Competition
If you cannot win, make the one ahead of you break the record.
— Jan McKeithen
A skeptic is not one who doubts, but one who examines.
— Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, French literary critic and historian
An intelligent mind is a mind which is not satisfied with explanations, with conclusions; nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion. An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind, a mind that is watching, learning, studying.
Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.
But there is another basic requirement, and I can’t understand now how I forgot it at the time…
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
The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created—created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Sometimes I find myself agreeing with Umberto.
Other times I want to say, “Chill dude . . . Life is a Cabaret, old chum!”