▲dfr
Great times are great softeners. Abundance can be its own obstacle,
To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives.
what matters most is not what these obstacles are but how we see them, how we react to them,
To argue, to complain, or worse, to just give up, these are choices. Choices that more often than not, do nothing to get us across the finish line.
“persist and resist.” Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder.
Everything is a chance to do and be your best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.
We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it.
It’s a cliché question to ask, What would I change about my life if the doctor told me I had cancer? After our answer, we inevitably comfort ourselves with the same insidious lie: Well, thank God I don’t have cancer.
Instead of denying—or worse, fearing—our mortality, we can embrace it. Reminding ourselves each day that we will die helps us treat our time as a gift.
The philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a Stoic as someone who “transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking.” It’s a loop that becomes easier over time.
— The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday.