hi

Peanut Butter

“The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”

“I typically arrive three years too late. I wish I had been able to sit in that white, aromatic kitchen and look you in the face but I was not ready. I was still on my way.”

“To achieve excellence, a counterintuitive notion you have is: most people seek to avoid pain and discomfort. After you achieve some mastery, you learn to ignore the pain. You must seek it out and embrace it. Most people avoid the stretch points in life, so they’re mediocre. But it gives us opportunity if we live at our stretch point, there will be pain. Pain can be physical pain or mental resistance. We can change our relationship to discomfort so we hunger for the growth edge rather than hide from it. What if we love the risk, love our stretch point? Wouldn’t it be liberating to, in that moment of pain, to realize that it will lead to great insight? And going into it, put our hearts on the line but know that if it doesn’t work out, we will learn. People often take that and go too far, saying it doesn’t matter win/lose, and they don’t fully engage. You have to fully engage. But also have an understanding that disappointments provide the greatest insights. When we lay our hearts on the line, we feel pain most people don’t feel because they’re not all in. And when you’re all in, it opens deep reservoirs of the human experience.”

“You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one’s self-respect. Hence I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously.”

I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to.

“There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.”

The biggest factor in getting something to go from hard to easy is normally exposure. The more you encounter something, the less intimidating it gets. Your emotional relationship changes. There's less uncertainty, your skill in dealing with it improves, your resentment for it fades, your craving for ease or salvation disappears. It has become easy. So if you have a bit of foresight, the easiest thing to do is to make the hard things easy. You make the hard things harder when you let yourself fall into the habit of avoiding them. Normally we drag our feet all the way to the easy-point, so it stays hard as long as possible. A society that values convenience and technological solutions teaches us to overvalue the easy and to undervalue the hard. We try to escape the hard parts as often as possible, limiting our exposure and justifying our psychological resistance to it. We seldom come to something hard with the intention to get to the point where it's easy. So what we're really doing is ensuring that we experience as much "hard" as possible. [...]

“People say: “One can’t help one’s thoughts.” But one can. The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. This idea is one of the oldest platitudes, but it is a platitude whose profound truth and urgency most people live and die without realising. People complain of the lack of power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power, if they choose. And without the power to concentrate - that is to say, without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience - true life is impossible. Mind control is the first element of a full existence.”

“The rule is that “to become someone that you have never been before, you must do something that you have never done before.” This means that to develop a superior character, you must exert ever-higher levels of self-discipline and self-mastery on yourself. You must do the things that average people don’t like to do.”

“You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself. Think of something that you love to do for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.”