Do Not Go Gentle
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas:
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas:
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Charlie Munger:
Another thing, of course, is life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn’t matter. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea.
Mookie Wilson:
When I’m in a slump, I comfort myself by saying if I believe in dinosaurs, then somewhere, they must be believing in me. And if they believe in me, then I can believe in me. Then I bust out.
Charlie Munger, Harvard College Graduation Speech, 1986:
First, be unreliable. Do not faithfully do what you have engaged to do. If you will only master this one habit you will more than counterbalance the combined effect of all your virtues, howsoever great.
Alan Watts:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”
The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”
The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
JOMO by Michael Leunig:
Oh the joy of missing out.
When the world begins to shout
And rush towards that shining thing;
The latest bit of mental bling –
Trying to have it, see it, do it,
You simply know you won’t go through it;
The anxious clamoring and need
This restless hungry thing to feed.Instead, you feel the loveliness;
The pleasure of your emptiness.
You spurn the treasure on the shelf
In favor of your peaceful self;
Without regret, without a doubt.
Oh the joy of missing out.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in Self-Reliance:
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own, but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Warren Buffett on what it takes to do what he does:
It’s a temperamental quality, not an intellectual quality. You don’t need tons of IQ in this business. … You need a stable personality, you need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd because this is not a business where you take polls. It’s a business where you think. And Ben Graham would say you’re not right or wrong because a thousand people agree with you and you’re not right or wrong because a thousand people disagree with you. You’re right because your facts and your reasoning are right.
Gurwinder Bhogal in Stoicism - The Ancient Remedy to the Modern Age:
A core idea of Stoicism is that you become what you consistently expose yourself to.
Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.
—Marcus Aurelius
You become what you give your attention to … If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will, and their motives may not be the highest.
—Epictetus
Therefore, to shape your mind, shape your stimuli.
Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind.
—Epictetus
Arthur Schopenhauer:
It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it’s impossible to find it anywhere else.
Calvin Coolidge:
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are onmipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Helen Keller:
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
Maya Angelou:
I believe in anger. Anger’s like fire, it can burn out all the dross and leave some positive things. But what I don’t believe in is bitterness. Forgiveness is imperative because you don’t want to carry that weight around, who needs to? And it will throw you down. It doesn’t help you to live life. I don’t make myself vulnerable if I can help it.
Michelle Kuipers in The Alpinist:
A lot of us live our lives thinking of the things we’d like to do or the adventures we’d like to have, but we hold back. I think that’s what really stands out to me about Marc-André’s journey. It’s about what is it that you would do if you were able to overcome the things that you see as limitations or the things that you’re afraid of? What would you do?
Niccolo Machiavelli:
All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but in calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.
Doing hard things — things you may not want to do but you know are good for you — doing them habitually and especially when you least feel like it calluses the mind. That makes doing them easier and helps you live up to your potential.
Anne Lamott in Almost Everything:
Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy. Even (or especially) people who seem to have it more or less together are more like the rest of us than you would believe. I try not to compare my insides to their outsides, because this makes me much worse than I already am, and if I get to know them, they turn out to have plenty of irritability and shadow of their own. Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.
This is good news, that almost everyone is petty, narcissistic, secretly insecure, and in it for themselves, because a few of the funny ones may actually long to be friends with you and me. They can be real with us, the greatest relief. As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too.
Mitch Albom in The Time Keeper:
Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.
Vincent Van Gogh:
Let us not forget that little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.
Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms:
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Benjamin Hoff in The Tao of Pooh:
The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can’t save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly.
Marshall Rosenberg:
Don’t do anything that isn’t play.
Make choices motivated purely by the desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, or obligation.
A joyful activity performed out of fear, guilt etc. will lose its joy.
T.H. White in The Once and Future King:
The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
Elisabeth Kübler Ross in Death: The Final Stage of Growth:
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
Brian Tracy:
You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you.
When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”
Someone else did it. You didn’t…
When this happens, you can take it two ways:
You could let that part of you give up…
Or you could do something about that jealous pain. Shut off your phone, kill the distractions, make it top priority, and spend the time.
It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort.
John Gardner in The Road to Self-Renewal:
It is a puzzle why some men and women go to seed, while others remain vital to the very end of their days. And why some people stop learning and growing. One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons: Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim.
Learn your true preferences. Knowing what you dislike tends to be more reliable than what you think you’ll like.
Try new things, but always keep a realistic option to quit. If you’re on the wrong train, every stop is the wrong stop.
Treat your life as an adventure, not a competition. A good life is a story you’re proud of. There’s no score.
Happiness is about getting in the flow. For most things, go with intensity over consistency. Balance your life at the macro level, not the micro.
Remove as much accountability from your life as you can. Choose what you want to be responsible for very rigorously.
The best things in life are free, and they’re not worth sacrificing for the possibility of getting the second best things.
As soon as you can afford to, optimize your life for maximum enjoyment. The deferred lifestyle is too risky.
As soon as you can afford to, work on what gives you most energy. Only intrinsic motivation lasts.
Procrastination is information. Don’t fight it, embrace it.
Never risk anything you can’t tolerate losing. Be very rigorous about what goes in that group.
Decouple your self-worth from anything you don’t control.
Understand that the only thing you truly control is your behavior (how you react to things). Live with dignity.
Do not play victim. Do not complain.
Add excitement to your life, not expectations. Happiness is governed by expectations, not outcomes.
Maya Angelou:
Sister, there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. Sister, those who expected to rise did not, their beds became their cooling boards, and their blankets became their winding sheets. And those dead folks would give anything, anything at all for just five minutes of this… So you watch yourself about complaining, Sister. What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.
Sociologist Daniel Chambliss:
At the higher levels of competitive swimming, something like an inversion of attitude takes place. The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring — swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say — they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. They enjoy hard practices, look forward to difficult competitions, try to set difficult goals. Coming into the 5:30 A.M. practices at Mission Viejo, many of the swimmers were lively, laughing, talking, enjoying themselves, perhaps appreciating the fact that most people would positively hate doing it. It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.
Richard Feynman:
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.
I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
Peter Barton:
By increments so exquisitely gradual that they might have passed unnoticed, I could have ended up being totally untrue to myself and living a life I hated.
Laurie Buchanan:
Whatever you are not changing, you are choosing.
Mary Anne Radmacher:
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying I will try again tomorrow.
“Self discipline” is a patch for being conflicted about what you want to do.
Often, productive people are interpreted as “having discipline”: able to force themselves to do the work even when it’s unpleasant.
But creative productivity only ever works in spite of that.
“Discipline is remembering what you want.”
When that works, it’s not “discipline”; it’s getting less conflicted.
The real answer to productivity and motivation is to resolve the conflicts you have. Once unconflicted about what to do, even hard work is effortless, motivation-wise.
Discipline is fighting yourself. Wasted energy. Wasted creativity.
Put that instead into figuring out what you actually most want.
Solve problems in doing what you want with reason, not force.
Problems really are soluble. What’s stopping you really is conflicting ideas. Force is trying to reach answers/truth using brute authority instead of reason.
Chicago ➝ Emeryville, Summer 2017
Perrythopolis was a tiny island nation floating peacefully in the farthest reaches of a deep blue sea. It was a utopian society, but existed only briefly in the imagination of a clever little girl.
All that remains is the name.