7 for Sunday is a weekly serving of 7 things for you to savor. — It’s an email containing my reflections on interesting things I find laying about, seasoned with some quotes from my collection. See https://7forsunday.com/.
Make yourself proud. I think we spend too much of our time trying to please everyone. And we forget that it’s all already within. Your instinct, your inner child, your soul, all of those know what’s good for you and the world. The public opinion of your friends and strangers online, not so much.
~ Jérôme Jarre
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In stressful moments, I try to take distance from the situation, take time to reflect. Whatever the problem, I typically ask myself, “Am I able to make a difference right now?” If I don’t see a clear way to make a positive impact, I reflect further. I think that patience in problem-solving can often be underrated.
~ Eric Ripert
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Don’t try to find your passion. Instead master some skill, interest, or knowledge that others find valuable. It almost doesn’t matter what it is at the start. You don’t have to love it, you just have to be the best at it. Once you master it, you’ll be rewarded with new opportunities that will allow you to move away from tasks you dislike and toward those that you enjoy. If you continue to optimize your mastery, you’ll eventually arrive at your passion.
~ Kevin Kelly
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Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
~ Jim Rohn
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Acknowledging our fundamental dignity, recognizing our potential and actively working towards its blossoming with sincerity, patience, and integrity, is what makes a life worth living. There will be challenges, and new gaps will constantly open, but recognizing and closing these gaps will make a difference in absolutely everything we undertake.
~ Vincent Thibault
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Engaged in the creative process we feel more alive than ever, because we are making something and not merely consuming, masters of the small reality we create. In doing this work, we are in fact creating ourselves.
~ Robert Greene
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It takes courage to let go of what’s not working. Rather than focus on what you’re losing, hone in on what giving up goals affords you, like more time and energy. Remember no decision is permanent. You can continue to make adjustments until you find the balance of goals that works for you.
~ Melody Wilding
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The approach is to learn to find peace with chaos.
~ Leo Babauta from, When Things Feel Scattered
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As with everything I’ve ever seen Babauta post, I agree. If you’re feeling scattered, you could do a lot worse than to read that article. It provides perspective, and some small, actionable things to start on.
Sometimes whatever-it-is is not actually a problem; The problem is our attitude about the problem. (Try Jack Sparrow’s admonishment which echos Aurelius’s reminder to himself.)
But, my Dear Reader, sometimes the problem is ourselves. We said ‘yes’ to one, or two, or twenty, things too many. And the yes’s are insidious. We are all so eager to help, that we rush in. (“The rescuer,” is one of the corners in the Karpman drama triangle. For which I refer you to M B Stanier’s, The Coaching Habit, p138.) So, if you’re feeling scattered: Check for drama.
The hard part is when you learn to start to set boundaries. Dealing with how setting boundaries feels when you’re comfortable being the rescuer is hard. Dealing with how it feels when everyone knows you as that person is hard. It takes cahones to relax and sink, to save yourself from the drowning swimmer you were trying to save. It takes chutzpah, when a friend asks you for what they think is a small favor, to pause for several seconds, to do the mental calculus, to set your boundaries for just how much effort you’re going to put into the thing… and only then answer them, ‘Yes.’ It takes brass to be kind enough to yourself to ensure you have boundaries that work for you.
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Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left, but this too: If we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If our mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for… all those are gone.
So we need to hurry.
Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?
~ Charles Bukowski
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In this moment, we need to be reminded that stories of the future—about AI, or any kind—are never just about technology; They are about people and they are about the places that those people find themselves, the places they might call home and systems that bind them all together.
~ Genevieve Bell
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Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable […] Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up in your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
~ Jack London
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Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
~ Howard H. Aiken
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Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
~ George S. Patton
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What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.
~ Hal Boyle
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The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Why are their pleasures uneasy? Because the motives upon which they are founded are not stable and they totter with the frivolity which gave them birth. … Laboriously they attain what they desire, anxiously they hold what they have attained, and in the meanwhile irrecoverable time is not taken into consideration.
~ Seneca
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Books? How, or to what end? For is not reading a kind of preparation for living, but living itself made up of things other than books? It is as if an athlete, when he enters the stadium, should break down and weep because he is not exercising outside. This is what you were exercising for; this is what the jumping-weights, and the sand, and your young partners were all for. So are you now seeking for these, when it is the time for action?
~ Epictetus
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There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
~ David Eagleman
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