Roger Federer's really good commencement address at Dartmouth, 2024......

      "Negative energy is wasted energy"

 

Checking in....................................

 

......................................with Albert Ellis:

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.

You never truly need what you want. That is the main and thoroughgoing key to serenity.

Convince yourself that worrying about many situations will make them worse rather than improve them.

The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better. But you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.

You mainly feel the way you think.

There's no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

Being assertive does not mean attacking or ignoring others feelings. It means that you are willing to hold up for yourself fairly-without attacking others.

There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.

The goal of all life is to have a ball.

On self-care........................

 

Spending your days, day after day, not caring is a tragedy.

-Seth Godin

A few more books...........................

 

.............................in the mail.

thanks Chris

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

          R.E.M.........................Around the Sun

 

On sorting out the future..................

 

In fact, many of its founding faculty were misfits in the most productive sense: outsiders in their own disciplines, a veritable Salon des Refusés. We weren’t solving problems. We were developing solutions without knowing the problems. That’s how breakthroughs happen, at the edges, where curiosity is free to wander and orthodoxy is politely ignored.

-Nicholas Negroponte, from this post

reality...........................

Eventually, reality rears its ugly head, and we recalibrate around what reality permits

-Mark Mills, as excerpted from here

Might depend on who "we" is...........

 

 The bigger the government gets, the less we get in return.

-Brian Wesbury, from here

a liberation...................

 

I just find when it comes to your finances, there is a liberation to limiting yourself where defining the things you won’t spend money on, won’t invest in, won’t pay attention to or won’t waste your time on are often more important than the things you will partake in.

-Ben Carlson, as cut-and-pasted from here

a perfect storm..................

 

In a society where many young people long to become “social influencers”, the news media misses a major White House cover-up which was conducted before their very eyes, and the population of those who are “famous for being famous” seems to grow, AI may be arriving during a perfect storm of shallowness.

-Michael Wade, from this substack episode

Martin Gurri is a national treasure.............

 

My moral sphere is a small world, a limited space. The necessary virtues aren’t complex: humility with my family, integrity at work, neighborliness in my community—add loyalty to friends, and one has the basic package.

-from this Discourse post

beyond.......................

 

. . . he was a prophet of tolerance.  Focusing on doctrinal disputes was divisive, he felt, and trying to ascertain divine certainties was beyond our mortal ken.  Nor did he think that such endeavors were socially useful.  The purpose of religion should be to make men better and to improve society, and any sect or creed that did so was fine with him.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

trained and developed..............

 

     The idea of the imagination as a muscle—as a faculty of the mind that could be trained and developed—had lodged with me.

-Albert Read, from his Introduction to The Imagination Muscle: Where Good Ideas Come From (And How to Have More of Them)

less............................

 

In a world without digital privacy, even if you have done nothing wrong other than think differently, you begin to censor yourself.  Not entirely at first.  Just a little, bit by bit.  To risk less, to hope less, to imagine less, to dare less, to create less, to talk less, to think less.  The chilling effect of digital surveillance is profound and it touches everything.  What a small, unimaginative world we would end up with.  Not entirely at first.  Just bit by bit.

-Tim Cook, from his 2019 speech at Stanford

A pretty good speech............

Tim Cook's 2019 Stanford Commencement address

 

start.......................

 

Success today starts last night.

-Jacob Emery

feeling...........................

 

Crucially, aliveness isn’t the same as happiness. As the Zen teacher Christian Dillo explains in his engrossing book The Path of Aliveness, you can absolutely feel alive in the midst of intense sadness. Aliveness, he writes, “isn’t about feeling better; it’s about feeling better.” When I feel aliveness in my work, it’s not because every task is an unadulterated pleasure; and when I feel it in my close relationships, it’s not because I’ve transcended the capacity to get annoyed by other people – because believe me, I haven’t.

-Oliver Burkeman

Part of the joy of living......

 

.........is exchanging good books with good friends.

Let’s talk for a minute about the etiquette of gifting books. The etiquette is that you probably shouldn’t do it. First of all, there is a 99% chance that you’re going to gift a book that someone won’t like. You’re gifting it because you like it, but you don’t know what the other person likes, so it will probably sit on a shelf somewhere. Second of all, it’s like gifting someone a vacuum cleaner. Great, but now I have to spend ten hours cleaning the house.

-Jared Dillian

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

........................................Mt. Joy

 

Provided the judgment...................

................doesn't come with condemnation:

 A man is morally free when ... he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

-George Santayana

Be not afraid of being wrong.........

 

Being wrong isn’t something to fear but rather something to expect.

-Farnum Street

misuse........................

 I would counter that the purpose of putting limits on yourself is not only to encourage the other side to reciprocate. It is to safeguard against your own fallibility. The problem with authoritarianism is not just that the other guy might misuse power. It is also that you might misuse it.

-Arnold Kling, from this episode