“Never waste valuable time or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others — that is too high a price to pay.” — Robert Greene The world may feel off-kilter, and in fact it surely is, but we must choose a path of productivity and consequence anyway. We can’t produce anything consequential if we’re…
“One of the virtues of mortality, if one wishes to look for such a virtue, is the reminder that choices really do matter and that the issue of permission to make those choices is now critical and necessary. It may well lead one to realize that a life managed by fear is a life unlived….
“Understand the superior value of getting what you want through hard work.” — @robertgreene Want a bit of perspective on work? Spend a weekend digging holes for fence posts, raking the yard, hauling bags of cement or other manual labor. That was my weekend, and I’m grateful for the reminder of what can be done…
“The greatest battle of all is with yourself—your weaknesses, your emotions, your lack of resolution in seeing things through to the end. You must declare unceasing war on yourself.” — Robert Greene We all have our moment-to-moment skirmishes with ourselves. We fight through our worst traits or we succumb to them. It’s easy to let…
I’ll finish the year having read somewhere between 34-36 books. That includes some heavy lifting non-fiction, some escapist pager turner fiction and a couple of books of poetry. All but one are older classics that I finally tackled in 2021. We ought to live a bit outside ourselves more often, and reading is an easy…
“The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests?…
“Men honor what lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but do not realize how dependent they are on what lies beyond it.” – Zhuang Zhou “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people are so full of doubts.” – Bertrand Russell Robert Greene,…
“There are cues and subtle aspects you can only pick up through a person-to-person interaction—such as a way of doing things that has evolved through much experience. These patterns of action are hard to put into words, and can only be absorbed through much personal exposure.” – Robert Greene, Mastery If we were to agree…
“We humans live in two worlds. First, there is the outer world of appearances—all of the forms of things that captivate our eye. But hidden from our view is another world—how these things actually function, their anatomy or composition, the parts working together and forming the whole. This second world is not so immediately captivating….
“What prevents people from learning… is not the subject itself—the human mind has limitless capabilities—but rather certain learning disabilities that tend to fester and grow in our minds as we get older. These include a sense of smugness and superiority whenever we encounter something alien to our ways, as well as rigid ideas about what…