Be honest with yourself about how hard you’re willing to work. One thing I noticed as a trainer and as a professor is people want to achieve something, but aren’t willing to put in the effort to get there. They say they want to work hard but when you work them hard, they run. Don’t be the person who runs. The discipline it takes to do that is uncomfortable and unpleasant sometimes and you must be willing to enter that discomfort. Look at advanced degrees: two out of three people don’t complete their PhD. It’s punishing. I’ve cried because of the stress numerous times. Every day I have to reaffirm my efforts at my dissertation, at lifting, at personal relationships. But it’s so, so worth it in the end.

What you are aware of, you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s still there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference. —Anthony deMello, from Awareness: the Perils and Opportunities of Reality

Kato Lomb explained that your micro-environment (the bubble in which you live) is more important than your macro-environment (the country in which you live). In other words, what matters most is the things that you deliberately expose yourself to all the time rather than those that you come across by accident.

It’s unfair to compare Android tablets to the Titanic. History shows that the Titanic didn’t back away from the iceberg and then ram it again, twice.

Don’t read a book once carefully. Read it 10 times, 100 times, sloppily.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

There is always another game on Saturday.

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, a Unitarian minister, summed it up decades ago:

The master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his work and his play, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether his is working or playing. To himself, he is always doing both.