“…decide…whether or not the goal is worth the risks involved. If it is, stop worrying….”
– Amelia Erhart
Stop Worrying
Library Burning
“When an old person dies it’s like a library burning.”
Overheard at The Nantucket Project
Procrastinate
“… to procrastinate is to mourn the precariousness of your creation even before you bring it into the world.”
Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination, by Costica Bradatan
(via)
Your Reputation
“The single best way to maintain your reputation is to do things you’re proud of. Gaming goes only so far.”
– Seth Godin
Enlarge the Box
“Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”
— The Art of Possibility, by Benjamin and Rosamund Stone Zander
(via Paul)
Email Zombies
“There are two types of emailers: reactors, who rely on notifications and near-constant monitoring of their inboxes to nibble away at their email throughout the day, and batchers, who set aside specific chunks of time to power through their email, so they can ignore it the rest of the day. Not surprisingly, batchers are significantly more productive when it comes to getting shit done, and according to recent research, they’re also less stressed and more happy.”
Don’t Let Email Zombies Eat Up Your Day, by Jocelyne K. Glei
Happiness Floats
“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to attend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change. But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything… Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye
(via Emilie)
Letting Go
“Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.”
– Hermann Hesse
Creativity
“there is no healthier drug than creativity.”
― Nayyirah Waheed
When Nobody is Looking
“You know, I’m not a huge fan of the concept of ‘passion’ when it comes to careers. Instead of trying to answer the daunting question of ‘What’s your passion?’ it’s better simply to watch what you do when you’ve got time of your own and nobody’s looking.”
– Daniel H. Pink
Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.
“When we remove ego, we’re left with what is real. What replaces ego is humility, yes—but rock-hard humility and confidence. Whereas ego is artificial, this type of confidence can hold weight. Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.”
– Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
The Capacity To Be Alone
“The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it’s not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person–without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.”
― Osho
(via Alex)
Momentum
“Never sacrifice momentum. I might know a better path, but if we’ve got a lot of momentum, if everyone’s united and they’re marching together and the path is O.K., just go with the flow. I may eventually nudge them down a new path, but never stop the troops mid march.”
– Ben Chestnut
Afraid of Nothing
“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.”
– Mary Oliver
Lesser Life
“do not choose the lesser life. do you hear me. do you hear me. choose the life that is. yours. the life that is seducing your lungs. that is dripping down your chin.”
― Nayyirah Waheed
Eternal Recurrence
“Eternal recurrence”: A sense of contentment with one’s life and an acceptance of it, such that one could live exactly the same life, in all its minute details, over and over for all eternity.
– Nietzsche
(via)
The Only Thing That Counts
“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.”
– Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes on the Universal Inner Child, in a Moving Letter to His Son
Human Nature
“My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways — and that’s okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we’re all these incredibly fragile beings.”
– Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton on What Makes a Good Communicator and the Difficult Art of Listening in Intimate Relationships
The Scariest Moment
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King
Where We Started
“And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
– T.S. Eliot
(via)
All Right, Call Me A Businessman
“…When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is – you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman.”
Phil Knight, Founder of Nike in Shoe Dog – A Memoir
5 mins. 5 hours. 5 days. 5 years. a lifetime
“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
Almost Here
Quote by Nayyirah Waheed.