“No one can possibly do a better job of being you than you can. And the best version of you is the one who has committed to a way forward. Your work is never going to be good enough (for everyone). But it’s already good enough (for someone). Committing to a practice that makes our best better is all we can do.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 246)
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“Ultimately, the goal is to become the best in the world at being you. To bring useful idiosyncrasy to the people you seek to change, and to earn a reputation for what you do and how you do it. The peculiar version of you, your assertions, your art.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 226)
“Of course, at first, all work is lousy. At first, the work can’t be any good—not for you and not for Hemingway. But if you’re the steam shovel that keeps working at it, bit by bit, you make progress, the work gets done, and more people are touched. There’s plenty of time to make it better later. Right now, your job is to make it.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 203)
“Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.”
Oscar Wilde, via Sunbeams (Page 82)
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our inner most being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth, via Sunbeams (Page 82)
“‘Letting go’ is only possible for short periods. We need some discipline to bring us to ‘letting be.’ We must walk a spiritual path. Ego must wear itself out like an old shoe, journeying from suffering to liberation.”
Chögyam Trungpa, via Sunbeams (Page 82)
“The first step… shall be to lose the way.”
Galway Kinnell, via Sunbeams (Page 82)
“The things that some people manage to be experts in: fantasy sports, celebrity trivia, derivatives and commodities markets, thirteenth-century hygiene habits of the clergy. We can get very good at what we’re paid to do, or adept at a hobby we wish we could be paid to do. Yet our own lives, habits, and tendencies might be a mystery to us.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 116)
“If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first. Befriending your bad ideas is a useful way forward. They’re not your enemy. They are essential steps on the path to better.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 191)
“We have unlimited reasons to hide our work and only one reason to share it: to be of service.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 190)
“You are not your work. Your work is a series of choices made with generous intent to cause something to happen. We can always learn to make better choices.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 181)
“When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can focus on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 p.m. because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship. Take what you get and commit to a process to make it better.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 171)
“Don’t overdress your thought in fine language.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 115)
“If you run a marathon, you’re going to get tired. It would make no sense to hire a coach and say, ‘I want you to help me train so I don’t get tired when I run a marathon.’ The only difference between the tens of thousands of people who finish the marathon and those that don’t is that the finishers figured out where to put their tired.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 169)
“The infinite game is the game we play to play, not to win. The infinite game is a catch in the backyard with your four-year-old son. You’re not trying to win catch; you’re simply playing catch. The most important parts of our lives are games that we can’t imagine winning.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 167)
“Every creator who has engaged in the practice has a long, nearly infinite string of failures. All the ways not to start a novel, not to invent the light bulb, not to transform a relationship. Again and again, creative leaders fail. It is the foundation of our work. We fail and then we edit and then we do it again.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 164)
“Atreus: Who would reject the flood of fortune’s gifts?
Thyestes: Anyone who has experienced how easily they flow back.”
Seneca, Thyestes, via The Daily Stoic (Page 113)
37 Transformative Quotes On Failure To Consider For Your Success
Excerpt: Failure isn’t losing—it’s learning. Those who live by this principle succeed more. Our 37 quotes on failure will transform your perspective.
Read More »37 Transformative Quotes On Failure To Consider For Your Success
“All of us get an endless supply of ideas, notions, and inklings. Successful people, often without realizing it, ignore the ones that are less likely to ‘work,’ and instead focus on the projects that are more likely to advance the mission. Sometimes we call this good taste. It’s possible to get better at this pre-filtering. By doing it out loud. By writing out the factors that you’re seeking, or even by explaining to someone else how your part of the world works. Instinct is great. It’s even better when you work on it.”
Seth Godin, The Practice (Page 143)