Category: Life
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What does success mean to you, now?
You’ve probably changed a lot this year. Certainly in the past few. Does your definition of success keep up with where you are now, or where you want to go in the future? If you’re making a professional pivot, or you’re turning a company around—in other words, changing the course of your work or life…
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Playing injured
Professional athletes play in all sorts of conditions. They play when they’re injured. They play when they’re sick with the flu. They play through heartbreak. It’s not ideal, but setbacks happen—and athletes keep playing. This philosophy and practice can apply to all sorts of other fields. (For example, advertisers keep advertising.) When you play through…
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The pinnacle of success
“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.” Orlando Aloysius Battista, via MoneyZen by Manisha Thakor
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Dealing in hope
One can lead a nation only by helping it see a bright outlook. A leader is a dealer in hope. Napoléon Bonaparte (via Prehistoric by Alex Wong)
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Finding echoes of other people in yourself
So I’d say, to the extent I can, that the image came in parts, and congealed when I started writing. For me, creating a character is like acting. I have to imagine being them. Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. And when I imagined being the boy in this story, these…
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“Happy-when” people
Shane Parrish writes in Clear Thinking: Running on the hedonic treadmill only turns us into what I call “happy-when” people—those who think they’ll be happy when something happens. For example, we’ll be happy when we get the credit we deserve, or happy when we make a bit more money, or happy when we find that…
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The failure and the learning
Shane Parrish writes in Clear Thinking: Experts can tell you all the ways they’ve failed. They know and accept that some form of failure is often part of the learning process. Imitators, however, are less likely to own up to mistakes because they’re afraid it will tarnish the image they’re trying to project. Because failure…
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Audiobooks are books
Simon Sarris makes the case we should treat audiobooks as seriously as we treat books, because listening is a skill just as important as reading: If you find audiobooks hard to follow, this is all the more reason to want to practice. After all: How long did it take you to learn to read well?…
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Choose the action, choose the consequence
“When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.” Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
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Sweet lemons
I recently took a week off work. The first day off, my nose started running. I got sick. The rest of the week involved me staying in my home, recovering. There are at least two competing truths here: One truth involves me being upset that I didn’t get to do much I wanted to. Another…