If you start thinking that only your biggest and shiniest moments count, you're setting yourself up to feel like a failure most of the time. Personally, I'd rather feel good most of the time, so to me everything counts: the small moments, the medium ones, the success that make the papers and also the ones that no one knows about but me. The challenge is avoiding being derailed by the big, shiny moments that turn other people's heads. You have to figure out for yourself how to enjoy and celebrate them, and then move on.

You can choose to focus on the surprises and pleasures, or the frustrations. And you can choose to appreciate the smallest scraps of experience, the everyday moments, or to value only the grandest, most stirring ones. Ultimately, the real question is whether you want to be happy. I didn't need to leave the planet to find the right answer.

Chris Hadfield — An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

It's not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death's final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Just as when ample and princely wealth falls to a bad owner it is squandered in a moment, but wealth however modest, if entrusted to a good custodian, increases with use, so our lifetime extends amply if you manage it properly.

Seneca — On Shortness of Life

Life can be frustrating. Oftentimes we know what our problems are. We may even know what to do about them. But we fear that taking action is too risky, that we don't have the experience or that it's not how we pictured it or because it's too expensive, because it's too soon, because we think something better might come along, because it might not work.And you know what happens as a result? Nothing. We do nothing. […]

We often assume that the world moves at our leisure. We delay when we should initiate. We jog when we should be running, or better yet, sprinting. And then we're shocked—shocked!—when nothing big ever happens, when our opportunities never show up. […] So the first step is: Take the bat off your shoulder and give it a swing. You've got to start, to go anywhere.

Ryan Holiday — The Obstacle Is the Way

You will come across obstacles in life—fair and unfair. And you will discover, time and time again, that what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them, and whether we keep our composure. You will learn that this reaction determines how successful we will be in overcoming—or possibly thriving because of—them.

Where one person sees a crisis, another can see opportunity. Where one is blinded by success, another sees reality with ruthless objectivity. Where one loses control of emotions, another can remain calm. Desperation, despair, fear, powerlessness—these reactions are functions of our perceptions. You must realize: Nothink makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings.

Ryan Holiday — The Obstacle Is the Way

In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success.

In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.

Chris Hadfield — An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

For most of us, failure comes with baggage—a lot of baggage—that I believe is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn't study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or—worse!—aren't smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. […]

We needed to think about failure differently. I'm not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren't a necessary evil. They aren't evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without the, we'd have no originality).

Ed Catmull — Creativity, Inc.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. […] Are you a writer who doesn't write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venue? Then you know what Resistance is.Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.

Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing. We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.

Steven Pressfield — The War of Art

The mind should not be kept continuously at the same pitch of concentration, but given amusing diversions. Socrates did not blush to play with small children; Cato soothed his mind with wine when it was tired from the cares of state; […] Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after the rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers.

Seneca — On Shortness of Life

The path to perfection makes it almost impossible to get your work out the door, because nothing will ever be perfect. Focus instead on great enough to launch and perfect enough for your audience to enjoy.

The book won’t get finished if you’re focused on making every sentence a timeless quotation for the masses. The painting won’t get done if every square inch needs to be Louvre-worthy. Your work can be great enough. […]

So practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes closer. Every time you work at what you do, you’re one step closer to the next step. A whole bunch of these steps add up to launching.

Paul Jarvis — Practice makes closer

Life doesn’t have to be easy — in fact, the hard stuff is how we achieve anything of value. Life doesn’t have to be comfortable — in fact, when we get out of our comfort zone, we grow. [We] doesn’t have to know what [we’re] doing — it’s when we do things we don’t know how to do that we learn new things, new skills, and get better at them.

Leo Babauta — The One Skill

Here’s the thing to ponder: The other person is never the problem.

What does that mean? If someone behaves rudely and you get angry with him, the problem isn’t the other person’s actions … it’s your reaction. Or more accurately, it’s not even your reaction, but your action based on that reaction.

This point of view contends that other people’s actions are just an outside stimulus, just like a leaf falling outside, or a rock falling in front of us on a mountain path. When a rock falls in front of us, we don’t get mad at the rock. We go around it. When a leaf falls, we don’t think it’s being rude to us. We just watch it, and think of it as a natural phenomena.

Other people’s actions are really no different.

Leo Babauta — The Little Book of Contentment

This is a slogan I use to help me put things in perspective: “We are all learning.” You can tell it to yourself whenever someone does something you don’t like.

What does it mean? If someone is rude, it just means he has a lot to learn about being considerate or managing his anger. If my co-worker screws up, she has some things to learn about the work. If my child screws up or acts badly, she also has a lot to learn about life.

And that’s OK. We all have things to learn. We are all in the process of learning, all the time. We’re at different stages with different skills, but none of us has learned everything. And if we realize this, we can then be patient with this fellow learner, who after all, can’t be expected to know everything and be perfect, right?

Leo Babauta — The Little Book of Contentment

One of the biggest reasons people buy so much, and are so discontent with their lives, is advertising. Advertising creates false needs — all of a sudden we need an […] or a new […] or a […], just because an advertiser put the need in our heads.

Advertising is highly effective — we might not realize it, but it works on our subconscious so that we want to buy things. It plants desires in our minds, and creates a mindset that, whatever our problem, buying something is the solution. It creates the mindset that buying is the norm, and there’s no other choice.

Leo Babauta — The Little Book of Contentment

So often, people take simple situations and over-complicate them. They do it out of nervousness, anxiety or pride. They assume, since something feels difficult, that it must be because they lack the proper knowledge to do it, not that it’s merely emotionally difficult for them.[…]

Analysis paralysis allows us to avoid a difficult emotional situation while feeling like we’re accomplishing something by analyzing it. Our minds lead us into an illusion of progress and effort without actual real progress or effort.

The best answer to most problems is usually the simplest one. […]

Stop thinking and act.

Mark Manson — Analysis Paralysis

Because ego wants to manage anxiety by achieving more, it is especially concerned with the results of all this striving. By focusing on the outcome, your ego gets validation that all this work is worth it. Without a satisfactory result, all the striving is pointless.

A calling reveals itself through self-discovery. Your calling comes from within and can only be revealed by paying attention to how your life is unfolding. Instead of managing the outcome, your calling can handle the stress of ambiguity. It knows that the tension is revealing something that you couldn’t otherwise learn.

Shelley Prevost — 5 Ways to Distinguish Your Calling From Your Ego

We all have things that we say are important to us. You might say that you want to lose weight or be a better parent or create work that matters or build a successful business or write a book — but do you make time for these goals above all else? Do you organize your day around accomplishing them?

If you commit to nothing, then you’ll find that it’s easy to be distracted by everything.

James Clear — If You Commit to Nothing, You’ll Be Distracted By Everything

Removing yourself from the quitting=failure mindset shows you just how much more can be accomplished when you free up time in your life.

Letting go of something puts you in control. If a project or relationship isn’t bringing you value and isn’t working the way you want, quit it. Stop doing that thing right now. Take a deep breath, step back, and reflect on the time you spent doing what you were doing so you can apply it to your next big idea.

You don’t have to quit big things either. If you’re trying to get healthier, start doing yoga. If you hate it, quit it and try something else. If you’re trying to become a better writer, experiment with a completely different writing style for one week. If you hate that style, quit it and try another one.

Quitting shouldn’t be looked at as the end. It’s simply a step in the process. A step that should always be pushing you forward, not backwards.

Jason Zook — Knowing when to quit

When faced with challenge, get smarter.

Ed Catmull — Creativity, Inc.

If you never draw a line in the sand and clarify what is really important to you, then you’ll end up doing what’s expected of you. When you don’t have a clear purpose driving you forward, you default to doing what other people approve of. We’re not sure what we really want, and so we do what we think other people want.

James Clear — The #1 Regret From the Lives of Dying Hospital Patients (And How to Avoid It)

It’s not your job to tell yourself no. It’s not your job to deny yourself opportunities. It’s not your job to prevent your own progress. There are enough people in the world who will do those things for you.

Your job is to embrace rather than ignore. Your job is to pursue rather than prevent. Your job is to tell yourself “yes” instead of “no.”

James Clear — It’s Not Your Job to Tell Yourself “No”

Leaders often talk a lot and don’t listen half enough. A lot of my success in starting businesses has come from learning from others. If you want to be a good leader, you have to be a great listener. You’ve got to be out there listening, learning, writing things down, and absorbing knowledge all the time. Everyone has something to teach you.

Richard Branson — How to start a business

Anyone who’s achieved great success in business knows failure is not a bad thing. On the contrary, failure enables you to learn, grow and perfect your methods.

In fact, failure is one of the secrets to success, since some of the best ideas arise from the ashes of a shattered business.

Richard Branson — You learn by doing and by falling over

We all have that one friend who says, “I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I’d be a billionaire!” That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson — Rework

It doesn’t matter how much you plan, you’ll still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don’t make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going.

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson — Rework

When you want something bad enough, you make the time – regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don’t want it bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time. Don’t let yourself off the hook with excuses. It’s entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come true.

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson — Rework

Tenacity matters. Bernhard told a story of a friend who did a drawing every day, for more than 3 years, and became amazingly good by the end of that stint. He shared Looney Toons legendary animator Chuck Jones’ assertion that you have to draw 100,000 bad drawings before you have a good drawing. Bernhard said you might not seem very good at something when you start out, but if you’re persistent, tenacious even, you can get amazingly good.

Leo Babauta — 8 Creativity Lessons from a Pixar Animator

Decisions are progress. Each one you make is a brick in your foundation. You can’t build on top of “We’ll decide later,” but you can build on top of “Done.”

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson — Rework

People automatically associate quitting with failure, but sometimes that’s exactly what you should do. If you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson — Rework

We often assume that successful people got to where they are because they went to the right school or knew the right person or had the right genetics or stumbled into the right job at the right time. It’s easier to think about success this way because then you can say that these people were lucky to have certain advantages and you weren’t, and that’s what made the difference. […]

The people who end up looking like the “chosen ones” — the best-selling authors, the successful business owners, the elite athletes, the talented artists — are successful first and foremost because they chose themselves before they had any measure of success. And that’s the piece of success that isn’t as easy to accept because it often means betting on yourself when you feel like a failure.

James Clear — The “Chosen Ones” Choose Themselves

It is natural to judge your work. It is natural to feel disappointed that your creation isn’t as wonderful as you hoped it would be, or that you’re not getting any better at your craft. But the key is to not let your discontent prevent you from continuing to do the work.

You have to practice enough self-compassion to not let self-judgement take over. Sure, you care about your work, but don’t get so serious about it that you can’t laugh off your mistakes and continue to produce the thing you love. Don’t let judgment prevent delivery.

James Clear — How to Find Your Hidden Creative Genius

If you’re selling your time as a freelancer, or selling your own products, you’ve probably already realized you need to put nearly as much effort into marketing as you do into your work.

Getting people to know who you are and what you do is part of the process if you want to make your living independently, and to do this well, you need to be loud. […]

When I say ‘loud’, I mean you need to let people know about your work. [Y]ou need to tell people in lots of different ways about your work. Because seeing your work, and your name, over and over is what makes it stick.

Belle Beth Cooper — Why you can’t be a quiet creative

Attention is a limited resource. Society has evolved to the point where it can provide information at a far greater rate than any of us could ever hope to consume. Marketing and media has mastered packaging information in alluring and dramatic manners to suck us in and constantly want more. But what if we don’t need to maximize our consumption of information? What if maximizing it was actually hurting us?

I’m starting to believe most of us are over-saturated with information. I think the eruption of so-called “Attention Deficit Disorder” may not be so much a deficit of attention rather than a saturation of attention. There’s so much stimulation to consume that our brains train themselves to only focus on each item for the bare minimum amount of time. And then move on. Life has more breadth but no depth. No focus.

Mark Manson — Attention Saturation Disorder

Money is in some respects like fire; it is a very excellent servant but a terrible master. When you have it mastering you; when interest is constantly piling up against you, it will keep you down in the worst kind of slavery. But let money work for you, and you have the most devoted servant in the world. It is no “eye-servant.” There is nothing animate or inanimate that will work so faithfully as money when placed at interest, well secured. It works night and day, and in wet or dry weather.

P.T Barnum — Art Of Money Getting

If you want to summarize the habits of successful people into one phrase, it’s this: successful people start before they feel ready. […]

If you’re working on something important, then you’ll never feel ready. A side effect of doing challenging work is that you’re pulled by excitement and pushed by confusion at the same time. […]

We all start in the same place: no money, no resources, no contacts, no experience. The difference is that some people — the winners — choose to start anyway.

James Clear — Successful People Start Before They Feel Ready

On the path to making something great, you’ll make many things that aren’t that good. That’s ok. You’ll also make good things that aren’t appreciated. Don’t get down: history is filled with examples of artists who struggled even when they were making great art. […] Keep at it. Keep making things. Focus on getting better. Keep offering the things you make to people, and learn from their response.

Justin Jackson — Keep Making Things

Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, “Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.” Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business.

Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.

P.T Barnum — Art Of Money Getting

Engage in one kind of business only, and stick to it faithfully until you succeed, or until your experience shows that you should abandon it. A constant hammering on one nail will generally drive it to home at last, so that it can be clinched. When a man’s undivided attention is centered on one subject, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once. Many a fortune has slipped through a man’s fingers because he was engaged in too many occupations at a time. There is good sense in the old caution against having too many irons in the fire at once.

P.T Barnum — Art Of Money Getting

The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships. We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed. We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable.

Robert Greene — Mastery

What offers immediate pleasure comes to seem like a distraction, an empty entertainment to help pass the time. Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings.

Robert Greene — Mastery

The purpose of life for man is growth, just as the purpose of life for trees and plants is growth. Trees and plants grow automatically and along fixed lines; man can grow as he will. Trees and plants can only develop certain possibilities and characteristics; man can develop any power which is or has been shown by any person anywhere. Nothing that is possible in spirit is impossible in flesh and blood. Nothing that man can think is impossible. Nothing that man can imagine is impossible of realization.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Being Great

Stagnating on an idea, or failing to act leads to anxiety, bitterness, and all around angst. We have to let that go, we have to act, we have to move forward. We have to recognize fear for the fantasy that it is, and act logically towards what will make our life, and those around us better in the end-game.

If you procrastinate, you only prolong a state of inactivity. Instead of twiddling your thumbs, wondering ‘what if?’ you could be solving the problems that are crippling you with fear.

Foster a love for motion, for acting, for empathizing with the potential problems that could face you, but instead of letting them cripple you, tackle them head on, and progress. This is how to become successful in your own life, by acting on what truly drives you, and not catering to doubt and fear.

Sean Smith — The Truth About ‘The Right Time

Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process.

Robert Greene — Mastery

People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires.

Robert Greene — Mastery

The first steps of a creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful, a lot of busy-ness with no apparent or definable end in sight. There is nothing yet to research. For me, these moments are not pretty. I look like a desperate woman, tortured by the simple message thumping away in my head: you need an idea. It’s not enough for me to walk into a studio and start dancing, hoping that something good will come of my aimless cavorting on the studio floor. Creativity doesn’t generally work that way for me. (the rare times when it has stands out like april blizzards.) You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun - paint into painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.

Twyla Tharp — The Creative Habit

Memory, as we most frequently think of it, encompasses every fact and experience that we can call up at will from our cranial hard drives. We all have this in varying abundance. It’s the skill that lets us store away the vital and seemingly trivial data and images and experiences of our lives. […]

But thinking of memory only in this way is simplistic. It shrinks our minds down to the size and sophistication of a personal computer—a machine defined and priced by how much it can remember and how quickly it can retrieve information. Creativity has little to do with this kind of memory. If it did, the most creative people people would have hair-trigger memories of photographic proportions, and our artists would all be found slaughtering the competition on Jeopardy! Just because you can recite Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory doesn’t mean you have the poetic spark to write a sonnet of your own.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it—for ourselves and others.

Twyla Tharp — The Creative Habit

In an accelerated, overachieving world, we all take pride in our ability to do two or more things at the same time: working on vacation, using an elegant dinner to hammer out a business deal; reading while we’re groaning on the StairMaster. The irony of multitasking is that it’s exhausting; when you’re doing two or three things simultaneously, you use more energy than the sum of energy required to do each task independently. You’re also cheating yourself because you’re not doing anything excellently. You’re compromising your virtuosity. In the words of T. S. Eliot, you’re “distracted from distractions by distractions”.

It’s a challenge to cut out multitasking because we all get a frisson of satisfaction from being able to keep several balls in the air at once. But [even] one week without multitasking is worth it; the increased focus and awareness are their own rewards.

Twyla Tharp — The Creative Habit

The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.

Robert Greene — Mastery

If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started “being creative,” well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing your work that we figure out who we are.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

Take twenty percent off a $25 shirt. The same reduction can be represented as 20 percent off or $5 off. Which seems like a better deal? Or think about a $2,000 laptop. The same reduction on a $2,000 laptop can be represented as 10 percent off or $200 off. Does one method of framing the discount make the deal seem better than the other?

Researchers find that whether a discount seems larger as money or percentage depends on the original price. For low-priced products, like books or groceries, price reductions seem more significant when they are framed in percentage terms.

Twenty percent off that $25 shirt seems like a better deal than $5 off. For high-priced products, however, the opposite is true. For things like laptops or other big-ticket items, framing price reductions in dollar terms […] makes them seem like a better offer. The laptop seems like a better deal when it is $200 off rather than 10 percent off.

A simple way to figure out which discount frame seems larger is by using something called the Rule of 100. If the product’s price is less than $100, the rule of 100 says that percentage discounts will seem larger. […] If product’s price is more than $100, the opposite is true. Numerical discounts will seem larger.

Jonah Berger — Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Simply changing on three-letter word can often spell the difference between failure and success in changing people without giving offense or arousing resentment. Many people begin their criticism with sincere praise followed by the word “but” and ending with a critical statement.

For example, in trying to change a child’s careless attitudes towards studies, we might say, “we’re really proud of you, Johnnie for raising your grades this term, but if you had worked harder on your algebra, the results would have been better.”

In this case, Johnny might feel encouraged until he heard the word “but”. He might then question the sincerity of the original praise. To him, the praise seemed only to be a contrived lead-in to a critical inference of failure. Credibility would be strained, and we probably would not achieve our objectives of changing Johnny’s attitude towards his studies.

This could easily overcome by changing the word “but” to “and”. “we are really proud of you Johnny, for raising your grades this term, and by continuing the same conscientious effects next term, your algebra grade can be up with all the others.” Now, Johnnie would accept the praise because there was no follow-up of an inference of failure. We have called his attention to the behavior we wished to change indirectly and the chances are he will try to live up to our expectations.

Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People

[W]hen people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate one another. We look to others for information about what is right or good to do in a given situation, and this social proof shapes everything from the products we buy to the candidates we vote for. […]

If people can’t see what others are doing, they can’t imitate them. So to get our products and ideas become popular we need to make them more publicly observable. […] We need to make the private public. If something is built to show, it’s built to grow.

Jonah Berger — Contagious: Why Things Catch On

When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason wives ran away? It was ‘lack of appreciation.’ And I’d bet that a similar study made of runaway husbands would come out the same way. We often take our spouses so much for granted that we never let them know we appreciate them.

Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People

There are reasons to believe that experiencing any sort of emotion might encourage people to share. Talking to others often makes emotional experiences better. If we get promoted, telling others helps us celebrate. If we get fired, telling others helps us vent.

Sharing emotions also helps us connect. Say I watch a really awe-inspiring video […]. If I share that video with a friend, he’s likely to feel similarly inspired. And the fact that we both feel the same way helps us deepen our social connection. It highlights our similarities and reminds us how much we have in common. Emotion sharing is thus a bit like social glue, maintaining and strengthening relationships.

Jonah Berger — Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Word of mouth […] is a prime tool for making a good impression. Think of it as a kind of currency. Social currency. Just as people use money to buy products or services, they use social currency to achieve desired positive impressions among their families, friends, and colleagues.

So to get people talking, companies and organizations need to mint social currency. Give people a way to make themselves look geod while promoting their products and ideas along the way.

Jonah Berger — Contagious: Why Things Catch On

In Huxley’s Brave New World, the citizens of the future state take a substance known as “soma” to drown their worries and embark on a holiday of happy thoughts. “A gramme is better than a damn” is a saying seeded deep into their minds, conditioning them to always pick the easy way out and kill off any hint of bad emotions with a gramme of soma, or three.

In some ways much of what we do today is a reflection of soma. Drugs and alcohol are the easy examples of this, but on another level a lot of today’s media is also soma. Look through the pages of a newspaper, or watch a popular news channel and see that most of the stuff being covered is completely irrelevant to your life. […] People consume it for the sake of consumption, not for the sake of acting on the information. It’s a ritual–you read the news because it’s what you do, not because it’s what you choose to do in order to accomplish a goal.

The reason for this is that this media actually acts as soma–it drowns out your thoughts and anxieties. It does it by flooding you with information at a rapid pace, leaving your brain busy trying to process it.[…] A busy mind cannot contemplate, and a mind that cannot contemplate cannot sink into perturbation. In this way, all this consumption of media online and offline is a way to kill off deep thinking–a cause of our anxieties.

Dmitry Fadeyev — Soma

“I’d love to start a company / become a great programmer / write an awesome blog, but there’s just not enough time in the day!” Bullshit. There’s always enough time, you’re just not spending it right.

Now that’s some tough love, but I’m sick and tired of hearing “no time” as an excuse for why you can’t be great. It really doesn’t take that much time to get started, but it does take wanting it really bad. Most people just doesn’t want it bad enough and protect their ego with the excuse of time. […]

If you want it bad enough, you’ll make the time, regardless of your other obligations. Don’t let yourself off the hook with excuses. It’s too easy and, to be honest, nobody cares on the other side. It’s entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come through.

David Heinemeier Hansson — There’s always time to launch your dream

Scarcity and exclusivity help products catch on by making them seem more desirable. If something is difficult to obtain, people assume that it must be worth the effort. If something is unavailable or sold out, people often infer that lots of other people must like it, and so it must be pretty good. […]

Scarcity and exclusivity boost word of mouth by making people feel like insiders. If people get something not everyone else has, it makes them feel special, unique, high status. And because of that they’ll not only like a product or service more, but tell others about it. Why? Because telling others makes them look good. Having insider knowledge is social currency. When people who waited hours in line finally get that new tech gadget, one of the first things they do is show others. Look at me and what I was able to get!

Jonah Berger — Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Don’t you have much more faith in ideas that you discover for yourself than in ideas that are handed to you on a silver platter? If so, isn’t it bad judgement to try to ram your opinions down the throats of other people? Isn’t it wiser to make suggestions - and let the other person think out the conclusion?

Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People

You must so impress others that they will feel that in associating with you they will get increase for themselves. See that you give them a use value greater than the cash value you are taking from them.

Take an honest pride in doing this, and let everybody know it; and you will have no lack of customers. People will go where they are given increase; and the Supreme, which desires increase in all, and which knows all, will move toward you men and women who have never heard of you. Your business will increase rapidly, and you will be surprised at the unexpected benefits which will come to you. You will be able from day to day to make larger combinations, secure greater advantages, and to go on into a more congenial vocation if you desire to do so.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

Humility is intelligent self-respect that keeps us from thinking too much or too little of ourselves. It reminds us how far we have come while at the same time helping us see how far short we are of what we can be.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

If there was a secret formula for becoming known, I would give it to you. But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: Do good work and share it with people.

It’s a two-step process. Step one, “Do good work,” is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Know you’re going to suck for a while. Fail. Get better. Step two, “share it with people,” was really hard up until about ten years ago or so. Now, it’s very simple: “Put your stuff on the Internet.”

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

It is really not the number of things you do, but the efficiency of each separate action that counts.

Every act is, in itself, either a success or a failure. Every act is, in itself, either effective or inefficient. Every inefficient act is a failure, and if you spend your life in doing inefficient acts, your whole life will be a failure.

The more things you do, the worse for you, if all your acts are inefficient ones. On the other hand, every efficient act is a success in itself, and if every act of your life is an efficient one, your whole life must be a success.

The cause of failure is doing too many things in an inefficient manner, and not doing enough things in an efficient manner.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

You can advance only be being larger than your present place; and no man is larger than his present place who leaves undone any of the work pertaining to that place. The world is advanced only by those who more than fill their present places.

If no man quite filled his present place, you can see that there must be a going backward in everything. Those who do not quite fill their present places are dead weight upon society, government, commerce, and industry; they must be carried along by others at a great expense.[…] No society could advance if every man was smaller than his place; social evolution is guided by the law of physical and mental evolution. In the animal world, evolution is caused by excess of life.

When an organism has more life than can be expressed in the functions of its own plane, it develops the organs of a higher plane, and a new species is originated. There never would have been new species had there not been organisms which more than filled their places. The law is exactly the same for you; your getting rich depends upon your applying this principle to your own affairs.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

Ironically, the less we’re worried about maintaining an ideal self-image and being endorsed by others, the more genuine acceptance and real confidence comes our way.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

To permit your mind to dwell upon the inferior is to become inferior and to surround yourself with inferior things.

On the other hand, to fix your attention on the best is to surround yourself with the best, and to become the best.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

The very best thing you can do for the whole world is to make the most of yourself.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

When it comes to creative endeavors, time is always relative. Whether your project takes months or years to complete, you will always experience a sense of impatience and desire to get to the end. The single greatest action you can take for acquiring creative power is to reverse this natural impatience. You take pleasure in the laborious research process; you enjoy the slow cooking of the idea, the organic growth that naturally takes shape over time. You do not naturally draw out the process, which will create its own problems (we all need deadlines), but the longer you can allow the project to absorb your mental energies, the richer it will become. Imagine yourself years in the future looking back at the work you have done. From that future vantage point, the extra months and years you devoted to the process will not seem painful or laborious at all. It is an illusion of the present that will vanish. Time is your greatest ally.

Robert Greene — Mastery

You must form a clear and definite mental picture of what you want; you cannot transmit an idea unless you have it yourself. You must have it before you give it; and many people fail […] because they have themselves only a vague and misty concept of the things they want to do, to have, or to become. It is not enough that you should have a general desire for wealth “to do good with”; everybody has that desire.

It is not enough that you should have a wish for travel, see things, live more, etc. Everybody has those desires also. If you were going to send a wireless message to a friend, you would not send the letters of the alphabet in their order, and let him construct the message for himself; nor would you take words at random from the dictionary. You would send a coherent sentence; one which meant something. When you try to impress your wants upon Substance, remember that it must be done by a coherent statement; you must know what you want, and be definite. You can never get rich, or start the creative power into action, by sending out unformed longings and vague desires.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

A man’s way of doing things is the direct result of the way he thinks about things.

To do things in a way you want to do them, you will have to acquire the ability to think the way you want to think; this is the first step toward getting rich.

To think what you want to think is to think TRUTH, regardless of appearances.

Every man has the natural and inherent power to think what he wants to think, but it requires far more effort to do so than it does to think the thoughts which are suggested by appearances. To think according to appearance is easy; to think truth regardless of appearances is laborious, and requires the expenditure of more power than any other work man is called upon to perform.

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

When too little ego deprives us of a healthy sense of self, getting approval from others is our primary motive and a consuming distraction to making a contribution. We then seek acceptance because we believe if we get the approval of others, it will feed our ego what it’s missing. But those are empty calories. If we’re hypersensitive to how others react to the words we say, the possessions we have, the thoughts we share, or the actions we take, we give control of how we feel about ourselves to others.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

[P]erfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force […]. Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tideness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get.

Anne Lamott — Bird by Bird

The more we expect people to recognize, appreciate, or to be dazzled by our brilliance, the less they listen, even if we do have better ideas.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. ‘To know all is to forgive all.’

As Dr. Johnson said: 'God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.’ Why should you and I?

Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People

There are three motives for which we live; we live for the body, we live for the mind, we live for the soul. No one of these is better or holier than the other; all are alike desirable, and no one of the three—body, mind, or soul—can live fully if either of the others is cut short of full life and expression. It is not right or noble to live only for the soul and deny mind or body; and it is wrong to live for the intellect and deny body or soul. […]

Man cannot live fully in body without good food, comfortable clothing, and warm shelter; and without freedom from excessive toil. Rest and recreation are also necessary to his physical life. He cannot live fully in mind without books and time to study them, without opportunity for travel and observation, or without intellectual companionship. […] To live fully in soul, man must have love;

Wallace D. Wattles — The Science of Getting Rich

When ego is out of balance, there is an inverse relationship between amassing knowledge and openness to learn; the more we know, the more confident we become. When our confidence in what we know increases to the point that we think there’s little left to learn, we’re less open to learn. That’s the point of danger; the lid to our box of knowledge begins to close and we lose relevance.

“In times of change, learners will inherit the earth,” said philosopher Eric Hoffer, “while the learned will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists”. To which futurist Alvin Toffler added, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” If we’re to increase our knowledge and relevance, the first step of leadership literacy is learning.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

Tomlinson suggests that if you love different things, you just keep spending time with them. “Let them talk to each other. Something will begin to happen.”

The thing is, you can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you’ll start to feel phantom limb pain. […]

Don’t throw any of yourself away. Don’t worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work. Don’t worry about unity-what unifies your work is the fact you made it. One day you’ll look back and it will all make sense.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

A wantrepreneur is someone who wants to be an entrepreneur, but is so obsessed with watching TED talks and talking about their business ideas that they never launch them. […]

If you have a conversation with a friend about your business idea this month, and next month you are having the same conversation, you are a wantrepreneur.

Dan Norris — 7 Day Startup

In fact, it is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt. You will fail to question the element of luck, making you think that you have the golden touch. When you do inevitably fail, it will confuse and demoralize you past the point of learning. In any case, to apprentice as an entrepreneur you must act on your ideas as early as possible, exposing them to the public, a part of you even hoping that you’ll fail. You have everything to gain.

Robert Greene — Mastery

In basketball, you don’t get better playing your little brother. You only get better playing your bigger brother […].

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

Amassing a body of work or building a career is a lot about the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time. Writing a page each day doesn’t seem like much, but do it for 365 days and you have enough to fill a novel.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

The trouble with creative work: Sometimes by the time people catch on to what’s valuable about what you do, you’re either a) bored to death with it, or b) dead. You can’t go looking for validation from external sources. Once you put your work into the world, you have no control over the way people will react to it.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Anne Lamott — Bird by Bird

You must cultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work and the need to constantly improve your ideas, along with sense of uncertainty-you are not exactly sure where to go next, and this uncertainty drives the creative urge and keeps it fresh. Any kind of resistance or obstacle that crosses your path should be seen as yet another chance to improve your work.

Robert Greene — Mastery

Your smile is a messenger of your good will. Your smile brightens the lives of all who see it. To someone who has seen a dozen people frown, scowl or turn their faces away, your smile is like the sun breaking through the clouds. Especially when that someone is under pressure from his bosses, his customers, his teachers or parents or children, a smile can help him realise that all is not hopeless - that there is joy in the world.

Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People

We need to spend less time looking to others for interesting things, and start spending more time doing the things that make us interesting. Perhaps you need to dedicate more time to that thing that got you where you are or that thing that will get you where you want to be. […] It’s easy to give time and attention to the things you enjoy or are easy, but true character comes when you give focus to the things that are difficult but must be done. This means you have to ignore everything else, and know that you will be better because of it.

Able Parris — Focus Means Ignoring

If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maria Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.”

Take time to mess around. Get lost. Wander. You never know where it’s going to lead you.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

I once succumbed to the fad of fasting and went for six days and nights without eating. It wasn’t difficult. I was less hungry at the end of the sixth day than I was at the end of the second. Yet I know, as you know, people who would think they had committed a crime if they let their families or employees go for six days without food; but they will let them go for six days, and six weeks, and sometimes sixty years without giving them the hearty appreciation that they crave almost as much as they crave food.

Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People

The problem that technology presents us is that it increases the amount of information at our disposal, but slowly degrades the power of our memory to retain it. Tasks that used to exercise the brain―remembering phone numbers, doing simple calculations, navigating and remembering streets in a city―are now performed for us, and like any muscle the brain can grow flabby from disuse. To counteract this, in our spare time we should not simply look for entertainment and distractions. We should take up hobbies-a game, a musical instrument, a foreign language―that bring pleasure but also offer us the chance to strengthen your memory capacities and the flexibility of our brain. In doing so, we can train ourselves to process large amounts of information without feeling anxious or overtaxed.

Robert Greene — Mastery

Keep your balance. You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are. This is especially hard for artists to accept, as so much of what they do is personal. Keep close to your family, friends and the people who love you for you, not just the work.

Austin Kleon — Show Your Work

Words matter. Artists love to trot out the tired line, “My work speaks for itself,” but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.

Austin Kleon — Show Your Work

In a world that constantly judges who finishes first, second, and third, it’s hard not to judge ourselves or others as more or less smart, innovate, insightfull, talented, or successful. There’s a constant stream of messages reminding us that who we are and what we achieve isn’t enough. We’re flooded with images that give as the illusion certain people have it all, and selected organizations are idolized as near perfect. The truth is no one has it all and perfection is an illusion.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

If it ain’t raining, it ain’t training.

Bear Grylls — Mud, Sweat and Tears

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

To keep our body healthy, our immune system creates molecules called free radicals that fight viruses and bacteria. However, when environmental factors such as pollution and pesticides cause free radical production to become excessive, the molecules attack not only virues and bacteria but good cells and vital tissue as well, causing illness, premature aging, cancer, and other diseases.

Ego is free radical.

In the right amount ego is inherently positive and provides a healthy level of confidence and ambition-driving out insecurity, fear and apathy. But left unchecked, it goes on a hunt. The primary “cells” ego attacks are our talents and abilities-either through overconfidence and giving the false illusion we’re better than we actually are, or by robbing us of confidence so that we lose trust in our ability to use those talents to capacity.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

Benjamin Franklin — The Way to Wealth

There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of faliure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind of comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done.

Robert Greene — Mastery

Creativity is by its nature an act of boldness and rebellion. You are not accepting the status quo or conventional wisdom. You are playing with the very rules you have learned, experimenting and testing the boundaries. The world is dying for bolder ideas, for people who are not afraid to speculate and investigate. Creeping conservatism will narrow your searches, tether you to comfortable ideas, and create a downward spiral-as the creative spark leaves you, you will find yourself clutching even more forcefully to dead ideas, past successes, and the need to maintain your status. Make creativity rather than comfort your goal and you will ensure far more success for the future.

Robert Greene — Mastery

Mum’s generosity ensured that as adults we never became too attached to, or attracted by money.

I learnt from her that before you can get, you have to give, and that money is like a river - if you try to block it up and dam it (i.e. cling on to it), then, like a dammed river, the water will go stagnant and stale, and your life will feaster. If you keep the stream moving, and keep giving stuff and money away, wherever you can, then the river and the rewards will keep flowing in.

I love the quote she once gave me: ‘When supply seems to have dried up, look around you quickly for something to give away.’ It is a law of the universe: to get good things you must first give away good things. (And of course this applies to love and friendship, as well.)

Bear Grylls — Mud, Sweat and Tears

Go make that stuff. Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.

Austin Kleon — Steal Like an Artist

There’s a vital difference between defending an idea and being defensive. The motive behind defending an idea is to let the best argument win. When we’re defensive, we defend our positions as if we’re defending who we are.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

Our achievements are generally limited only by the beliefs we impose on ourselves. If we tell ourselves often enough that we don’t have what it takes, then that will inevitably become our reality.

Bear Grylls — Mud, Sweat and Tears

As of today, spend a minimum of one hour a day doing whatever you are waiting to do until your finances are more secure, or untill the children have grown and left home, or until you have finished your obligations and you feel free to do what you really want to do. […] Do what you love to do, what you are waiting to do, what you’ve been born to do, now.

David Deida — The Way of the Superior Man

Constantly looking over our shoulder at what others are doing takes our eyes off what’s ahead of us. Then our goals are set not by what’s possible or relevant but by what someone else is doing. In that case, we’re not even setting our goals; someone else is. A preoccupation with comparision pushes us to measure success against acomplishments that have little or nothing to do with what we’re uniquely suited for. Envy is a strong motivator but a weak navigator.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics

The problem is that we humans are deep conformists. Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others, or criticized by teachers. People with a high visual sense are often labeled as dyslexic, for example. Because of these judgements, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery. Mastery is like swimming—it is too difficult to move forward when we are creating our own resistance or swimming against the current. Know your strengths and move with them.

Robert Greene — Mastery

Ironically, being too competitive makes us less competitive. By fixating on someone else, we give up our potential in the name of becoming “better than” or at least “as good as” someone else.

David Marcum, Steven B. Smith — Egonomics