Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

by Timothy Ferriss

Jack Canfield quote, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”

Life is not designed to hand us success or satisfaction, but rather to present us with challenges that make us grow. Mastery is the mysterious process by which those challenges become progressively easier and more satisfying through practice. The key to that satisfaction is to reach the nirvana in which love of practice for its own sake (intrinsic) replaces the original goal (extrinsic) as our grail. The antithesis of mastery is the pursuit of quick fixes.

Show up in every moment like you’re meant to be there, because your energy precedes anything you could possibly say.

Fear is a friend of exceptional people.”

So when you start something new, it’s okay to do it in an unsustainable way. Once you achieve it, then you can devote your time to figuring out how to sustain it. They’re two different playbooks.

I now try to make space and time for saying, “This is what’s going really well . . .” whereas, when I first managed people, the approach was more, “What do we need to fix today?”

I’ve realized that instead of following the trends, you want to identify the trends but not follow them. It’s good to recognize trends, but if you follow them, you get sucked into them, and then you also fall with the trend.

Failure will happen, and failure is an opportunity to build resilience, to practice forgiveness of self and of others, and to gain wisdom.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; this is to have succeeded.”

“To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”—Elbert Hubbard

When you’re sad, just be sad. When you’re afraid, just be afraid. When you’re overwhelmed, just be overwhelmed. When you’re unfocused, can you find a way to let it be and simply enjoy that state?

Huxley’s genius consists in showing that you could control people far more securely through love and pleasure than through violence and fear.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.