KEVIN COSTNER
“Being an entrepreneur is being willing to do a job that nobody else wants to do, (in order) to be able to live the rest of your life doing whatever you want to do.”
SAM HARRIS
“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good…. If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”
MINDFULNESS AND MENTAL CHATTER
“’Mindfulness’ is just that quality of mind which allows you to pay attention to sights and sounds and sensations and even thoughts themselves, without being lost in thought and without grasping at what is pleasant and pushing what is unpleasant away.” “We’re so deeply conditioned to be lost in thought and to have this conversation with ourselves from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. It’s just chatter in the mind and it’s so captivating that we’re not even aware of it. We are essentially in a dream state and it’s through this veil of thought that we go about our day and perceive our environment. But we are just talking to ourselves nonstop and until you can break that spell and begin to notice thoughts themselves as objects of consciousness, just arising and passing away, you can’t even pay attention to your breath, or to anything else, with any clarity.”
CAROLINE PAUL
FRAGILITY IS OVERRATED
“I hope no one gets injured, but injury is not as bad as people think. To not do something because you might get injured is a terrible reason not to do something.”
MY FAVOURITE THOUGHT EXERCISE: FEAR SETTING
“Many a false step was made by standing still.” – Fortune cookie
“Name must your fear be before banish it you can.” – Yoda, from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
The Power of Pessimism: Defining the Nightmare
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” – Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister
Conquering Fear = Defining Fear
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared’” – Seneca
Q&A: Questions and Actions
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” – Mark Twain
KEVIN KELLY
“Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative and experiences.”
SIT, SIT. WALK, WALK. DON’T WOBBLE.
“The Zen mantra is ‘Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don’t wobble.’… It’s this idea that when I’m with a person, that’s total priority. Anything else is multitasking. No, no, no, no. The people-to-people, person-to-person trumps anything else. I have given my dedication to this. If I go to a play or a movie, I am at the movie. I am not anywhere else. It’s 100% - I am going to listen.”
TF: In a world of distraction, single-tasking is a superpower.
THE WORST CASE: A SLEEPING BAG AND OATMEAL
“One of the many life skills that you want to learn at a fairly young age is the skill of being an ultra-thrifty, minimal kind of little wisp that’s traveling through time… in the sense of learning how little you actually need to live, not just in a survival mode, but in a contented mode… That gives you the confidence to take a risk, because you say ‘What’s the worst that can happen? Well, the worst that can happen is that I’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag and I’d be eating oatmeal. And I’d be fine.’”
IS THIS WHAT I SO FEARED?
“Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify… A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The following is an excerpt from “On Festivals and Fasting” letter 18 from The Moral Letters to Lucilius, which Seneca wrote to his pupil Lucilius.
“… Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence.”
“Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more, so that it may be a test of yourself instead of a mere hobby. The, I assure you, my dear Lucilius, you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune; for, even when angry, she grants enough for our needs.”
WHITNEY CUMMINGS
“PEOPLE-PLEASING IS A FORM OF ASSHOLERY”
“You’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re also not giving them the dignity of their own experience and (assuming) they can’t handle the truth. It’s patronizing.”
BRYAN CALLEN
“Happiness is wanting what you have.”
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IN A COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT SPEECH?
“We are wired and programmed to do what’s safe and what’s sensible. I don’t think that’s the way to go.”
“I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible. That’s what makes the world a better place to live.”
ALAIN DE BOTTON
“When people seem like they are mean, they’re almost never mean. They’re anxious.”
OFFENSE VERSUS DEFENSE
“The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, (that’s when) the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static start to loom large and become very threatening.”
DON’T EXPECT OTHERS TO UNDERSTAND YOU
“To blame someone for not understanding you fully is deeply unfair because, first of all, we don’t understand ourselves, and even if we do understand ourselves, we have such a hard time communicating ourselves to other people.”
LAZY: A MANIFESTO
The essay that follows is excerpted from that book. (We Learn Nothing, by Tim Kreider)
“Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t working or doing something to promote their work.”
“Even children are busy now… I was a member of the latchkey generation, and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon… all of which afforded me knowledge, skills, and insights that remain valuable to this day.”
“Even though my own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. And I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder, write more, and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night with Lauren, one last good hard laugh with Harold. Life is too short to be busy.”
Novembro, 2020