You have the right to a purpose. If you do not have a purpose, one will be appointed for you.
~ David Cain from, Never Forget Your Rights
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What a delightful riff on the standarized wording commonly known as the “Miranda rights”!
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You have the right to… →
The fountain of content →
The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happines by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.
~ Samuel Johnson
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Show us you have learned →
Eat like a human being, drink like a human being, dress up, marry, have children, get politically active — suffer abuse, bear with a headstrong brother, father, son, neighbor, or companion. Show us these things so we can see that you truly have learned from the philosophers.
~ Epictetus
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Compassion →
All of these desperate and depraved acts we see ‘bad people’ do, we are all ultimately capable of them too. Under different circumstances, with a different upbringing and different experiences, every one of us could be a killer. But if you got lucky, and that’s not the way it turned out, you might be inclined to put yourself on a distinctly higher plane.
~ David Cain from, Should We Have Compassion for Killers?
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I’ve learned to use venom and outrage as indicators. When I taste venom… when I feel outraged… that’s when I redouble my efforts to use my brain and be rational.
I’m not convinced (one way or the other) as to wether it’s even possible to never feel outraged–or if that’s even a good end-goal.
But I am certain that–without exception–if ever I let my outrage direct my actions, I regret it later.
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Living virtuously →
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
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What’s wrong with the world? →
This type of view of the world — and like I said, I think it’s the prevailing view — stems from an ideal that many people have in their heads of what the world should be like. They might not realize they have that ideal, but it’s there. And the world will never reach this Platonic ideal, because it’s just this image of perfection that does not match reality. Reality and this ideal are incompatible.
~ Leo Babauta from, «http://zenhabits.net/2008/08/whats-wrong-with-the-world-not-a-damn-thing/»
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This ties in with yesterday’s comments about the Beatles’ Let It Be. There’s certainly a peculier passion associated with youth. But there’s a much nicer circumspection of age. When things are going badly, relax for they will not last. Whent things are going well, relax for they will not last. The error is in not relaxing, not in the circumstances being observed.
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Letting years go by →
In fact, I’ve let years of my life go by this way. I could be working on something I truly love, and then I’d hit a snag. I’d get frustrated, then avoid it for the rest of the day. I just wouldn’t want to be frustrated anymore, so I wouldn’t touch it. There’s always later. Perhaps if a better mood came along I’d be willing to tackle it.
~ David Cain from, Protect Your Dreams From Contamination
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I’m not sure I agree with how easy it sounds the way he puts it. But he’s dead on with the point.
Here’s another spin on it, the late, great, Jack Vance as Curly.
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How to walk across a parking lot →
How to walk across a parking lot
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I aspire to one day look back and say: I wrote a single thing which is as good as the above.
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Time management →
The caveat is that this quadrant can be mistaken as something that shouldn’t be part of life, but that is not true. It is really important to have a balanced life between work and your personal life. You need downtime to not get burnt out and that is where quadrant four comes into the picture. The challenge is you allocate most of your time to quadrant two, with just enough of time spent in quadrant four to get by.
~ Thanh Pham, from How To Prioritize Todo Lists With A Sheet of Paper
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I disagree.
Everything in the UN-important half (the lower half in the diagrams) of the quadrant is the Bad Lands to be avoided. There’s no such thing as “work life balance.” I spent decades trying to fiddle with that balance. There is only life. I strive to do only important things. I strive to only do NON-urgent things by paying attention to what I should be doing. I strive for a wide variety of activities which are all necessary, important and not urgent. One might even say: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
I have control over only two things: My thoughts and my actions.
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The great teacher →
How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception. Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think: “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake. Do not ask whether it is “the Way” to do this or that. Ask whether the sky is blue or green. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it.
~ Eliezer S. Yudkowsky from, Twelve Virtues of Rationality
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If you don’t think intentionally… If your ideas and beliefs don’t produce a working model of reality… well…
When an honest person discovers they are wrong, they stop being wrong or they stop being honest. It’s your choice.
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