The difference between questioning and doubting is action.
It’s okay to question something. You should ask questions. And yeah, there may be some apprehension before we decide to act (especially if you are doing something for the first time).
But doubt, on the other hand, is an inability to act. At its root, you’ll discover its fear.
Doubt your doubts before you ever doubt your faith.
[“My favourite word? It’s act.” – Ai Weiwei]
Your first shot is not your last shot.
Change does not happen overnight.
The kind of change that last is slow and incremental.
Drip by drip. Step by step. Here a little. There a little.
At the center of anyone that is angry or stuck is fear.
Instead of spending our time trying to make the fear go away, learn to dance with the fear.
Sometimes courage is the still quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.”
The person that fails the most will win.
We have more access to more information than anyone ever before in the history of the world. For the first time ever, we have tools to connect 3 billion people in one network.
Ok Google: What are the top Google Searches of 2016?
By the way, the chance of winning the Powerball is 1 and 292 million. (Of course, I had to Google it.) So why are we spending so much time obsessing over something that will clearly never happen?
Because there is always a chance.
Unfortunately, we are wasting it on things that are distracting us from solving interesting problems.
It’s becoming clear that the key to learning is not about finding answers but to ask the right questions.
We are all designed to connect.
Life is best when shared.
Here is how I can prove it to you: Anytime anyone experiences joy, the first thing they want to do is share it.
Because it’s too good not to.
It’s happiness when shared.
The future is bright.
It’s bright because every day we move closer to more dignity, equality and opportunity for those who have never had it.
It’s bright because every day we take a step towards greater clarity and respect.
We cannot agree on every controversial issue or piece of legislation. But we can hold each other to the highest standards. We don’t have to see each other as we are but as we become.
We can disagree. But let us not be disagreeable. Each of us has infinite potential and infinite worth.
In an open theater there are plenty of seats to take.
But for some reason, there is always that person that will come and sit in the seat right in front of you.
It turns out, we want what others have.
It’s innate in our nature.
So if we can learn to just love what we have, the world would be a happier place.
When we try to go in too many directions at once, we end up going nowhere.
Then we’re stuck.
And we end up blaming the wrong things for why we are where we are.
It’s innate in all of us to look for the connection of cause-and-effect. We generalize everything and anyone: Taking the simplest logical explanation that makes sense to us, accept it and apply it.
We do this to form stories to understand how people behave and how things work. We then cement our predispositions to find explanations of future events.
But when our predispositions are inaccurate, incorrect or erroneous (which is most of the time) we find ourselves moving in the wrong direction again.
There’s hope though. We can get better. We can be better today than we were yesterday. We can get better tomorrow than we are today.
We can start where we are by march confidently to the beat of our own drum. We just need to let go of our biases.
As much as we would like to believe we are a good judge of people (because we are people), most of the time, we are wrong.
Everyone has bad days. And when we act inappropriately or irrationally or loose are temper, we tend to attribute our behavior to the environment. When we see other people do it, we tend to attribute it to their personality.
We justify our actions to fit the story we tell ourselves of how the world works.
Living in a world of abundance, it’s easy to seduce ourselves into thinking that everyone can and should reach the same status.
It’s easy to confuse other people’s miseries with wrong and old assumptions. So let’s be clear: The poor are not poor because they deserve to be. There isn’t something wrong with their personality. They are trapped in their environment.
We have come a long way to restore dignity and opportunity and equality to people who carry the burdens of poverty and oppression. But there is still more work that needs to be done. We can do better with what we have been given.
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