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January 5 - January 28, 2025
We need to ask for an inch and turn it into a foot without setting off panic alarms.
He realizes that, just as you want to negotiate ad pricing close to deadlines, getting what you want often depends more on when you ask for it than how you ask for it.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
replace presence-based work with performance-based freedom.
The purpose here is to separate your activities from a single environment and ensure that you have the discipline to work solo.
If you don’t get it over time, leave. It’s too big a world to spend most of life in a cubicle.
All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but 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. —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, The Prince
SOME JOBS ARE simply beyond repair. Improvements would be like adding a set of designer curtains to a jail
Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30–40 years of tolerating the mediocre.
If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.
Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
Don’t confuse the complex with the difficult. Most situations are simple—many are just emotionally difficult to act upon.
It’s not that you don’t know what to do. Of course you do. You are just terrified that you might end up worse off than you are now.
self-imposed suffering that can be avoided.
There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth.
The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold.
The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of ...
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This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choice...
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The consequences of bad decisions do not get better with age.
Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.
The person who has more options has more power.
Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. —PAUL FUSSELL, Abroad
The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research. —ROLF POTTS, Vagabonding
There is more to life than increasing its speed. —MOHANDAS GANDHI
Following elimination and automation, what would you be escaping from?
This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfection. —SAINT AUGUSTINE (354 A.D.–430 A.D.)
One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time-famine mind-set, and comparative impulses that created it in the first place.
Learn to slow down. Get lost intentionally. Observe how you judge both yourself and those around you.
It’s an easy excuse not to do something adventurous.
Pack as if you were coming back in one week.
Cheap is good, but bullet holes are bad.
What is the 20% of my belongings that I use 80% of the time? Eliminate the other 80% in clothing, magazines, books, and all else.
If you sell even a few expensive items, it could finance a good portion of your mini-retirement.
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
The retired and ultrarich are often unfulfilled and neurotic for the same reason: too much idle time.
Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum.
Go nuts and live your dreams.
It is critical to stop repressing yourself and get out of the postponement habit.
Learning to replace the perception of time famine with appreciation of time abundance is like going from triple espressos to decaf.
People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.
“yes” to the following two questions:
Have I decided on a single meaning for each term in this question? Can an answer to this question be acted upon to improve things?
If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
to love, be loved, and never stop learning—
TO LIVE IS to learn. I see no other option.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike.
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. —PAULA POUNDSTONE
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive. —THICH NHAT HANH
It is hard to recalibrate your internal clock without taking a break from constant overstimulation.
