Ambitious people are a dime a dozen. Most people doubt themselves. All of us — in some shape or form — are stuck in la la land.
One of the most difficult yet useful skills is the ability to balance your aspirations with reality. A pessimist and an idealist both miss the point.
The point is to have optimism about your future but look at the state of society, your environment, and your circumstances without rose-colored glasses.
Many of these truths sit right under your nose. Intuitively you know they’re true, but facing them head-on means discomfort.
Success or failure…
Learning how to read people is a psychological superpower, but it’s also a skill that anyone can pick up. It’s possible to glean a ton of information about others simply by paying attention.
Ever since I started writing, I’ve been honing this skill. It’s not a hard and fast science — everyone has off days. But staying aware of a few patterns can help you find people with great character — and shape the person you may wish to be. I look for these eight subtle clues in my interactions with people to understand who they really are.
The way…
Why do we love life quotes so much?
I think I have the answer. Life quotes have a way of piercing through the b.s. and noise surrounding us. Life quotes are the swords that cut the Gordian knots of noise and reveal the essence of life we know deep down but tend to forget.
I’m a writer, which means I love quotes. But I also understand how simultaneously insightful and useless they can be. You can do one of two things with a quote — use it as inspirational fluff to post on Instagram or use the insight to change…
There’s one thing that gets in the way of your success. It’s something everyone struggles with to a degree including myself. It’s not that you don’t want better outcomes in your life. Who doesn’t? It’s not that you don’t have the talent or skillset to be able to pull off a specific goal.
Often, things like motivation and discipline aren’t the real culprit. There’s one overarching theme in your life that keeps you from getting what you want and it’s the seed to all of your doubts, fears, and anxieties.
What’s the theme? You care way too much. …
You live in a society of panderers. Everyone is trying to sell you a dream. I’m selling you a dream, too, don’t get me wrong, but I’m at least attempting to be objective about it. You can let me know whether or not I’m doing a good job.
If you want to be successful in this world, you must understand the world you’re living in — a mixture of massive opportunity and cruel inequality, crazy upside, and limited mobility, the ability to pursue but not the promise of happiness.
Life is beautiful, tough, amazing, and shitty at the same time…
Flashback in time: I’m 26 years old, my girlfriend is pregnant, and we’re living in her parents’ basement rent-free because we were that broke.
I’d just started writing about a year before that. I wasn’t making any serious money with it yet, but at that point, I knew it was something I wanted to do long-term.
I’d heard that writing books can help you make an extra income as a writer.
I’d already attempted and failed, to write a book before, so I started doing more research on how to do it. …
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but having the right amount of money and earning it the right way can give you the next best thing to ‘happiness’ — peace of mind.
Money has whatever context you give to it. People talk about money as if it has an opinion or as if it’s some sentient entity. It’s not. Money responds to how you treat it.
Treat it as scarce and it will run away from you. Treat it as abundant and it will come to you. Think of it as evil and it won’t like you. …
Here is the self-help guru everyone hates.
He’s a white man, 6 foot 3, and good-looking. He has a high IQ, comes from an upper-middle-class family, and graduated from an elite university.
After writing one article, he goes viral, and builds an entire career from a random moment of success, telling you how you can have the exact same life if you followed his ‘blueprint’ for success.
Sound about right?
Jokes aside, you can’t properly think about success in a vacuum, and there’s no such thing as a perfectly repeatable formula.
You can attempt to achieve the same outcomes as…
Millions of people have read my words. A small percentage of those people decide to join my email list. Out of that small percentage of people who join my email list, only a small handful of them will ever buy anything from me.
If you’re launching something like an information product, depending on the price, getting one percent of people to buy your product is a win. Depending on how you price your product, getting one percent of people to buy it can help you make a sizeable income.
Say your product is one thousand dollars and you have an…
Most [people] make the error of thinking that one day it will be done. They think, “If I can work enough, then one day I could rest.”Or, “I’m only doing this now so that one day I can do what I really want with my life.” The […] error is to think that eventually, things will be different in some fundamental way. They won’t. It never ends. As long as life continues, the creative challenge is to tussle, play, andmake love with the present moment while giving your unique gift. — David Deida
It doesn’t matter how successful you become…
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