Wisdom

“I don’t like the term ‘success.’ It implies finality that has always felt misleading. We all live many lives, the experience of each compounding on the next. The attachment to a singular end-state defined by a milestone in a career seriously misses greater existential truths for me that are more interested in experimentation, iteration, and circularity.” — Ara Katz

"What's the most complete span of a life, you ask? To live until attaining wisdom. Whoever reaches that goal ends furthest, not at a point but greatest. Let that man rejoice boldly in the truth, and give thanks to the gods, and to himself among these; let him credit the cosmos for his creation, and deservedly so, for he returns to the cosmos a better life than the one he got. He has set the template of the good man, and revealed its measure and its quality. If he had added anything to it, the addition would have been similar to what came before." — How to Die, Seneca

Your future self is watching you right now through your memories.

Everyone wants to succeed immediately and without pain or effort. Bad advice is everywhere. Build a following. Establish a platform. Learn how to scam the system. In other words, do all the surface stuff and none of the real work it takes to actually produce something of value. The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We're like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep. Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something—the book you're writing, the album, the movie—and staying there for a long, long time.

Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope: “Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. Why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes?

And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is — we’re here on Earth to fart around.

Of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance anymore.”

“The artist may not always be the maker. It may be the person who sees the piece and recognizes the art in it.” — Rick Rubin 

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this gap.



For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.



Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

"For me, success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets." — Toni Morrison

You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.

“Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” - Voltaire

“Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit the evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now. You are not some disinterested bystander. Participate. Exert yourself.” — Epictetus

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” —Teilhard de Chagrin

“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.” — Miyamoto Musashi

"My approach to what I do in my job… and it might even be the approach to my life… is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing.



That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference…because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something… a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career.



Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important."



— Mads Mikkelsen

“We are all floating in a tremendous river and the river carries you along. Some of the people in the river are swimming against the current, but they are still being carried along. Others have learned that the art of the thing is to swim with it. You have to flow with the river. There is no other way. You can swim against it, and pretend not to be flowing with it. But you still flow with the river.” — Alan Watts

"The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." — Vincent Van Gogh

No one talks about the inbetween. Letting your old life die for your new one. I know so much is coming but right now I just feel dead.

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

You could theoretically change your life at any moment. Move here, date that person, work on that startup, write that blog, dye your hair, adopt a dog. Should I stay, should I go? I don’t know if this agency is freedom or burden. Perhaps all the best things are both.

There's no such thing as work-life balance. It's all just life.

“It didn’t happen to you, it just happened.”

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." — Carl Gustav Jung

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the music of the cosmos, we are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments, and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.

When the end arrives, it’s really the beginning.

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.” — Terence McKenna

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist