stuff tagged with "perspective"

Suffering isn’t something I avoid. It’s something I love—I love what it brings, what’s on the other side of it. When we’re climbing Mt. Everest, we’re all suffering together, facing the same battle, chasing the same dream. Suffering makes the accomplishment that much more fulfilling.

— Elizabeth Rose

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 we’re here on Earth to fart around.

— Kurt Vonnegut

My Taste Is Basic. So What?


🔗 a linked post to harpersbazaar.com » — originally shared here on

I can’t live in hell and make excuses for ravenously consuming a shitty reality show produced by a person I don’t know personally on a network I am unaffiliated with. You can use “I like it!” (the exclamation point is necessary) any time freaks question a regular-ass thing you enjoy, and it’ll 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 “I like it!” robs them of that opportunity.

It’ll all work out. Even if it doesn’t, it all works out.

— Cody Blades

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.

— Rosamund and Benjamin Zander

How to Figure Out What People Want


🔗 a linked post to every.to » — originally shared here on

If you’re thinking, “Figure out the kinds of sequences that generate good responses,” you’re still looking for essences. You’re 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. 

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. 

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 za’atar, 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, they’ll be able to evoke them later—for themselves and for others—in a logo design or an article.

I’ve 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 I’m 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.

I’m finding that the moments I am aware of what’s 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.

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly.

— E.B. White

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 you’ve made yourself happy.

— Conan O’Brien

Life feels simpler when we tell ourselves there is a single truth and everything else is a deviation from that truth–an error, a lie, an ‘untruth’. It’s disturbing to imagine that we can shape reality simply by choosing a different truth. The very idea of competing truths feels slippery, disingenuous, conniving.

— Hector Macdonald

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.

— Louis L'Amour

They can’t kill you and they can’t eat you. Suit up.

— Len Fassler

Everything we have belongs to others; time alone is ours.

— Seneca

Everything you want is on the hard side of work.

— Tim Kennedy

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.

— Steve Jobs

Every man dies, not every man really lives.

— William Wallace, Braveheart

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.

— 'Death Valley Jack' Dennis, oldest participant of the Badwater Ultramarathon