In the background.........................

Bruce Springsteen...................The Rising Album

  

reaching..................

 Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting — in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard — reaching for the highest that is in us — becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success. Success is the maximum utilization of the ability that you have.

-attributed to Zig Ziglar, from here

patiently and persistently...............

 For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong.

-Bill W.

guardianship...................

. . . we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.  When great and kinglike riches fall into the hands of a bad master, they are dispersed straightway, but even a moderate fortune, when bestowed upon a wise guardian, increases by use: and in like manner our life has great opportunities for one who knows how to dispose of it to the best advantage. 

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On The Shortness of Life

pursuit.....................

. . . by embracing the pursuit of happiness, we rob ourselves of happiness in the here and now.  We fail to appreciate who we are and what we've done to this point.

-Dan Sullivan/Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and The Gain 

single-player..................

 Training yourself to be happy is completely internal.  There is no external progress, no external validation.  You are competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.

-Naval Ravikant

Beating up on Malthus.....................

     Malthus had quite accurately foretold the one phenomenon [population explosion], but had missed the other altogether [productivity increases].  Why? Because of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone. . . . They all thought they were making sober predictions based on the best knowledge that was available to them.  In reality they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Recommended.................

 

A one-day workweek...................

 Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.

-Cal Newport, from here