Wisdom quotes

"What would this look like if it were easy?" is such a lovely and deceptively leveraged question. It’s easy to convince yourself that things need to be hard, that if you’re not redlining, you’re not trying hard enough. This leads us to look for paths of most resistance, often…

Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.

One of the most dangerous things you can do is to treat a fixable problem as part of your identity. Then you'll never fix it.

(sitting in a room doing nothing) not now babe, i'm increasing boredom to hit my flowstate

Only Ayn Rand was smart enough to predict that incompetence and an ENVY of excellence will lead to dystopian social outcomes. Orwell thought we'd need total mind control, Huxley thought we'd need a permanently drugged populace, but Rand knew: all you need is resentment

Everytime I start BIG, I fail. 

Everytime I start small, I succeed bigger than I could have imagined.

Conditional love means: "Please hide parts of yourself so I don't have to feel uncomfortable.”

The best way to improve your mental health is by improving your physical health.

"The more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you’re going to be."

@naval

The Buddha said, “We suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won’t suffer.” But he didn’t say that as the last word; he said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that to someone, they’re going to come back after a while and say, “Yes, but…

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." - Carl Jung

Anxiety is lack of progress.

Lack of progress is lack of clarity.

Lack of clarity happens when you never take the time to self-reflect on whether you are actually going where you want to be in life.

there’s a good cultural shift away from “you can have it all” and towards “you can only have a few things, choose wisely and focus”

do the thing you want to do and not the thing you think you should do before you do the thing you want to do

“The problem with getting good at managing your life is that you end up with a life that has to be managed” truly a banger

Outer work for my inner work friends, inner work for my outer work friends

"Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness."
— Yousuf Karsh

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

It's impossible to hate someone you understand.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars.

Something I taught 15 yo: In everyday life, big decisions often occur mixed together with small ones. If you're not careful you'll tend to give them equal weight. So separate decisions as much as you can. There are many techniques for doing this.

It only takes a few moments of introspection to become aware of the vast, yawning emptiness that abides at the center of your heart. Every adult feels it. Most of us experience it as the pain of grief, and do anything we can to avoid feeling it. 

This is because postmodern…

Every piece of advice must be taken before it’s given.

People get addicted to feeling offended because it gives them a high—that sense of moral superiority, even if caused by anger, secretly feels good.

it’s hard for cerebral people to understand how crucial it is to learn by doing rather than thinking and the more uncertain you are about doing the thing the more you’re about to learn

Life gets better once you realize that every time you feel scared of doing something, it means the current you is not fully up to the task, it also means that you are about to grow as a person: you just need to stop overthinking your current limitations, get started, and push.

why can’t we all just be high agency rockstars with the strongest of opinions loosely held and a singular yearning for maximum impact

Jamie Foxx is incredibly confident. As one of his close friends described to me: “Even when things go a little south, he ALWAYS makes you feel like he has everything under control. I see a lot of people in his circle gravitate toward him for that confidence, myself included.”…

the answer to other people’s problems can seem so clear to you because you’re not burdened by their past or future, you’re firmly rooted in their present (something that’s very hard to do when facing your own problems)