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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ryan Holiday
Started reading
January 6, 2024
we’re not as smart and as wise as we’d like to think we are.
If we ever do want to become wise, it comes from the questioning and from humility—not, as many would like to think, from certainty, mistrust, and arrogance.
“From the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, ‘you are an impression and not at all what you appear to be.’
The samurai swordsman Musashi made a distinction between our “perceiving eye” and our “observing eye.” The observing eye sees what is. The perceiving eye sees what things supposedly mean.
it is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
As smart or successful as we may be, there is always someone who is smarter, more successful, and wiser than us.
Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief others might bring. A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up.”
Which will help your children more—your insight into happiness and meaning, or that you followed breaking political news every day for thirty years?
Disagreements and occasional frustration are taxes placed on even the happiest of relationships.
As a form of a therapy, CBT helps patients identify destructive patterns in their thoughts and behavior so they can, over time, direct and influence them in a more positive direction.
What is your default interpretation of someone else’s intentions?
If being upset or hurt is something you’d like to experience less often, then make sure your interpretations of others’ words make that possible.
But what if we let these opinions go? Let’s try weeding (ekkoptein; cutting or knocking out) them out of our lives so that things simply are. Not good or bad, not colored with opinion or judgment. Just are.
be willing to learn from anyone and everyone, regardless of their station in life.
the “good” that the Stoics advocate is simpler and more straightforward: wisdom, self-control, justice, courage. No one who achieves these quiet virtues experiences buyer’s remorse.
It would be embarrassing if we didn’t end up finding out if we were wrong in the past.
Character is a powerful defense in a world that would love to be able to seduce you, buy you, tempt you, and change you. If you know what you believe and why you believe it, you’ll avoid poisonous relationships, toxic jobs, fair-weather friends, and any number of ills that afflict people who haven’t thought through their deepest concerns.
Would I be better saying words or letting my actions and choices illustrate that knowledge for me?
“How much better is it to be known for doing well by many than for living extravagantly? How much more worthy than spending on sticks and stones is it to spend on people?”
it really beautiful to win the genetic lottery? Or should beauty be contingent on the choices, actions, and attributes we develop? An even keel, a sense of justice, a commitment to duty. These are beautiful traits—and they go much deeper than appearances.
Here is how to guarantee you have a good day: do good things.
The same goes for the quotes in this book and for other inspiring words you might hear. Don’t just admire them. Use them. Follow their example.
This is why so many petty criminals confess or voluntarily surrender. They don’t always stick to it, but at the lowest moment, they finally realize: this is no way to live. They want the peace of mind that comes with doing right. And so do you.
What if the next time you were treated meanly, you didn’t just restrain yourself from fighting back—what if you responded with unmitigated kindness?
Most rudeness, meanness, and cruelty are a mask for deep-seated weakness. Kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength.
If your happiness is dependent on accomplishing certain goals, what happens if fate intervenes? What if you’re snubbed? If outside events interrupt? What if you do achieve everything but find that nobody is impressed? That’s the problem with letting your happiness be determined by things you can’t control.
Our ambition should not be to win, then, but to play with our full effort. Our intention is not to be thanked or recognized, but to help and to do what we think is right.
“Don’t set your mind on things you don’t possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think how much you would desire them if they weren’t already yours.
Instead of seeing philosophy as an end to which one aspires, see it as something one applies. Not occasionally, but over the course of a life—making incremental progress along the way.
You can’t just hear something once and expect to rely on it when the world is crashing down around us.
“What’s the point of having countless books and libraries, whose titles could hardly be read through in a lifetime. The learner is not taught, but burdened by the sheer volume, and it’s better to plant the seeds of a few authors than to be scattered about by many.”
from abandoning the pursuit of wisdom? So, what should each of us say to every trial we face? This is what I’ve trained for, for this my discipline!”
Don’t spend much time thinking about what other people think. Think about what you think.
The next thing to do—consider carefully the task at hand for what it is, while remembering that your purpose is to be a good human being.
Do the right thing. That’s it.
indulging in the empty calories of existence
The Stoics believed, above all else, that our job on this earth is to be a good human being.
“We like to say that we don’t get to choose our parents, that they were given by chance—yet we can truly choose whose children we’d like to be.”
You’ll be too busy putting one foot in front of the next to even notice the obstacles were there.
“How much more harmful are the consequences of anger and grief than the circumstances that aroused them in us!”
Today, give yourself the most simple and doable of tasks: just don’t make stuff worse. Whatever happens, don’t add angry or negative emotions to the equation. Don’t react for the sake of reacting. Leave it as it is.
‘The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so we might listen more and talk less.’”
Always Say Less Than Necessary.
Let’s not wish we could turn back time or remake the universe according to our preference. Not when it would be far better and far easier to remake ourselves.
That’s who you want to be, whatever your line of work: the casual, relaxed person in every situation who tells everyone else to take a breath and not to worry. Because you’ve got this. Don’t be the agitator, the paranoid, the worrier, or the irrational. Be the calm, not the liability.
Their self-criticism is constructive.
Laying into yourself, unduly depriving yourself, punishing yourself—that’s self-flagellation, not self-improvement.
it might not seem like it makes a big difference to see life as something you have to do versus get to do, but there is.
Train with humility.
“When you’ve done well and another has benefited by it, why like a fool do you look for a third thing on top—credit for the good deed or a favor in return?”
