ZeV’s Reviews > Ego Is the Enemy > Status Update

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"There's a quote from Bismarck that says, in effect, any fool can learn from experience. The trick is to learn from *other people*'s experience."

"training was like sweeping the floor. Just because we've done it once, doesn't mean the floor is clean forever. Every day the dust comes back. Every day we must sweep." -- Daniele Bolelli

"I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself." -- Joseph Conrad

"In failure or adversity, it's so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It's a distraction too; we don't do much else when we're busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us ... Does this get us any close to where we want to be? No. It just keeps us where we are--or worse, arrests our development entirely."

"This is characteristics of how great people think. It's not that they find failure in every success. They just hold themselves to a standard that exceeds what society might consider to be objective success. Because of that, they don't much care what other people think; they care whether they meet their own standards. And these standards are much, much higher than everyone else's."

"I never look back, except to find out about mistakes ... I only see danger in thinking back about things you are proud of." -- Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann

"He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man" -- Seneca "Alter that: He who will do anything to avoid failure will almost certainly do something *worthy of a failure* ... The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can't bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can't absorb a few blows, it wasn't worth anything in the first place."

"Most trouble is temporary ... unless you make that not so. Recovery is not grand, it's one step in front of the other. Unless your cure is more of the disease."

"The problem is that when we get our identity tied up in our work, we worry that any kind of failure will then say something bad about us *as a person*. It's a fear of taking responsibility, of admitting that we might have messed up. It's the sunk cost fallacy. And so we throw good money and good life after bad and end up making everything so much worse."