Blog — Quotes

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Not a dancer but a wrestler: waiting, poised, and dug in, for sudden assaults.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

Well-being is realized by small steps, but is truly no small thing.

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.

Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.

This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.

Mindfulness is healthy, it’s professional, and it allows us to be our best self. It is also maddeningly difficult, particularly in a culture that prizes busyness over just about everything else.

But mindful isn’t the opposite of busy.

Mindfulness demands intention. Mindfulness is the practice of simply doing the work. Without commentary, without chatter, without fear.

More isn’t the point. Better is.

Pathfinding is at the core of creating with significance, and finding the path is largely the work of finding non-paths until the path is evident.
That doesn’t mean that we’re sloppy. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite.
There’s a rigor to this exploration, a nonrandom way to explore the possible.

And that doesn’t mean we ship junk. We can make mistakes together, in private often, testing and measuring and improving.

And then we can ship the work. Work we’re proud of. Deliver it to people who care and begin again.

The foundation of all real skills is this one: the confidence and permission to talk to one another. Not to manage, belittle, intimidate, or control. Simply to seek to be understood, and to do the work to understand.

The first step: Don't be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you'll be no one, nowhere—like Hadrian, like Augustus.
The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.

The alternative is to bring actual wonder to the conversation, to be with a person in their story and narrative. Wonder is the open-ended version of curiosity, without seeking an explanation to solve the problem.

Without tension, we wait. Without a deadline, we meander. Without urgency, it’s easier to stall.

Because significant organizations spend most of their time and energy not being where they were yesterday. In fact, the uncertainty and the dislocation are the point, not a temporary inconvenience.