stuff tagged with "perspective"
If all you did was look for things to appreciate, you would live a joyously spectacular life.
Suffering isnât something I avoid. Itâs something I loveâI love what it brings, whatâs on the other side of it. When weâre climbing Mt. Everest, weâre all suffering together, facing the same battle, chasing the same dream. Suffering makes the accomplishment that much more fulfilling.
I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. A fire engine goes by, and I give them a thumbs up. I see a woman with a dog and I ask the woman what kind of dog that is. The moral of the story is weâre here on Earth to fart around.
My Taste Is Basic. So What?
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I canât live in hell and make excuses for ravenously consuming a shitty reality show produced by a person I donât know personally on a network I am unaffiliated with. You can use âI like it!â (the exclamation point is necessary) any time freaks question a regular-ass thing you enjoy, and itâll swipe their legs out from under them every single time, and you can stand over their quivering body with your subpar tastes and laugh your face off.
Deploy it whenever you want, then sit back and watch judgmental friends splutter and try to choke out a response, because what people like that really want is to show off how much more cultured and evolved they are than you, and saying âI like it!â robs them of that opportunity.
Itâll all work out. Even if it doesnât, it all works out.
Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.
Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. We spend the years between these episodes benefiting or suffering from their consequences until the arrival of the next forceful moment.
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.
One of the many, many, many mantras I had to adopt to make it to the end was, "this is a challenge, not a race."
I want to do important work, I said. Then smile at people you meet, she said & play with dogs & tuck a blanket around someone who falls asleep. That's not what I meant, I said. Of course you did, she said. You just had a smaller idea of important.
One of the best secrets of a happy life is the art of extracting comfort and sweetness from every circumstance.
How to Figure Out What People Want
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If youâre thinking, âFigure out the kinds of sequences that generate good responses,â youâre still looking for essences. Youâre seeking a list of words that can make someone excited.
Instead, the process of making something that people want is the process of learning, through experiment and error, to be the kind of person who can generate needs, wants, and jobs in other people.Â
This kind of person is one who notices that a new restaurant in their neighborhood has a line out the door. Instead of walking by, they walk in.Â
They stop to notice the soft, earthy color palette of its interior decoration, one that evokes a coastal Mediterranean village. They see the way its menu layers in unexpected ingredients like zaâatar, cinnamon, and chile as subtle references to other cultures and traditions. They notice the feelings that this sequence of experience evokes in them, the way it feels familiar and also pleasantly surprising. They know that if they linger on these feelings, theyâll be able to evoke them laterâfor themselves and for othersâin a logo design or an article.
Iâve been trying to be more aware of things happening to me lately.
I know I can be in my head, a million miles away from reality unfolding before me. I feel more comfortable there, if Iâm honest. Reality can be uncomfortable, not quite right for me.
As it turns out, when you retreat from reality too often, you start to forget that while it can be uncomfortable sometimes, its contents can be incredible.
Iâm finding that the moments I am aware of whatâs happening around me are when I am the happiest.
And it turns out, paying attention to reality with your own unique perspective can really make a difference for others.
Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society â things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly.
I think a great way to go through a comedy career is to make yourself happy. If you stick to that, chances are that the worse thing that happens is youâve made yourself happy.
Notice that, while lots of people are happy to tell you about Golden Ages, nobody ever seems to think one is happening right now. Maybe thatâs because the only place a Golden Age can ever happen is in our memory.
One is not nostalgic for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been.
Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.
Happy endings donât exist But hereâs a pearl you may have missed Every day can be a happy beginning
We canât 100% every journey.
The older I get, the more I'm conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn't it?
Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what youâre doing.
Whenever youâre chasing a big dream, youâre supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy or not great a third of the time, and if you feel roughly in those ratios, it means you are in fact chasing a dream.
Life feels simpler when we tell ourselves there is a single truth and everything else is a deviation from that truthâan error, a lie, an âuntruthâ. Itâs disturbing to imagine that we can shape reality simply by choosing a different truth. The very idea of competing truths feels slippery, disingenuous, conniving.
If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
We donât stop playing because we grow old⊠We grow old because we stop playing.
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
Millions long for immortality who donât know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Despair is a failure of the imagination.
Some people will never learn anything for this reason: because they understood everything too soon.
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
Why canât lifeâs problems hit us when weâre seventeen and know everything?
It is important to draw wisdom from many different places. If you only draw wisdom from one place, it becomes rigid and stale. Understanding others, the other elements and the other nations, will help you become whole.
They canât kill you and they canât eat you. Suit up.
If you were to put your problem down on a table at the same time as others, odds are youâll pick your own up pretty quick.
When you focus on the past, thatâs your ego. When I focus on the future, that's my pride. I try to focus on the present. That's humility.
Everything we have belongs to others; time alone is ours.
It never gets easier, you just get faster.
The grass is always greener on the side thatâs fertilized with bullshit.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
Everything around you that you call "life" was made up by people that were no smarter than you. You can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Every man dies, not every man really lives.
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
Time isn't the main thing. It's the only thing.
Everything you want is on the hard side of work.
I do it for a challenge. I look around and see that most of the people I went to school with are dead or seriously ill and think how lucky I am.
