Trust....................

 

Trust your own instinct.  Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

-attributed to Billy Wilder

On striverly instincts......................

 In my field of economics, we have something called "Stein's Law," named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  Obvious, right?  Well, when it comes to their own lives, people ignore it all the time.  But you ignore this about your professional success at your peril.  It will leave you falling further and further behind, shaking your fist at the heavens.

     There is another path, though, instead of denying change in your abilities, you can make the change itself a source of strength.  Instead of trying to avoid decline, you can transcend it by finding a new kind of success, better than what the world promises and not a source of neurosis and addiction: a deeper form of happiness than what you had before; and in the process, true meaning in life—maybe for the first time. . . .

     A word of caution, though: This path means going against many of your striverly instincts.  I'm going to ask you not to deny your weaknesses but rather to embrace them defenselessly.  To let go of some things in your life that you worked hard for—but that are now holding you back.  To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don't make you special.  To face decline—and even death—with courage and confidence.  To rebuild relationships you neglected on the long road to worldly success.  And to dive into the uncertainty of a transition you have worked so hard to evade.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

Part of the fabric...............

       Acquisitiveness is a universal phenomenon, among animals as well as human beings, children as well as adults, primitive peoples as well as those culturally advanced.  It is rooted in the instinct of self-preservation, but it also has an important psychological dimension in that it enhances feelings of self-assurance and competence.  Its objects are, in the first place, material goods, but it also has an incorporeal aspect, embracing ideas, artistic creations, inventions, and even the very space that surrounds us.  Claims to exclusive use are especially emphatic in respect to land with which humans are linked by mystic bonds.  The notion of primitive communism has not basis in fact: it is simply the ancient—and, apparently, indestructible—myth of the Golden Age dressed up in modern pseudo-scientific language.  Anthropology has not knowledge of societies ignorant of property rights: in the words of E. A. Hoebel cited above, "property is as ubiquitous as man, a part of the basic fabric of all society."  Which means, to employ Aristotelian terminology, that it is not merely a "legal" or "conventional" but a "natural" institution.  As such it is no more a subject of moralizing (unless it be for its excesses) than mortality or any other aspect of existence over which humans have at best minimal control.

-Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom

The genius of knowing what to ignore...............

 Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both right and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones.  In that assessment of his own abilities, Einstein was very likely overly modest.  But part of his genius was an instinct for what mattered and the ability to pursue it vertically and connect it horizontally.

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History