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Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," as Shakespeare put it."
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Ryan Holiday |
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It may take some hard work.But the more you say no to the things that don't matter, the more you can say yes to the things that do.
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Ryan Holiday |
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With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything.
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Ryan Holiday |
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If we can focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to realize they are fighting an unwinnable battle.
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Ryan Holiday |
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The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else's hands. There is a sort of ego ceiling imposed-one knows that is not better than the "master" he apprentices under. Not even close. You defer to them, you subsume yourself. You cannot fake or bullshit them. An education can't be hacked; there are no shortcuts besides hacking it every single day. If you ..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Every negative has a positive. Push a negative hard enough and deep enough that it will break through into its counterside.
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Ryan Holiday |
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In the novel Fight Club, the character Jack's apartment is blown up. All of his possessions--"every stick of furniture," which he pathetically loved--were lost. Later it turns out that Jack blew it up himself. He had multiple personalities, and "Tyler Durden" orchestrated the explosion to shock Jack from the sad stupor he was afraid to do anything about. The result was a journey into an entirely different and rather dark part of his life. I..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Philosophy's true use - "An operating system for life's difficulties and hardships"."
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Ryan Holiday |
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Were you to live three thousand years, or even a countless multiple of that, keep in mind that no one ever loses a life other than the one they are living, and no one ever lives a life other than the one they are losing. The longest and the shortest life, then, amount to the same, for the present moment lasts the same for all and is all anyone possesses. No one can lose either the past or the future, for how can someone be deprived of what'..
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Ryan Holiday |
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A degree on a wall means you're educated as much as shoes on your feet mean you're walking. It's a start, but hardly sufficient.
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Ryan Holiday |
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The best way to avenge yourself is to not be like that." --MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 6.6 "How much better to heal than seek revenge from injury. Vengeance wastes a lot of time and exposes you to many more injuries than the first that sparked it. Anger always outlasts hurt. Best to take the opposite course. Would anyone think it normal to return a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog?" --SENECA, ON ANGER, 3.27.2"
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Ryan Holiday |
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The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up. -- CHUCK PALAHNIUK
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Ryan Holiday |
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Booker T. Washington tells an anecdote told to him by Frederick Douglass, about a time he was traveling and was asked to move and ride in the baggage car because of his race. A white supporter rushed up to apologize for this horrible offense. "I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner," the person said. Douglass would have none of that. He wasn't angry. He wasn't hurt. He replied with great fervor: "They cannot de..
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Ryan Holiday |
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It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It's remembering Socrates' wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing.
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Ryan Holiday |
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The only relationship between work and chatter is that one kills the other. Let
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Ryan Holiday |
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The hard thing isn't dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.
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Ryan Holiday |
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It is not enough to have great qualities; we should also have the management of them. --LA ROCHEFOUCAULD I
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Ryan Holiday |
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Ego leads to envy and it rots the bones of people big and small.
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Ryan Holiday |
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We can seek to rationalize the worst behavior by pointing to outliers.
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Ryan Holiday |
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realized that the same drive and compulsion that had made me successful so early came with a price--as it had for so many others. It wasn't so much the amount of work but the outsized role it had taken in my sense of self. I was trapped so terribly inside my own head that I was a prisoner to my own thoughts. The
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Ryan Holiday |
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Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, your worst enemy already lives inside you: your ego.
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Ryan Holiday |
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False ideas about yourself destroy you. For
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Ryan Holiday |
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As the Quaker William Penn observed, "Buildings that lie so exposed to the weather need a good foundation."
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Ryan Holiday |
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That's how it seems to go: we're never happy with what we have, we want what others have too. We want to have more than everyone else. We start out knowing what is important to us, but once we've achieved it, we lose sight of our priorities. Ego sways us, and can ruin us. Compelled
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Ryan Holiday |
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When Arthur Lee was sent to France and England to serve as one of America's diplomats during the Revolutionary War, instead of relishing the opportunity to work with his fellow diplomat Silas Deane and elder statesman Benjamin Franklin, he raged and resented them and suspected them of disliking him. Finally, Franklin wrote him a letter (one that we've probably all deserved to get at one point or another): "If you do not cure yourself of thi..
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Ryan Holiday |
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The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Creativity is a matter of receptiveness and recognition. This cannot happen if you're convinced the world revolves around you.
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Ryan Holiday |
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magine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You'd learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You'd develop a reputation for being indispensable. You'd have countless new relationships. You'd have an enormous bank of favors to call upon d..
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Ryan Holiday |
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You know what is a better response to an attack or a slight or something you don't like? Love. That's right, love.
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Ryan Holiday |
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we cannot be humble except by enduring humiliations." How"
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Ryan Holiday |
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Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what's outside your control.
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Ryan Holiday |
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Most of us are afraid of dying. But sometimes this fear begs the question: To protect what exactly? For a lot of people the answer is: hours of television, gossiping, gorging, wasting potential, reporting to a boring job, and on and on and on. Except, in the strictest sense, is this actually a life? Is this worth gripping so tightly and being afraid of losing? It doesn't sound like it.
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Ryan Holiday |
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you must reclaim the ability to abstain because within it is your clarity and self-control.
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Ryan Holiday |
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The mind must be given relaxation--it will rise improved and sharper after a good break. Just as rich fields must not be forced--for they will quickly lose their fertility if never given a break--so constant work on the anvil will fracture the force of the mind. But it regains its powers if it is set free and relaxed for a while. Constant work gives rise to a certain kind of dullness and feebleness in the rational soul." --SENECA, ON TRANQU..
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Ryan Holiday |
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The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you "push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside."
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Ryan Holiday |
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No slavery is more disgraceful," he quipped, "than one which is self-imposed."
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Ryan Holiday |
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Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on--it isn't manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human, and therefore manlier. A real man doesn't give way to anger and discontent, and such a person has strength, courage, and endurance--unlike the angry and complaining. The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength." --MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 11.18.5b"
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Ryan Holiday |
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If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled--have you no shame in that?" --EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 28"
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Ryan Holiday |
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To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school . . . it is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. --HENRY DAVID THOREAU
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Ryan Holiday |
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Speculation led to disaster, he realized, and he needed to always ignore the "mad crowd" and its inclinations." --
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Ryan Holiday |
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In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote: The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performa..
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Ryan Holiday |
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Roger Ebert calls snarking "cultural vandalism." He's right. Snark makes culture impossible, or rather, it makes the conditions that make culture possible impossible. Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability: These are the targets of snark. "Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line," he wrote."
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Ryan Holiday |
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Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.
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Ryan Holiday |