#and Jason looking all stoic and tough trying to lead this meeting | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

theadmiringbog · 7 years ago

Photo

Steven Pressfield

I’m 74. Believe me, you’ve got all the time in the world. You’ve got ten lifetimes ahead of you. Don’t worry about your friends “beating” you or “getting somewhere” ahead of you. Get out into the real dirt world and start failing. Why do I say that? Because the goal is to connect with your own self, your own soul. Adversity. Everybody spends their life trying to avoid it. Me too. But the best things that ever happened to me came during the times when the shit hit the fan and I had nothing and nobody to help me. Who are you really? What do you really want?

Susan Cain

I wanted writing to be a permanent source of pleasure, and never to be associated with financial stress or, more generally, the pressure to achieve.

Terry Crews

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession?

“Work hard to beat the competition.”

The truth is that competition is the opposite of creativity. If I am working hard to beat the competition, it actually prevents me from thinking creatively to make all concepts of competition obsolete.

This competitive mindset destroys people. It’s the scorched-earth way of thinking, and everyone is burned.

The truth is that you need the success of everyone in your field in order to achieve your own success. Creativity operates differently. You work hard because you’re inspired to, not because you have to. Work becomes fun, and you have energy for days because this life is not a “young man’s game.” It is an “inspired person’s game.”

In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? What new realizations and/or approaches helped?

I realized that I had to let people leave my life, never to return.

It’s the realization that there is a “will to pleasure,” a “will to power” and, in the words of Viktor Frankl, a “will to meaning.” You won’t take a bullet for pleasure or power, but you will for meaning.

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

–Niels Bohr Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner

“These individuals have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.”

–Seneca Roman Stoic philosopher, famed playwright

Mike Maples, Jr.

Ego is about who’s right. Truth is about what’s right.

“Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

—C. S. Lewis

Aniela Gregorek

... our Eating Out Jar, Happiness Jar, and others. The three of us are strong-willed individuals with distinct preferences, and the Eating Out Jar came out of a struggle. Each time we talked about going out to eat, we would spend so much energy bickering that we would be exhausted or discouraged by the time we finally chose. It was not fun. The same situation occurred with choosing an activity for the weekend.

Amelia Boone

For every major event in my life—everything from races to job changes to breakups—I assign a song. Most of these come organically: what I was listening to at the time, lyrics that spoke to me at a moment in my life, or a song I sang on repeat during a race (a common habit of mine). I keep these songs in a playlist, ordered chronologically. I can go back through and listen to that playlist and relive major experiences, both highs and lows, in my life.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

I define faith as the ability to hear the music beneath the noise.

...

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere, what would it say, and why? It would say three words: “Live. Give. Forgive.” They are by far the most important things in life.

Julia Galef

One distraction I’ve learned to avoid is consuming media that’s just telling me things I already know and agree with.”

Annie Duke

When two extreme opinions meet, the truth lies generally somewhere in the middle. Without exposure to the other side, you will naturally drift toward the extremes and away from the truth of the matter.

...

Poker has taught me to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn’t mean I failed, and just because I won doesn’t mean I succeeded—not when you define success and failure around making good decisions that will win in the long run.

What matters is the decisions I made along the way, and every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward. By doing this, losing becomes a less emotional experience and more an opportunity to explore and learn.

“There is no exact answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life.’ It’s like asking a chess master ‘what is the best move in the world?’ It all depends on what situation you are in.”

-- Victor Frankl

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

–Bill Gates Co-founder of Microsoft

“What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.”

—Hal Boyle

Maria Sharapova

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?

In my profession, losses are often seen as failures. Not being the person who wins the last point, walking off the court first. All those visible things. But internally, losing sets you up for winning. Losing makes you think in ways victories can’t. You begin asking questions instead of feeling like you have the answers. Questions open up the doors to so many possibilities. If a loss sets me up for those tough questions I might have to ask, then I will get the answers that will ultimately turn those losses into victories.

Jason Fried

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession?

No, don’t scale. Start small, stay as small as possible for as long as possible. Grow in control, not out of control.

“Raise capital to launch a software/services business.” No, bootstrap. As in life, we form business habits early on. If you raise money, you’ll get good at spending money. If you bootstrap, you’ll be forced to get good at making money.

...

I’ve always been pretty good at saying no, but over the last couple of years I’ve come up with a new rule. If the ask is more than a week away, I almost always say no, regardless of what is it. Exceptions include family things I need to attend, and a conference or two I really want to speak at, but other than that, if the “yes” would tie me to something further than a week or so out, it’s almost always a no.

I always explain why and say something like, “Thanks for the invitation, but I just can’t commit to anything more than a day or so in advance. I need to keep my schedule open for me and the people I work with on a regular basis. Best bet is to hit me up a day or two before you wanted to get together. If I’m available we can set up a time.”

Gary Vaynerchuk

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”?

Macro patience, micro speed. They should not care about the next eight years, but they should stress the next eight days. At a macro, I think everybody’s super impatient. I think I’m unbelievably patient in years and decades, and unbelievably sporadic and hyper every minute on a day-to-day basis. I genuinely think everybody’s the reverse. Everybody’s making decisions about, like, “What am I going to do at 25? I better do that. . . .” In years, they’re impatient and making dumb decisions, and then in days, they’re watching fucking Netflix. They’re super worried about 25 when they’re 22, yet they’re drinking every Thursday night at 7 P.M. They’re playing Madden. They’re fucking watching House of Cards. They’re spending four and a half hours on their Instagram feed every single day. This is super important. Everybody’s impatient at a macro, and just so patient at a micro, wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing the fuck out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out.

...

I still need a healthy balance of 20 percent yeses to things that seem dumb, because I believe in serendipity, and that’s an important balance that people struggle with.

Tim O’Reilly

Every morning, on my run, I try to take a picture of a flower and share it on Instagram. I was inspired to do this by a passage I read many years ago in a book by C. S. Lewis (I think it was The Great Divorce), in which a character, after death, only sees the flowers as blobs of color, and his spirit guide tells him, “That’s because you never really looked at them when you were alive.” As the line from Hamilton says, “Look around. Look around. How lucky we are to be alive right now!”

...

I have profited greatly from Esther Dyson’s advice about accepting speaking engagements: “Would I say yes if it were on Tuesday?” Because the day will come when it is on Tuesday.

...

We equate being smart and being driven as the ways to get ahead. But sometimes, an attitude of alert watchfulness is far wiser and more effective. Learning to follow your nose, pulling on threads of curiosity or interest, may take you places that being driven will never lead you to.

“Let life ripen and then fall. Will is not the way at all.”

—Lao Tzu, from The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu

Tom Peters

They say: “Think big! Have a compelling vision!” I say: Think small. Do something super cool by the end of the day!

...

I write about ��excellence.” Most see excellence as some grand aspiration. Wrong. Dead wrong. My two cents: Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

-- Albert Einstein

Brene Brown

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? What questions do you ask yourself?

Always these questions:

Sleep? Exercise? Healthy food? Am I resentful because I’m not setting or holding a boundary?

Leo Babauta

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

I am absurdly fond of minimalist aesthetics. I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from an empty room with just one piece of furniture and a plant. Sometimes I fantasize about owning nothing but an empty room!

Esther Dyson

Always take jobs for which you are not qualified; that way you will inevitably learn something. And do not drop out of college unless you truly have a better alternative.

Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse: This small, short book provided me a vocabulary to think about the meaning of life—not just my life, but all life! It gave me a mathematical framework for my own spirituality. As it says, the game is to keep the game going forever, to rope all beings into playing infinite games versus finite (win-lose) games, and to realize that there is only one infinite game.

Kevin Kelly

I learned far more about business from that $200 than from a debt-inducing MBA.

...

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore?

Don’t try to find your passion. Instead master some skill, interest, or knowledge that others find valuable. It almost doesn’t matter what it is at the start. You don’t have to love it, you just have to be the best at it. Once you master it, you’ll be rewarded with new opportunities that will allow you to move away from tasks you

Eric Ripert

An orb of shungite stone. Its incredible protective and healing qualities—mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical—can be felt by even the most skeptical people. One benefit relevant for many of us today: it diffuses negative waves from electronics.

...

Five or six years ago, I decided that I was going to live my life in three parts—one-third for my business, one-third for my family, one-third for myself.

“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.”

–Fred Rogers Creator of the famous television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

–Lao Tzu Chinese philosopher, author of Tao Te

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”

–Terry Pratchett English fantasy writer

Gabor Mate

If you’re really smart, you’ll drop the drivenness. It doesn’t matter what’s driving you; when you’re driven, you are like a leaf, driven by the wind. You have no real autonomy. You are bound to be blown off course, even if you reach what you believe is your goal. And don’t confuse being driven with being authentically animated by an inner calling. One state leaves you depleted and unfulfilled; the other fuels your soul and makes your heart sing.

John Arnold

The reality, best captured in The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, is that the long-term trend in almost every measure is resolutely positive. Optimism is a reflexive trait, with a circular relationship between cause and effect. The more optimistic society is about the future, the better the future is. These books serve as a reminder of the great advances.

Mr. Money Mustache

You are free for life once you have 25 to 30 times your annual spending locked up and working for you in low-fee index funds or other relatively boring investments. If you save the standard 15 percent of your income, this freedom arrives roughly at age 65. If you can crank that up to 65 percent, you’re free just after your 30th birthday, and you often end up a lot happier in the process. Of course, there are other ways to solve the money problem: Own a profitable business, or find work that is joyful enough to do it for life. But even these things happen more quickly if you don’t get mired in the earn-to-borrow-to-spend trap that is part of that big middle-class assumption.

David Lynch

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?

I sit and desire ideas.

Evan Williams

Mindfulness meditation, which I started doing regularly about five years ago, has changed my life more than any other behavior. I feel like it rewired my brain (probably because it did). At first, I felt the effects very powerfully. After a few years, it feels less dramatic but necessary. If I go more than a couple days without sitting, I feel off. Wish I had started many years before.

...

Be in a hurry to learn, not in a hurry to get validation. In a team environment, you will make a much better impression if it seems like you’re not at all worried about yourself. It’s okay to actually be worried about yourself—everyone is—just don’t seem like it. If you resist asking for too much, you will often get more.

Chris Anderson

The realization that the best way to get things done is to let go. Here’s the thing. . . . It’s often the case that people want to help you or work with you. But they can’t if you insist on holding on to tight control. The more you let go, the more people will surprise you.

...

Many of us have bought into the cliché “pursue your passion.” For many, that is terrible advice. In your 20s, you may not really know what your best skills and opportunities are. It’s much better to pursue learning, personal discipline, growth. And to seek out connections with people across the planet.

Michael Gervais

“Every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece.” We have far more control in our lives than many embrace. We create or co-create our experiences in life, and each day is a new opportunity to be fully engaged in the present moment. It’s the present moment where glimpses of our potential are revealed and expressed.

...

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?

“You can do anything you put your mind to.” Ah, no, that’s not accurate, and it reveals the advice-giver’s naiveté about human experiences.

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

–G. K. Chesterton English philosopher known as the “prince of paradox”

“All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.”

–John Gunther American journalist

Katrin Tanja Davidstodir

If you are asking about an exercise, I would say it is basic “fitness.” It is hanging out around your lactic threshold for an extended period of time—it’s hard. But that’s where the magic happens. It’s not going guns blazing through a workout and it’s not “talking pace.” It’s hanging out right where you might start dropping off soon but you can hold on. Once your general fitness is higher, your recovery is better between lifts and between events; it translates into so many other things.

Terry Laughlin

My five steps to mastery:

Choose a worthy and meaningful challenge.

Seek a sensei or master teacher (like George Leonard) to help you establish the right path and priorities.

Practice diligently, always striving to hone key skills and to progress incrementally toward new levels of competence.

Love the plateau. All worthwhile progress occurs through brief, thrilling leaps forward followed by long stretches during which you feel you’re going nowhere. Though it seems as if we’re making no progress, we are turning new behaviors into habits. Learning continues at the cellular level . . . if you follow good practice principles.

Mastery is a journey, not a destination. True masters never believe they have attained mastery. There is always more to be learned and greater

Drew Houston

If I had a cheat sheet I could give myself at 22, it would have three things on it: a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000.

The tennis ball is about finding something that you can become obsessed with, like my childhood dog who would go crazy whenever anyone threw a ball for her. The most successful people I know are all obsessed with solving a problem that really matters to them.

The circle refers to the idea that you’re the average of your five closest friends. Make sure to put yourself in an environment that pulls the best out of you.

And the last is the number 30,000. When I was 24, I came across a website that says most people live for about 30,000 days—and I was shocked to find that I was already 8,000 days down.

...

Make sure the problem you become obsessed with is one that needs solving and is one where your contribution can make a difference. As Y Combinator says, “Make something people want.”

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.”

–Louis L’Amour

Muneeb Ali

Asking myself the question, “When I’m old, how much would I be willing to pay to travel back in time and relive the moment that I’m experiencing right now?”

Steven Pinker

Find a new topic or area or concern that has a small number of people you respect behind it, but which has not become a culture-wide fad or conventional wisdom. If it’s already common knowledge, it’s probably too late to make a major contribution. If you’re the only one excited, you may be deluding yourself.

Ignore advice to simply follow your intuition or gut without thinking through whether the course of action is likely to be fruitful and rewarding.

Focus on effectiveness—what your actions will actually accomplish—and not self-actualization or other ways of trying to feel good about yourself.

Don’t think that the arts and verbal professions are the only respectable occupations (a common mindset of grandchildren of workers). The elites sneer at commerce as tawdry, but it’s what gives people what they want and need, and pays for everything else, including the luxury of art.

Think about what you will add to the world. Some lucrative professions (e.g., ultra-high-tech finance) are dubious applications of human brainpower.

Whitney Cummings

There’s something very liberating about being dirty, because then you don’t have to worry about getting dirty.

...

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?

“Network.” In creative fields, I think networking actually hurts you in most cases. Don’t waste your time socializing with people who you think can help you. Just get better, and opportunities will naturally present themselves once you deserve them. Only focus on things within your control. And if you don’t know what those things are, find someone who can tell you. Don’t network, just work.

Rick Rubin

What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?

Anything having to do with commercial success. Anything having to do with testing things, doing polls, or getting public opinion on your work so you can change it. Anything suggesting a safe path and anything suggesting a stable situation, especially in the beginning. When you start out doing something, you’re likely charting uncharted territory, and it’s good to ask a lot of questions from people in the industry and to learn from them. Remember, though, when people give you advice, they’re giving you advice based on their particular skills, experiences, and perspectives. So know that when you get expert advice, it’s often people telling you about their journey, and every journey is different.

Ben Silberman

Even at the company, every week I show employees the current week within the year visually, just to remind them that every week matters.

...

I left Google in 2008 to start a company, and the first two or three things didn’t work out. Pinterest launched in 2010. It didn’t really start growing quickly for another year or two, and it really took off around 2012. That’s a four-year period where things weren’t going awesome. But, I thought: “That’s not that long. That’s like med school before you go into residency.”

Yuval Noah Harari

Nobody really knows what the world and the job market will look like in 2040, hence nobody knows what to teach young people today. Consequently, it is likely that most of what you currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time you are 40.

So what should you focus on? My best advice is to focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence.

Change is usually stressful, and after a certain age, most people don’t like to change. When you are 16, your entire life is change, whether you like it or not. Your body is changing, your mind is changing, your relationships are changing—everything is in flux. You are busy inventing yourself. By the time you are 40, you don’t want change. You want stability. But in the twenty-first century, you won’t be able to enjoy that luxury. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, some stable job, some stable worldview, you will be left behind, and the world will fly by you.

Don’t trust the adults too much. In the past, it was a safe bet to trust adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the 21st century is going to be different. Whatever the adults have learned about economics, politics, or relationships may be outdated. Similarly, don’t trust technology too much. You must make technology serve you, instead of you serving it. If you aren’t careful, technology will start dictating your aims and enslaving you to its agenda.

Lorenzo stopped the action and walked around the net. He spoke quietly: “When I was a young player in Italy, nine or ten years old,” he said, “my coach gave me a rule: I could make mistakes, but I couldn’t make the same mistake twice. If I was hitting balls into the net, he would say, ‘I don’t care if you hit balls over the fence or anywhere else, but you’re not allowed to hit any more balls into the net. That’s the only rule.’”

Most of the time, “What should I do with my life?” is a terrible question. “What should I do with this tennis serve?” “What should I do with this line at Starbucks?” “What should I do with this traffic jam?” “How should I respond to the anger I feel welling up in my chest?” These are better questions. Excellence is the next five minutes, improvement is the next five minutes, happiness is the next five minutes.

This doesn’t mean you ignore planning. I encourage you to make huge, ambitious plans. Just remember that the big-beyond-belief things are accomplished when you deconstruct them into the smallest possible pieces and focus on each “moment of impact,” one step at a time. I’ve had a life full of doubts . . . mostly for no good reason.

Based on everything I’ve seen, a simple recipe can work: focus on what’s in front of you, design great days to create a great life, and try not to make the same mistake twice.

#Tribe of Mentors #books

1 note · View note