đ€ Morning thoughts (April 29 - May 5)
Every Sunday I share a quote and a reflection on it for each day of the week.
Themes of the week: Commitment, honesty, urgency, mortality, passion, experience, presence, fluidity
Sunday - May 5, 2024
"Itâs so simple really: If you say youâre going to do something, do it. If you start something, finish it."Â
Epictetus, The Art of Living
Thereâs no simpler hack to life than keeping your word to others and to yourself. If you align your outer and inner promises.
Saturday - May 4, 2024
"Society is organized to make death invisible, to keep it several steps removed. That distance may seem necessary for our comfort, but it comes with a terrible price: the illusion of limitless time, and a consequent lack of seriousness about daily life. We are running away from the one reality that faces us all."Â
Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
The measure to which you perceive life as urgent informs the audacity you put into it. Resistance falls apart when you know you canât waste another minute.Â
Friday - May 3, 2024
"Your mission is to find something youâre good at and apply the thousands of hours of grit and sacrifice necessary to become great at it. As you get there, the feeling of growth and your increasing mastery of your craft, along with the economic rewards, recognition, and camaraderie, will make you passionate about whatever âitâ is"Â
Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Wealth
First find your passion then follow it. What most people get wrong is that passion is not something you stumble on, itâs something you work at.Â
Thursday - May 2, 2024
TakezĆ lay among the corpses. There were thousands of them. âThe whole world's gone crazy," he thought dimly. âA man might as well be a dead leaf, floating in the autumn breeze."
Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi
Once you face the inevitability death and fragility of life head on, you realize how much weâre one and the same. Itâs about being ruthlessly honest with yourself.Â
Wednesday - May 1, 2024
"Today I see red when anybody at Ogilvy, Benson & Mather tells a client that we cannot produce an advertisement television commercial on the day we have promised it. In the best establishments, promises are always kept, whatever it may cost in agony and overtime."Â
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
The promises you make are an indicator of self respect. When you break them youâre not only lying to others, youâre lying to yourself. It takes honesty and commitment to be true to who you want to be.
Tuesday - April 30, 2024
"The poker books and self-help courses will never tell you this, but the first step toward succeeding at anythingâfrom poker to attracting women to life in generalâdepends on finding a way to cram the most experience into the shortest period of time âŠSo, by playing fourteen hours a day, I looked at roughly fourteen thousand hands each day. It wasnât long before Iâd seen more hands online than what even the most obsessive live players saw in a lifetime"Â
Dan Bilzerian, The Setup
You have to be a little terrified of not knowing or practicing enough or fast enough. Urgency and scarcity are powerful motivators. Make every experience precious.Â
Monday - April 29, 2024
"Wage guerrilla war on your mind, allowing no static lines of defense, no exposed citadelsâmake everything fluid and mobile"Â
Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
Realize: thereâs no greater danger than a set of rigid beliefs and thoughts rooted in outdated principles. Keep upgrading your internal reality, even when it feels counter to your nature.Â