Never...................

 

Guard your speech.  Never speak of yourself, your affairs, or of anything else in a discouraged or discouraging way.  Never admit the possibility of failure, or speak in a way that infers failure as a possibility.  Never speak of the times as being hard, or of business conditions being doubtful.  Times may be hard and business conditions doubtful for those who are on the competitive plane, but they can never be for you; you can create what you want, and you are above fear.  When others are having hard times and poor business, you will find your greatest opportunities.

Train yourself to think of and to look upon the world as something which is Becoming, which is growing; and to regard seeming evil as being only that which is undeveloped.  Always speak in terms of advancement; to do otherwise us to deny your faith, and to deny your faith is to lose it.  Never allow yourself to feel disappointed.  You may expect to have a certain thing at a certain time, and not get it at that time; and this will appear to you like failure.  But if you hold to your faith you will find that the failure is only apparent.  Go on in the certain way, and if you do not receive that thing, you will receive something so much better that you will see that the seeming failure was really a great success.

-Wallace D. Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich

The problem is never just the problem..........

.......It's the response to it that defines your team.

from this Tanmay Vora post

the pilgrimage...................

 

     These spiritual masters understood that a spirituality that begins in the acceptance that one is not "in control" necessarily involves a flexible attitude, which requires a mistrust of the rigidities of certainty.  If life is "unmanageable"—and, of course, at time it is—there will necessarily be sudden surprises, unexpected twists and turns, unforeseen detours.  In recognizing spirituality's—life's—open-endedness, we learn to be flexible and adaptable, thus protecting ourselves from the tendency to want to fix things "once and for all."  Hold fast to the "now" means "hang on and enjoy the ride," for we never know (and we can't control) where the vicissitudes of the pilgrimage that is spirituality will take us.

     The modern mind—so enthralled by technique, so oriented to efficient production and "bottom-line" results, so obsessed with comfort and predictability—approaches the concept of pilgrimage with wariness and puzzlement.  Why backtrack and sidestep when you can march straight ahead?  The word vicissitudes, with its promise of ups and downs, its suggestion of successes and failures, its reminder that we cannot "march straight ahead," is unsettling and disorienting for those who equate progress with perfection.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

"an atmosphere of persistent edginess".........

 

By nearly any material or technological measure, humanity has never been so prosperous, so capable, or so close to receiving the full blessings of science properly ordered to human need.

That does not mean everything is fine. It means despair is a distortion of reality. We are so accustomed to hearing what is broken that we forget to notice what is being built

-Jamie Wilson, advocating for some thoughtful perspective

Never surrender.........................

 

     Gibran's bitter denunciation of both religious and political injustice prevailing at the time, brought about his anticipated exile from the country and his excommunication from the church, although his parents were staunch Maronites.  It was the story, Khalil the Heretic, in particular which drove the Sultan and his Emirs into trepidation and cause nervous authorities in the entire Middle and Near East to examine their governments.

    Gibran was quietly pursuing painting with his friend Rodin in Paris when he learned of the ceremonial destruction of his book, and he merely expressed the thought that it was excellent cause for the issuance of a second edition.

-Martin L. Wolf, from the Preface to Gibran's Spirits Rebellious

unwavering..................

 

Let your energy impact the people you're talking to, as opposed to the other way around.

     For a recent and slightly cynical college graduate, Randy's sunny optimism could sometimes stretch the limits of belief.  Ask him how his day was going, and he would say, "You know, man, I'm trying to make today the very best day of my life."  I might have rolled my eyes, but that kind of unwavering positivity turned out to be impossible to resist . . .

-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality

iron..............................

 

Whenever you think that some situation of some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who is ruining your life. . . Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.  If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it as best you can—the so-called "iron prescription"—I think that really works.

-Charlie Munger

The wisdom of Calvin..............

 

via

On the "killer instinct".....

I saw a screenshot of a Reddit post recently from a person who wondered aloud why rich people continue to work, because this person said that the whole point of getting rich was that you wouldn’t have to work anymore. I know one thing for sure—that person is never going to be rich.

-Jared Dillian, from this substack post

Natural Resources..............

 

In speaking of the great resources of this country it should be kept in mind that the greatest of these is not the money in the banks, nor the minerals in the ground, nor the trees in the forest, nor the richness of our soil; but it is the mental attitude, and the imagination, and the pioneering spirit of the men who have mixed experience and education with these raw materials, thereby transferring them into various types of useful service for our own people and for the people of other nations.

-Andrew Carnegie, as quoted here

great is the responsibility.................

 

The time at which I stand before you is full of interest. The eyes of all nations are fixed on our Republic. The event of the existing crisis will be decisive in the opinion of mankind of the practicability of our federal system of government. Great is the stake placed in our hands; great is the responsibility which must rest upon the people of the United States. Let us realize the importance of the attitude in which we stand before the world. Let us exercise forbearance and firmness. Let us extricate our country from the dangers which surround it and learn wisdom from the lessons they inculcate.

-Andrew Jackson, from his second inaugural address, March 4, 1833

Self-help............................

 

"Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life.  It is such a simple idea.  Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life.  If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it's always your fault and you just fix it the best you can - the so-called "iron prescription" - I think that really works.

-Charlie Munger, as channeled by Peter Bevelin

utilize.......................

High-hope people take every experience they have as a learning experience—no matter the experience.   Everything happens for them, not to them.  They utilize every experience to improve how they live and approach life.

-Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, 10x Is Easier Than 2x

Walking with joy..................

 

......................through the valley of the shadow. . .

a product.......................

 

Material possessions can be here today and gone tomorrow, and if your happiness is tied up in them, it too can be here today and gone tomorrow.  But happiness, a product of a mindset that combines curiosity, the joy of perpetual intellectual discovery, and an appreciation of life's experiences, can be more lasting.

-Gad Saad,  The Saad Truth About Happiness

More homework.....................

 

What would make cooking a spiritual practice rather than mere work is cultivating a sense for what is sacred and doing you best to bring that alive in the world of the kitchen.

-Edward Espe Brown,  No Recipe: Cooking as a Spiritual Practice

leakage.................

 The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.

-George Will, as excerpted here

refuse.......................

 In particular, the Stoics don't think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter.  If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self by conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

Yes, and..............................

 We need patience and curiosity rather than fear and reactivity.

-Tony Isola, from here

Recommended...........................*

 

He knew how to make us more afraid of letting each other down than we were of any opponent.

To my surprise, Hakeem turned around and left.  That's when I learned that, for fear to win, you have to be afraid, and for that moment, I wasn't.

. . . the true measure of a competitor is not by the number of opponents they defeat, but by what they do to surpass what they have already accomplished.

Live on the edge, play on the edge, but never hurt the team.

The play would be a textbook example of the age-old cliche: it's not how you start, but how you finish.  Effort and finish had become my most consistent attributes.

Every friend ain't your brother, and every brother ain't your friend.

I had just learned a lesson about how money works.  It's not about using your labor as the sole source of all your income.  It's about using your labor to acquire cash that you save that gives you an opportunity to leverage credit or assets to buy other assets that make you money.

They'll tell athletes all the time that your financial advisor, your agent, your marketing rep, all these people work for you, you should be the boss, and most of us are unprepared to be a boss, and quite frankly, I had to learn that those people actually don't work for you.

During the national anthem, I gave a strong prayer to my ancestors.  I knew I was going to need all the help I could get, so I prayed for toughness, poise, and love.  All that I hoped they passed down onto me.

*although I wish his editor had worked a little harder