🤔 Morning thoughts (January 13 - 19)
Every Sunday I share a quote and a reflection on it for each day of the week.
Themes of the week: focus, discipline, self-awareness, perspective, resilience, empathy, action
Sunday - January 19, 2025
"You suck at it because you will do everything but that. This is a harsh truth that nobody wants to hear (and everybody will search for endless theory to avoid)."
Dan Koe, The Art of Focus
“What’s my practice?” If you claim to be serious about mastering your skill, you should be clear about how, when and where you deliberately work on it. Show me how serious you are by pointing me to your practice.
Saturday - January 18, 2025
"When you’re chasing happiness externally, it’s because you’re disconnected internally."
Dr. Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and the Gain
There’s a gap you can only fill with awareness and daily, deliberate action towards becoming your ideal self. You can’t expect the world to bridge it for you. It will only mirror the same exact empty distance.
Friday - January 17, 2025
"Nobody causes suffering for you. You cause the suffering for yourself by generating tensions in the mind."
William Hart, The Art of Living
When something’s wrong in your world, learn to look inside yourself before you look outside for something or someone to blame. Your mental processes and reaction patterns are where it all starts. Every single time.
Thursday - January 16, 2025
"Remember: When you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on what you have, you get what you lack."
Greg McKeown, Effortless
What you put out will come back in an effort to restore your equilibrium. Pay attention to the energy you want the world to compensate.
Wednesday - January 15, 2025
"people fail to realize that every positive thought holds a negative seed. This is why almost every great success comes after great failure. If you want to be happier, you need to expose yourself to more negative experiences that allow you to create the positive ones."
Dan Koe, The Art of Focus
You can sense when you’re not living at the edge of your comfort zone because “luck” and opportunity suddenly stop meeting you halfway. It’s your call to move and face adversity. Negative experiences are part of the duality of life.
Tuesday - January 14, 2025
"Our natural tendency is to see other people as mere reflections of our own desires and values. Failing to understand the ways they are not like us, we are surprised when they do not respond as we had imagined. We unintentionally offend and alienate people, then blame them, not our inability to understand them, for the damage done."
Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
Your ability to wear other people’s shoes is the single most important skill you could master. It will take a lifetime but the process in itself is enough of a reward. Empathy is a superpower.
Monday - January 13, 2025
"In training to make events your teachers, you make real experience the foundation of your philosophy."
Phil Stutz, Lessons for Living
Your philosophy on life should be based on real, earned, experiential knowledge, not on expectations or learned knowledge. Learn to direct yourself and then move towards it. Let action teach you.