I had always loved sunrise: was always renewed in spirit. For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd ever slept through dawn. The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plan had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why, and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.
-Dick Francis, as excerpted from Wild Horses
The universe does not offer financing.
This is hard to accept because modern life trains us to expect
the opposite. We are addicted to "Buy Now, Pay Later." You live in
the house before you pay off the mortgage. You get the degree before you pay
off the loan. You eat the meal before you ask for the check.
We are conditioned to enjoy the benefit today and pay the cost
tomorrow.
Achievement reverses the transaction. It requires full payment
in advance (and regular payments forever). If you want a fit body, a calm mind,
a healthy relationship, or financial independence, the cost is non-negotiable.
You must do the work before you get the result.
This is why most people quit. They pay a little, see nothing,
and stop. They never make it far enough to see the first return arrive.
-Shane Parrish via Farnum Street, from this edition
Gibran's bitter denunciation of both religious and political injustice prevailing at the time, brought about his anticipated exile from the country and his excommunication from the church, although his parents were staunch Maronites. It was the story, Khalil the Heretic, in particular which drove the Sultan and his Emirs into trepidation and cause nervous authorities in the entire Middle and Near East to examine their governments.
Gibran was quietly pursuing painting with his friend Rodin in Paris when he learned of the ceremonial destruction of his book, and he merely expressed the thought that it was excellent cause for the issuance of a second edition.
-Martin L. Wolf, from the Preface to Gibran's Spirits Rebellious
How long will it be before we discover we cannot dazzle God with our accomplishments?
When will we acknowledge that we need not and cannot buy God's favor?
When will we acknowledge that we don't have it all together and happily accept the gift of grace?
-Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel
The
older I get, the more I realize nothing changes if nothing changes. The new
life you want doesn’t magically appear. It’s built through action. New habits.
New mindsets. New standards. New boundaries. Reinvention has a cost of entry.
Pay it with pride.
Have been missing the wonderful world of the Eclecticity blog. Stumbled across this post of his while rooting through the archives. Hope all is well with you Doug.
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2005 at Emory, real life is not college; real life is not high school. Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high. The world that you’re about to enter is filled with junior high adolescent pettiness, pubescent rivalries, the insecurities of 13-year-olds, and the false bravado of 14-year-olds.
-Tom Brokaw, Emory University Commencement Address (2005)
as found in this week's edition of Tim Ferriss's Five-Bullet Friday
It was a step in the right direction, if not the perfect solution; I did miss the orderly abundance of a fully replenished case. But the experience showed me that creativity was going to be the main ingredient in striking a true balance between restaurant-smart and corporate-smart. . . .
We threw ourselves into the project. Jon proved to be an extremely dangerous co-conspirator. For example, he found a company in Italy making amazing, tiny blue spoons. How amazing could a plastic spoon possibly be? You are going to have to trust me on this: they were paddle-shaped, extraordinarily well designed, and completely unique. They were also preposterously, heartbreakingly expensive.
But I had to have them; the Sculpture Garden deserved them. Nothing else would do.
The first time my boss saw one of those spoons, she narrowed her eyes and asked me what they had cost. I told her, and her eyes got even narrower: "We'll talk about this later." But a month later, we sat down to review the first P & L for the cart, and I never heard another word about those spoons.
I'd managed 95 percent of my budget aggressively, leveraging MoMA's brand to get excelled gelato at a steep discount, and a beautiful cart for free. I'd earned the right to splurge on those spoons, the one small detail I believed would dramatically transform the experience of getting an ice cream at the cart.
This is what I would later call the Rule of 95/5. Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent "foolishly." It sounds irresponsible; in fact, it's anything but. Because that last 5 percent has an outsized impact on the guest experience, it's some of the smartest money you'll ever spend.
-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left . . .
Throughout history, there have always been those who would manipulate others in order to gain sex, money, or power. We have not yet put that era behind us.
-Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
When things
don't go well it's easy to wonder, "Why me?" It's easy to point
fingers. It's easy to wallow in frustration or defeat.
But it is
also easy to ask, "What is this teaching me?"
You can't remove the frustrations from life, but you can always try to come out a little wiser on the other side.
-James Clear, from this edition
Tip generously. You go around only once, and tipping generously is a meaningful way to improve your own quality of life.
Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.
Computers are useless; they can only give you answers.
-attributed to Pablo Picasso (perhaps modified a bit)
Now, I am faced with another illusion. It is no longer a question of particular privileges, but of transforming privilege into a common right. The entire nation has conceived the odd idea that it could increase production indefinitely by handing it over to the State in the form of taxes in order for the State to give it back a portion in the form of work, profit, and pay. The state is being requested to ensure the well-being of every citizen; and a long and sorry procession, in which every sector of the workforce is represented, from the severe banker to the humble laundress, is parading before the organizer in chief in order to ask for financial assistance.
-Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms and "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen" (March 1848)
-Robert Frost, Carpe Diem
....................and Conservatism 101:
. . . many conservatives are fed up with important institutions, including higher education and mainstream media. This has turned many conservatives into “brokenists.” They are not disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions.
Seems like the distrust of all "isms" has been well earned.
We should also heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack: “If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.” This maxim is a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.
-Charlie Munger, from his The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
If time=money, your earning potential is limited. If value=money, your earning potential is unlimited.
-Nicholas Bate, from Rule 4 of 7 about money
Neuroscientists tell us that awareness of beauty in one’s environment for a long time, reduces stress, can have physiological benefits, perhaps even longevity, . . .
-as lifted from this David Kanigan post
The guiding notion of the Enlightenment, and later of Marx and Lenin's "scientific" socialism, was that henceforth the alliance between happiness and justice would no longer come about through the individual quest for wisdom, but through the rebuilding of society as a whole. And before building a new society, the old one first had to be completely destroyed. It was at the end of the eighteenth century that the idea of revolution took on its modern meaning. Personal salvation was from then on subordinate to collective salvation. . . . suffice it to say that somewhere between 1965 and 1970 I thought I'd seen the irremediable bankruptcy of this illusion, the progenitor of the great totalitarian movements that have ravaged the twentieth century.
Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.
-Dr. Seuss, as channeled by Theodor Seuss Geisel
Logic means, simply, the art and method of correct thinking. It is the logy or method of every science, of every discipline and every art; and even music harbors it. It is a science because to a considerable extent the processes of correct thinking can be reduced to rules like physics and geometry, and taught to any normal mind; it is an art because by practice it gives to thought, at last, that unconscious and immediate accuracy which guides the fingers of the pianist over his instrument to effortless harmonies. Nothing is so dull as logic, and nothing is so important.
-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, from the chapter on Aristotle, the world's first logician
You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it.
-attributed to Jimmy Dean
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