Category: Life
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A reminder
The artist who created Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson, wrote a beautiful commencement speech for Kenyon College. Here’s an excerpt from it (emphasis added): But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another. Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In…
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What went right?
The things that go wrong get the most attention. That makes sense, because somebody needs to correct them. The problem happens when the things that go wrong get all of the attention. You may even start to only notice things going wrong. Focus on the things that didn’t go wrong—the things that went right. When…
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The secret isn’t in the recipe
An apprentice is sick of his job at a high end restaurant. It pays poorly, he’s stuck doing the menial tasks, and the head chefs don’t give him any recognition or affirmation. A manager at a rival restaurant approaches him with a deal. If the apprentice steals the restaurant’s recipes, the manager will give him…
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One good reason
When something is important, one good reason is enough to make it worth a try even if there are a dozen bad reasons. When you don’t see a path to success, one good reason is enough to make something worth giving up even if there are a dozen good reasons.
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Ignorance premium and the idiot index
When you want to do something and don’t know how to get it done, you’re going to have to pay whoever can do it for you. Let’s call it the ignorance premium. For example, if you want to eat a specific dish and you don’t know how to cook it, you will have to order…
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Three ways of seeing reality
Coming to terms with reality, and working with it—not against it, or distorting it—is generally good advice. It’ll help you get to where you want to go. Here are three ways to discern between what’s real and what you are imagining (or desiring, stressing over, or overthinking): “Reality doesn’t need you to help operate it.”…
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Prioritizing
Every CEO’s job is to prioritize. It’s to decide what to do, and more importantly, what not to do. Once they do that, they communicate the priorities to their teams—sometimes tens of thousands of people—and those teams get it done. I want to repeat this: the leader’s most important task is to prioritize. Even thousands…
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Action vs. declaration
The smallest action is worth a thousand bold declarations. A declaration merely tells somebody else what you want; an action shows them what you want and your drive to make it happen. Championship coach Bill Walsh puts it this way in The Score Takes Care of Itself: Someone will declare, “I am the leader!” and…
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On personal change
Your first steps to changing yourself for the better may be inspired by somebody else in your life. You think you’re changing for them. In actuality, there’s a good chance that the main beneficiary of the change is you. Let’s say you used to handle conflicts poorly. After a lot of classes and constant practice,…