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Only you can create the life you want for yourself—no one is going to do it for you.
Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
This life isn’t a dress rehearsal, it’s not a practice or a training session, it’s the real thing. It’s the only one you have. So see it . . . and then be it.
In German, we have a saying: Wenn schon, denn schon. Roughly translated, it means “If you’re going to do something, DO IT. Go all out.”
Really learn your trade and work to become great at it so you can be an asset to your community.
if you don’t push yourself, if you don’t give it your all, if you don’t cut the legs off your sweatpants when the situation calls for it, then you’re only letting yourself down.
There is no plan B. Plan B is to succeed at plan A.
Fuck plan B! The second you create a backup plan, not only are you giving a voice to all the naysayers, but you are shrinking your own dream by acknowledging the validity of their doubts.
If the work of being great or achieving something special hasn’t hurt or cost you anything, or at least made you uncomfortable, then I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’re not working hard enough.
Haruki Murakami once wrote, “I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”
“Do what you say you’re going to do, and try to do it a little better than you said you would.”
If it matters to you, make the time.
“See it. Believe it. Achieve it.”
What is the value of trying to be someone you’re not?
What they all have in common is that they never let anyone else write their stories. They know how to sell their vision better than anyone, and they walk peacefully through the world confident in that knowledge.
rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better.
amor fati. Love of fate. “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to,” the great Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus said. “Rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens. Then you will be happy.”
failure is not fatal.
You can’t fail when you don’t try.
Failure has never killed a dream; quitting kills every dream it touches.
your job is neither to avoid failure nor to seek it out. Your job is to bust your ass in pursuit of your vision—yours and nobody else’s—and to embrace the failure that is bound to come.
The worst thing that can happen when you do the work to overcome adversity instead of quit in the face of it is that you fail again and learn one more way that doesn’t work. Then that just forces you to switch gears, which gets you one step closer to your goal, because now you’re more likely to be heading in the right direction.
“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Helping others is a simple practice that requires nothing more than awareness, willingness, and a little bit of effort.
you have more to offer than you know.
things in life might not always go the way you want them to in the beginning, but that isn’t an excuse to stop trying or to stop striving or to not be grateful for the things you do have.
