Will

We all want to feel good about ourselves, but many of us don’t recognize how much work that actually takes.

In order to feel confident and secure, you need to have something to feel confident and secure about. We all want to feel good about ourselves, but many of us don’t recognize how much work that actually takes.

being good at something allows you to be calm in a storm, knowing that you can handle whatever comes.

Bruce Lee responded, “It is better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.”

my dreams would be made or broken by the people I chose to surround myself with.

The thing I’ve learned over the years about advice is that no one can accurately predict the future, but we all think we can.

The thing I’ve learned over the years about advice is that no one can accurately predict the future, but we all think we can. So advice at its best is one person’s limited perspective of the infinite possibilities before you. People’s advice is based on their fears, their experiences, their prejudices, and at the end of the day, their advice is just that: it’s theirs, not yours. When people give you advice, they’re basing it on what they would do, what they can perceive, on what they think you can do.

“Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something, not even me …. You got a dream …. you gotta protect it. People can’t do something themselves, they want to tell you you can’t do it. If you want something, go get it. Period.”

“Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.”

“be nice to everybody you pass on your way up, coz you just might have to pass them again on your way down.”

My fantasies always involved one woman. I wanted to ravish her with my complete, undivided devotion and affection. I wanted to be the best man she’s ever known—I wanted to fulfil all of her dreams, solve all of her problems, take away all of her pain. I wanted her to adore me. I wanted to be so trustworthy and emotionally reliable that I would cleanse her impression of all men. And if I could have killed a dragon for her, climbed up her hair, entered the heavily guarded castle, and then have my kiss work as an antidote to the poison she’d ingested, that would have just been a little icing on my love cake.

People often say ignorance is bliss. Maybe … right up until it’s not.

Life is like school, with one key difference—in school you get the lesson, and then you take the test. But in life, you get the test, and it’s your job to take the lesson.

The universe only teaches through experience.

It is so painful when people I care about miss the opportunity to elevate.

It is so painful when people I care about miss the opportunity to elevate. I’ve been in this kind of situation maybe fifty times in my career. I am trying to climb and fly as high as humanly possible, and I want to take the people I love with me. But invariably, at critical moments, when the necessity to level up presents itself, some people—like JL—rise to the occasion and others fold. Whether they don’t see the grander vision, or can’t take the heat of the fresh challenge, or they’re trapped by some hidden, self-defeating narrative, over and over I have suffered the pain of waving from the bow of the new ship as they’re left behind, standing on the shore.

It’s better to die than to walk around scared.

these conflicts and misunderstandings had such simple solutions, yet our immaturity demanded that we had to suffer excruciating consequences in order to learn the most basic lessons of human relating.

It’s respectable to lose to the universe. It’s a tragedy to lose to yourself.

A major aspect of the pain and mental anguish we experience as humans is that our minds seek, and often demand, logic and order from an illogical universe.