitzkin,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne.
When I told my podcast listeners that I was doing a second interview with Cal, dozens replied with some variation of “Please just let Cal talk for 3 hours. I could listen to him tell stories forever.” I highly recommend listening to both of Cal’s episodes. They will make your spine tingle.
“What are some of the choices you’ve made that made you who you are?”
Maxims and Reflections by Goethe:
“‘Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who’ve found it’ [adapted from Voltaire].
Eric Weinstein (TW: @ericrweinstein)
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” —Mark Twain.
“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
“Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”
“If you study even the smallest bit of science, you will realize that, for all practical purposes, we are nothing. We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small, backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse. “This universe has been around for probably 10 billion years or more, and will be around for tens of billion years afterwards. So your existence, my existence, is just infinitesimal. It is like a firefly blinking once in the night. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually you will fade, your works will fade, your children will fade, your thoughts will fade, this planet will fade, the sun will fade . . . it will all be gone. “There are entire civilizations that we remember now with just one or two words like ‘Sumerian’ or ‘Mayan.’ Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No. “If you don’t believe in an afterlife, then you [should realize] that this is such a short and precious life, it is really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There is no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or however long the universe is going to be around.”
“Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”—Thomas Jefferson
Tara’s first book, Radical Acceptance,
Curtis’s films. “He’s got a four-part film called The Century of the Self,
I’ve scheduled deloading phases in a few ways: roughly 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. daily for journaling, tea routines, etc.; 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Wednesday for creative output (i.e., writing, interviewing for the podcast); and “screen-free Saturdays,”
The big question I ask is, ‘When I had the opportunity, did I choose courage over comfort?’”
Closely related advice from one of my own mentors: “Be a skeptic, don’t be a cynic.”
favorite podcast is Hardcore History by Dan Carlin
That’s it. When things are going bad, don’t get all bummed out, don’t get startled, don’t get frustrated. No. Just look at the issue and say: “Good.”
If you can say the word “good,” guess what? It means you’re still alive. It means you’re still breathing. And if you’re still breathing, that means you’ve still got some fight left in you. So get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, re-engage, and go out on the attack.
tone:
“Enjoy it.” —the best answer I’ve heard to what I always ask close friends: “What should I do with my life?”
Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel.