charmed..................

 

To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have.  An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.  To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.  Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins.  It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, from his essay El Dorado

On being you-ish.............

 

Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your path, your character, your life, should be the most unlikely, the most unexpected, the least predictable version you can make. Improbable lives have fewer competitors, more unique rewards, and are harder to replace with AIs, since AIs run on the predictable. . . .

The more you-ish you become, the less competition you have, because you are occupying your own niche. Less competition means you don’t have to be in a race; you can relax and focus on your strengths. You have the space to become even more you, and even less likely.

-Kevin Kelly, from this substack

On goals..........................

 

     There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation.

     When goals are created out of desperation, we feel an immense sense of scarcity and urgency.  They feel heavy, like a burden, and we may feel daunted by the colossal task we've just committed ourselves to.  Impostor syndrome and self-doubt begin to manifest, and we feel like we're always short on time.  We go about our lives frantically, desperately searching for ways to accomplish our goals faster, always looking externally to fill the void we feel internally.

     Worst of all, if we achieve the goal, soon after, all those feelings of lack begin to resurface again. . . .

     When we create goals out of inspiration, it's an entirely different story.  In this state, we are creating because we feel deeply moved, inspired, and expansive.  Our goals feel like a calling rather than an obligation.  We feel like a powerful force of life is coming from within us, wanting to be expressed through us and into the physical world.  This is why painters paint, dancers dance, writers write, and singers sing, even if they never get paid or make a living from it.  We feel pulled instead of forced to create something.  We gravitate towards it.  We feel compelled to do it.  When we feel like this, we create from a place of abundance instead of lack.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think

a worthy goal....................

 

     "When I am reading a book, whether wise of silly," Swift once wrote, "it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me."  The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William's morals.  Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, "The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head.  By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could."  That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

True, these..................

 

272.   One of my goals is to be an ambitious 85-year-old.

273:   Life is a series of continuing education classes.

-Michael Wade, Random Thoughts: Brief Reflections and Moments of Clarity

Grit....................

 

Vague goals massively underperform. “Try hard” is basically no goal at all. Effective goals have to be specific enough that you can say with certainty whether you hit them, and challenging enough to actually require something from you.

-Austin Scholar, from this edition

A worthy goal................

 

      via

anti-fragileness as a goal.............

 

The goal for both your body and finances is to make them anti-fragile systems. Growing stronger through controlled stress to avoid collapse under reckless intensity is the North Star for amplifying wealth and optimal health.

-Tony Isola, from here

A worthy goal................

 

     My only financial goal is to go to bed every night with a sense of calm, knowing my family is OK and that I can spend the next day doing what I want, when I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want.

-Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money:  Simple Choices for a Richer Life

A worthy aim......................

 

    Try this:  Write down what you want your obituary to say, then figure out how to live up to it.

-Morgan Housel

A worthy goal...........................

......................to live life in radical amazement.

it's windy out there, too..................

 

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

-attributed to Seneca

That's the goal.......................

 

trust......................

 

Smart leaders don't tell others how to do something.  They tell them the end results that need to be achieved.  Then they allow the other person to use their individual creativity to figure out the how.

-Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time

Good to have goals............

 

rearranged their brains...............

 

I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life, and while their temperaments run the gamut—lovable, aloof, enigmatic, even eccentric—they all have one thing in common.  They think differently than most people.  All of them, to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails.

-Brad Jacobs, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars

goals..................

 

Seemingly impossible goals are more practical than possible goals because impossible goals force you outside your current level of knowledge and assumptions.

-Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More By Doing Less

unlocking......................

Watching someone with a crazy goal give it everything they've got and then succeed is so powerful.  It's like magic, because it unlocks potential we didn't even know we had.  It shows us what is possible if we put our mind to something and then back that up with effort. 

-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

naysayers.........................

 

When it comes to you and your dreams, the naysayers have no idea what they are talking about.  And if they haven't done the things you are trying to do, the question you need to ask yourself is: Why should I ever listen to them?

     The answer is, you shouldn't. You should ignore them. Or better yet, hear what they have to say and then use it as motivation. . . .

     You have a choice with the naysayers you face on the road to achieving your goals.  You can ignore them or you can use them, you just can't ever believe them.

-Arnold Schwarzenegger,  Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

Seeing everything...................................

 

...................................................as a process.