When God wants to bring you quickly, He doesn’t bring you gently.
Instead of worrying about what’s going to happen next, start with what needs to happen first.
Urgencies and emergencies will come and go with every news cycle.
That next big thing is already here.
Your email, it can wait.
Do the work that matters most.
Do the hard thing first.
Whatever comes next is bound to be better when we put our best foot forward.
No one signs up for a marathon not expecting to get tired. The question is: Where are you going to put the tired?
Sprinting is an all-out effort for a short period of time. No matter how hard we try or how much we want it, we can’t sprint forever.
It’s beneficial to learn when we need to take our foot off the gas before we run ourselves into the ground. We need to pace ourselves, to embrace the tension, and not make it go away.
Sure, it’s exciting to start but there are no heroes at the beginning.
Enthusiasm soon dwindles and you’ll find yourself in the dip. Its hard and you’re uncomfortable. That’s the moment. When others are turning around you find another gear, a place to put the tired, you lean in to the tension.
If we don’t leave anything in the tank, we don’t leave anything to finish.
You can learn a lot living with cowboys or ranchers or farmers.
You can also learn by living with hipsters or artists or musicians.
There is a lot to learn from those who live in a small town or the big city or in poverty or in abundance.
There is no one way.
Don’t close your mind.
Repeat: Don’t close your mind.
As a young man, Adolf Hitler tried to become a painter.
Have you ever seen any of his paintings?
Neither have I.
He cashed in all of his assets and tried to enroll into the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
He was rejected twice and was told that he was “unfit” to become a painter and that he should focus on becoming an architect.
As Steve Pressfield has pointed out, it was easier for Hitler to start World War II then it was to become an artist.
We’re not searching for answers. Everything is one click away. Someone already wrote it in a Dummies Guide.
What we need are choices.
But you probably have more choices than you think.
When we say we have no choice, what we’re really trying to say is that there are no more easy choices left to make.
[No one is going to magically give you responsibility, you have to take it.]
Only us.
People.
We are all in this together.
You live your life going forward but you learn from life looking back.
Click. Pop. Aha. Eureka. You make a new connection, a moment of clarity where things make sense.
What’s better, and more seldom, is the moment you realize that you’re wrong. You begin to see that people and relationships and cultures and economies and complex social problems can’t be explained or solved with one simple, easy solution. It’s far more complicated than that. It’s a shot in the gut.
Books that will change your mind: The Gift, The War of Art, The Art of Possibility, The Infinite Game, Understanding Comics, The Blue Sweater, A Whole New Mind, Debt, Linchpin, The Gifts of Imperfection, Persuadable, New Rules, Start with Why, The Design of Everyday Things, On the Road, Self Reliance, Walden, Man’s Search for Meaning, A Million Miles, How to Win Friends, Secrets of Closing the Sale, The Coaching Habit, The Total Money Makeover
In the end, the most important book that you will ever read is the one you write.
The left side of the brain wants everything to be tested and measured. It wants certainties and definite proof. It also takes everything quite literally. The right side of our brain, however, is telling the left side to calm down, stop taking yourself so seriously.
The brain has a difficult time describing and coping with the impossible. So when we can’t explain something the best our brain can muster is “that was lucky” or “what a coincidence.”
Low probability? Perhaps. But there are some things in this world that we can’t explain.
It’s magic when the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.
It’s how we defy the odds.
We should leave room for possibility, imagination, and wonder. We should hope for things that can’t be seen or explained.
There is always more to explore. As far as we have come in the last 200 years (even in the last 30) there is still more that we don’t know than what we do know. The beauty of living in a universe that is infinite in length means that it is infinite in possibility.
We should be constant seekers of truth. It’s a journey without an end.
