“No one is going to stand up and hand you a plate of progress in life. You must make progress by your own sheer will, discipline, and efforts every day.”
– Brendon Burchard
Progress
Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
(via)
Service
“It is high time that the ideal of success should be replaced by the ideal of service.”
– Albert Einstein
Let the Connection Be What It Is
“when you meet that person. a person. one of your soulmates. let the connection. relationship be what it is. it may be five mins. five hours. five days. five months. five years. a lifetime. let it manifest itself, the way it is meant to. it has an organic destiny. this way if it stays or if it leaves, you will be softer from having been loved this authentically. souls come into, return, open, and sweep through your life for a myriad of reasons, let them be who and what they are meant.”
― Nayyirah Waheed
Slow Growth
“The more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Loyalty
“Our modern, rootless times do seem to be a particularly inhospitable environment for loyalty. We come and go so relentlessly that our friendships can’t but come and go too. What sort of loyalty is there in the age of Facebook, when friendship is a costless transaction, a business of flip reciprocity…. Friendship held together by nothing more permanent than hyperlinks is hardly the stuff of selfless fidelity.”
– Eric Felten
Love That Will Be Ready
“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”
― Nayyirah Waheed
C’est rare…
“C’est rare, un chat qui vous regarde dans le yeux.”
– Jean Paul Sartre
(via)
Defined by What We Create
A quote by Mark Stevenson taken from this CreativeMornings/London talk.
Parenthood
“i do not expect my child’s respect.
just because i have given birth to their life.
does not mean they owe me.
anything.
what i want most
is to look into my child’s eyes
and
see
that i have given birth
to
a
heart.
have
honored.
held and feed.
someones
heart.
from the moment we first met.
and
they love me for it.”
― Nayyirah Waheed
Creativity
“Creativity is paying attention and putting a light on things we might otherwise overlook.” — Wendy MacNaughton
(via Jocelyn)
Defining Authenticity
“…We call a brand or a person authentic when they’re consistent, when they act the same way whether or not someone is looking. Someone is authentic when their actions are in alignment with what they promise.
Showing up as a pro.
Keeping promises.
Even when you don’t feel like it.
Especially when you don’t.”
– Seth Godin
Read the full post defining authenticity.
Our Work
“We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.”
– Steven Pressfield
(via)
Paradox
“The first and truest thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful gift, and it’s impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It’s been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It’s so hard and weird that we sometimes wonder if we’re being punked. It’s filled simultaneously with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don’t think it’s an ideal system.”
(via Bailey)
Pleasure / Happiness
Pleasure is short-term, addictive and selfish. It’s taken, not given. It works on dopamine.
Happiness is long-term, additive and generous. It’s giving, not taking. It works on serotonin.
Read Seth Godin’s full post on this topic.
Not Everything…
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
– James Baldwin
(A quote taken away from Paola Mendoza’s powerful CreativeMornings talk in NYC last Friday. I will share as soon as it is online!)
Connected With Everything
“If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.”
– Alan Watts
Culture
“A single change can happen overnight, but nothing is going to suddenly transform culture. Culture is cumulative—it’s composed of all previous decisions made by a group of people. Bit by bit, a company can make different trade-offs, and over time, this is how culture turns around.”
– Greg McKeown in this article.
(via Bailey)
How Emotions Are Made
“Utka Eskimos have no concept of “Anger.” The Tahitians have no concept of “Sadness.” This last item is very difficult for Westerners to accept… life without sadness? Really? When Tahitians are in a situation that a Westerner would describe as sad, they feel ill, troubled, fatigued, or unenthusiastic, all of which are covered by their broader term pe’ape’a.”
From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, via an article on New Neuroscience Reveals 3 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent
Every Once In A While
Always coming back to Debbie Millman’s illustrated essay of timeless advice on courage and the creative life.
“Every once in a while — often when we least expect it — we encounter someone more courageous, someone who choose to strive for that which (to us) seemed unrealistically unattainable, even elusive. And we marvel. We swoon. We gape. Often , we are in awe. I think we look at these people as lucky, when in fact, luck has nothing to do with it. It is really about the strength of their imagination; it is about how they constructed the possibilities for their Life. In short, unlike me, they didn’t determine what was impossible before it was even possible.”
Limits
“The fears you don’t face, become your limits.”
– Robin Sharma
(via Risk Happy)
Just Go Fucking Do It
‘I wish you luck, and stubbornness, and the absence of the need for a permission slip from anybody. Just go fucking do it.’
– Elizabeth Gilbert
Via this interview with Rachel Khong on okreal.co
Courage
“Courage is a love affair with the unknown.”
— Osho
Change Is For The Better
“All change is change for the better. There is no such thing as “change for the worse.” Change is the process of Life Itself, and that process could be called by the name “evolution.” And evolution moves in only one direction: forward, and toward improvement. Therefore, when change visits your life, you can be sure things are turning for the better. It may not look that way in the very moment change arrives, but if you will wait a while and have faith in the process, you will see that this is true.”
— Neale Donald Walsch