Stepping Stones
Whatever you’re doing now is just a stepping-stone to the next project or adventure. Any rut you get into is one you can get yourself out of.
— Timothy Ferriss, 4-Hour Work Week
There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted.
— Timothy Ferris, 4-Hour Work Week
Of course, I interrupted the book I was reading to post and Tweet this.
Focus is hard.
If you want to experience the joys of yacht racing in the comfort of your own home, simply stand fully clothed in an ice cold shower and tear up $100 bills.
— Unknown
My life is spent in one long effort to escape the commonplaces of existence.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, spoken by Sherlock Holmes in The Red-Headed League
Ditto.
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
— Jeannette Rankin
First woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
— David Foster Wallace
Listen to that still, quite voice in the back of the mind. It might be your destiny trying to get your attention.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
— William Shakespeare
I memorized this quote in grade 10 English class. Funny how some things stay with you forever.