Life Is Short And So Is This Book

by Peter Atkins

get great insights absolutely requires hard work, but it also requires

space.

So to make the most of your life, say no to things that don’t matter, work hard at what you love, and occasionally take time away from your core focus to rest so that your mind can be quiet for great insights to come.

you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.

I try not to obsess on the past, but to learn from it. I try not to worry about the future, but to prepare for it.

The lesson to me is that you can focus on something going well, or something beautiful, or something interesting -- even amidst terrible times.

Accept that luck and bad luck aren’t evenly or fairly distributed, and you can’t do anything about that.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

greed is a hole you can never fill (though

our brains were made to think while in motion.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.

We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

Assuming your basic life needs are being met, you can choose to be happy if you want -- even when you make mistakes, or are in the middle of some pretty awful circumstances.

A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

While it’s obviously better to start doing what you love early in life, many people don’t.

So it’s quite possible to reinvent your career even late in life.

Today, because my work and personal life are highly integrated, I work over the weekends -- but I feel just as excited Sunday night as I do on Friday afternoon.

If you can get paid to do what you perceive as play, you have a great job.

I’ve been astonished how much you can learn if you read widely across a variety of fields. I read as much as I can.

Find mentors. If you can identify people who have more experience than you and who excel at what they do, it's incredible to have the opportunity to learn from them.

People l...

teach others. If you’re highly motivated, and don't ask for anything other than wisdom y...

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

to make changes in your life, focus on taking small steps in the right direction. Whether you want to change your health, your job, or your relationship, you can’t do it overnight. And you can’t become great at anything without a lot of repeated practice.

You need to set the bar high enough that achieving your goals will mean something to you in the long term.

if the field you enter is growing, your odds of success will be higher.

you love what you do and work very hard, persevere, and take small steps, you likely will be in a dramatically different place ten years from now.

Picking the right partner - someone you respect, and with whom you can communicate, laugh and collaborate well - can make a huge difference in the quality of your life.

Remember: take small steps. They work. Big steps often don’t. Over time, small steps add up, and you end up in a different place.

It’s impossible in many ways to get outside that frame of reference, although with diverse experience, a lot of reading, honest self-reflection on your failures, and some thinking, it’s possible to stretch our perspective. Data and patterns matter, and you should pay close attention to them.

Focus is important because time is limited

If you don’t take good care of yourself physically and psychologically, you won’t be able to enjoy your life.

We’re all going to be dead anyway some day. So while you should try your hardest to make the most of your life, when something funny happens, when you make a mistake, or even (and perhaps especially) when bad things happen, it’s easier if you can laugh about yourself and the world.