Category: Life
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Find a ladder
Structure is great for giving people things to focus on and to channel their creative energy through. Structure is bad for constraining people and sucking away their motivation. It’s easy to either become too rigid with your structure, or to embody a swirl of chaotic energy. You need to know when to do what. One…
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“What if grinding is bad?”
A coach asked me this question in my late 20s. It was mind-blowing. At the time, I’d already read Trying Not to Try, and I was still soaking things in and slowly shifting my worldview. This question really accelerated the process. Some questions that counter-grinding question provoked: Wasn’t everything supposed to be a grind? If…
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Punctual gratification
Be happy today. Be happy now. Don’t put it off, because you’re not going to do it. Pay yourself first with your time, with your happiness, with your energy. If you said you were going to treat or reward yourself, keep your promise. Sometimes, it feels sad to actually try to be happy, excited, or…
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A job is a job
If you’ve committed to a new project, congratulations! You’ve just started a new job. You can call this an informal apprenticeship, an internship, or whatever. It’s a job. Even if it doesn’t pay you every two weeks. Even if you need to work on weekends. Even if it feels risky and unstable. Even if it’s…
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Patience is power
Of all virtues, patience might be the easiest to talk about and agree upon, and the most difficult to actually practice. The ability to stick with things—you can call it perseverance, persistence, consistency, or whatever—is really grounded in patience. You can’t control how talented you are, who you’re born to, or what natural inclinations you…
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Hastening gratification
One of the questions executive coach and author Marshall Goldsmith asks himself every day is, “Did I do my best to be happy?” In his book The Earned Life, he elaborates on impermanence, and in contrast, on delayed gratification: “This is the Great Western Disease of ‘I’ll be happy when…’ It is the pervasive mindset…
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Make a map
I recently came across Dishoom’s cookery book, a “highly subjective guide to Bombay with map.” The description very clearly explained a path to becoming a leading thinker or authority on something: make a map. The most obvious place is to start with an area you’re familiar with; where you live, where you work, your favorite…
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I was wrong about audiobooks
In my 20s, I refused to listen to audiobooks. For starters, to me, it didn’t count as actual reading. I also loved, and still love, paper books. To experience an audiobook felt like a betrayal to this admiration. On top of all of that, I also thought it’d be incredibly slow, and I wouldn’t be…
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Aesop (the business), on lists
In their excellent hardcover book titled after their company, Aesop authors Jennifer Down and Dennis Paphitis write about the power of lists in an essay entitled “An Inventory of All Things”: At Aesop, there are lists on how we open and close a store or office each day, lists detailing laboratory processes, lists describing how…
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Make lists
Lots of them. List the moments and experiences that gave you energy, brought you confidence, and made you do what you do now. List the things you’ve done with your life. List the things you want to do with your life, and how you can do them (Can you do a smaller version of it?…