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July 18 - August 1, 2019
A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature.
“Fix the first problem fully and calmly before you even think about the second problem.”
Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.
He had called them a Schicksalsgemeinschaft—a community bound by fate—in which each man “is dependent on the other, and is thereby sworn to one another.”
Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion.
