High-hope people take every experience they have as a learning experience—no matter the experience. Everything happens for them, not to them. They utilize every experience to improve how they live and approach life.
-Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, 10x Is Easier Than 2x
Material possessions can be here today and gone tomorrow, and if your happiness is tied up in them, it too can be here today and gone tomorrow. But happiness, a product of a mindset that combines curiosity, the joy of perpetual intellectual discovery, and an appreciation of life's experiences, can be more lasting.
-Gad Saad, The Saad Truth About Happiness
What would make cooking a spiritual practice rather than mere work is cultivating a sense for what is sacred and doing you best to bring that alive in the world of the kitchen.
-Edward Espe Brown, No Recipe: Cooking as a Spiritual Practice
The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.
-George Will, as excerpted here
In particular, the Stoics don't think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter. If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self by conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take.
-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)
We need patience and curiosity rather than fear and reactivity.
-Tony Isola, from here
He knew how to make us more afraid of letting each other down than we were of any opponent.
To my surprise, Hakeem turned around and left. That's when I learned that, for fear to win, you have to be afraid, and for that moment, I wasn't.
. . . the true measure of a competitor is not by the number of opponents they defeat, but by what they do to surpass what they have already accomplished.
Live on the edge, play on the edge, but never hurt the team.
The play would be a textbook example of the age-old cliche: it's not how you start, but how you finish. Effort and finish had become my most consistent attributes.
Every friend ain't your brother, and every brother ain't your friend.
I had just learned a lesson about how money works. It's not about using your labor as the sole source of all your income. It's about using your labor to acquire cash that you save that gives you an opportunity to leverage credit or assets to buy other assets that make you money.
They'll tell athletes all the time that your financial advisor, your agent, your marketing rep, all these people work for you, you should be the boss, and most of us are unprepared to be a boss, and quite frankly, I had to learn that those people actually don't work for you.
During the national anthem, I gave a strong prayer to my ancestors. I knew I was going to need all the help I could get, so I prayed for toughness, poise, and love. All that I hoped they passed down onto me.
*although I wish his editor had worked a little harder
Hating the way I was feeling helped me give up Camel cigarettes thirty-two years ago, and then alcohol. It is good to surrender things that poison us and our world. Am I free of such toxicity now? Well, about forty percent, and that is a pretty good deal. I'll take it.
Hate weighed me down and muddled my thinking. It isolated me and caused my shoulders to hunch, the opposite of sticking together and lifting our hands and eyes to the sky. The hunch changes our posture, because our shoulders slump, and it changes our vision, as we scowl and paw the ground. So as a radical act we give up the hate and the hunch the best we can. We square our shoulders and lift our gaze.
-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes, and perceptions of the people who do the work.
Culture defeats strategy every time. Measurable skills without productive attitudes aren't worth much.
-Seth Godin, The Song of Significance
"We want solutions, but what we really need are attitudes. You don't need abs, but rather an attitude of training. You don't need the answer, but rather an attitude of curiosity. You don't need an easier life, but rather an attitude of perseverance. Attitude precedes outcome.
-James Clear, from here
Your Ma did the cooking and I hustled for things to cook, though I would take a shy at it myself once in a while and get up my muscle tossing flapjacks. It was pretty rough sailing, you bet, but one way and another we managed to get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, because we had made up our minds to take our fun as we went along. With most people happiness is something that is always just a day off. But I have made it a rule never to put off being happy till tomorrow. Don't accept notes for happiness, because you'll find that when they're due they're never paid, but just renewed for another thirty days.
-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
Make a conscious effort this month…and every month after this one, to choose your attitude and focus on what you need to do each day. Then do just a little bit more. Believe. Smile. Laugh. Engage. Commit. Show resilience. . . . I’ll be focused on building relationships, solving problems, and having fun. What about you?
-Sean Carpenter, as culled from here
Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life. . . . Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it as best you can . . .
..................but I'll root for this attitude:
“I took the mindset that it was time for us to stop asking for a seat at the table. And we were going to build our own table,” Smith says.
No one else "makes us angry." We make ourselves angry when we surrender control of our attitude. What someone else may have done is irrelevant. We choose, not they. They merely put our attitude to a test. If we select a volatile attitude by becoming hostile, angry, jealous or suspicious, then we have failed the test. If we condemn ourselves by believing that we are unworthy, then again, we have failed the test.
If we care at all about ourselves, then we must accept full responsibility for our own feelings. We must learn to guard against those feelings that have the capacity to lead our attitude down the wrong path and to strengthen those feelings that can lead us confidently into a better future.
-Jim Rohn, The Five Major Pieces To The Life Puzzle
Fate will do as it wills, and there is nothing any human can do about it. Flailing around trying to control outcomes is futile. We do what we can, and then we accept fate's results. Too often, when fate deals a blow, some of us spend days, months, or even years, allowing the memory to affect our lives. The key to Stoic reaction is resilience. We never give up. We never surrender. We find goodness and joy in every human experience, no matter how dire the experience looks or feels.
-Rick Georges, as extracted from here
"Mischievous people make the world a lot more interesting, and a much better place to live."
"Another example is a little more boisterous and even more obviously mischievous. There is a story about the Chinese monk Budai, a quasi-historical figure in Buddhism otherwise known as ‘the laughing Buddha’. Budai was well known for his pranks and mischief, and did not disappoint even in death. Knowing that he would be cremated, when he knew he was dying he stuffed his pockets with gunpowder and fireworks, so that his followers would be amazed and shocked – and would burst into fits of laughter – as his corpse exploded on the pyre at his own funeral. It is hard, I think, to imagine a greater triumph over death than this. It is also a wonderful example of the cheerfulness of mischievous people extending beyond life into death."
"The task of a philosopher: we should bring our will into harmony with whatever happens, so that nothing happens against our will and nothing that we wish for fails to happen."
-Epictetus, Discourses, 2.14.7
A long To-Do list seems intimidating and burdensome—all these things we have to do in the course of a day or week. But a Get-To-Do list sounds like a privilege—all the things we're excited about the opportunity to experience. This isn't just semantic playing. It is a central facet of the philosopher's world view.
-Ryan Holiday, excerpted from today's entry in The Daily Stoic
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