Rowing

I am rowing toward the past. I am trying to squeeze out of each stroke a better image of myself, and I am trying to enlist the ghosts of history to help power the oars. I want them as friends, as comrades, as partners, as ancestors.

~ Barry Strauss

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In an instant

No one has ever reached a point where the power fortune granted was greater than the risk. The sea is calm now, but do not trust it: The storm comes in an instant. Pleasure boats that were out all morning are sunk before the day is over.

~ Seneca

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Pragmatism

Pragmatism is not so much realism as flexibility. There are a lot of ways to get from point A to point B. It doesn’t have to be a straight line. It’s just got to get you where you need to go. But so many of us spend so much time looking for the perfect solution that we pass up what’s right in front of us.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Hopefulness

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position—it is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.

~ Nick Cave

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Reality

In this modern age, very little remains that is real. Night has been banished, so have the cold, the wind and the stars. They have all been neutralized: The rhythm of life itself is obscured. Everything goes so fast and makes so much noise, and men hurry by without heeding the grass by the roadside, its colour, its smell and the way it shimmers when the wind caresses it. What a strange encounter then is that between man and the high places of his planet!

~ Gaston Rébuffat

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Persevere

Persevere in what you have begun; hurry as much as you can, so that you will have more time to enjoy a mind that is settled and made flawless. To be sure, you will have enjoyment even as you make it so; But there is quite another pleasure to be gained from the contemplation of an intellect that is spotlessly pure and right.

~ Seneca

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Benefit

The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad things—is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same things over and over (which is the definition of insanity for a reason). People fail in small ways all the time. But they don’t learn. They don’t listen. They don’t see the problems that failure exposes. It doesn’t make them better.

~ Ryan Holiday

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Persistence

Consider this mindset:

never in a hurry
never worried
never desperate
never stopping short

As Epictetus once summarized his entire philosophy: Persist and resist. Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder.

~ Ryan Holiday

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The job

A man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul.

~ Leroy Percy

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First judgements

[R]eject the first judgements and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are so often rooted in fear. […] This is radically different from how we’ve been taught to act. Be realistic, we’re told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the “other” party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It’s this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back.

~ Ryan Holiday

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