“You can inspire, influence, help, support, advise, and love others. But you can’t control how any of it is received or understood. You have no say over what gets internalized, what gets triggered, or how the other person will react. Your work is to offer your best; their work is to receive it as best they can.” ~ Emily Maroutian
“The unresolved pain of previous generations operates in families like an emotional debt. We either face it or we leverage our children with it. When a man stands up to depression, the site of his battle may be inside his own head, but the struggle he wages has repercussions far beyond him. A man who transforms the internalized voice of contempt resists violence lying close to the heart of patriarchy itself. Such a man serves as a breakwall. The waves of pain that may have wreaked havoc across generations spill over him and lose their virulent force—sparing his children. The ‘difficult repentance’ such a man undertakes protects those who follow him. And his healing is a spiritual gift to those who came before. The reclaimed lost boy such a man discovers—the unearthed emotional, creative part of him—may not be merely the child of his own youth, but the lost child of his father’s youth, or even of his father’s father.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Don’t make excuses. Don’t blame any other person or any other thing. Get control of your ego. Don’t hide your delicate pride from the truth. Take ownership of everything in your world—the good and the bad. Take ownership of your mistakes, take ownership of your shortfalls, take ownership of your problems, and then take ownership of the solutions that will get those problems solved. Take ownership of your mission. Take ownership of your job, of your team, of your future, and take ownership of your life. And lead. Lead. Lead yourself, and your team, and the people in your life; lead them all. To victory.” ~ Jocko Willink, TEDx University of Nevada
“Healthy self-esteem is the capacity—rarely taught to either sex in our culture—to hold oneself in warm regard even when colliding with one’s human shortcomings. Our capacity to stay rooted in a compassionate understanding of one another’s flaws keeps us humane. When we lose touch with our own frailties we become judgmental and dangerous to others.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Boys don’t hunger for fathers who will model traditional mores of masculinity. They hunger for fathers who will rescue them from it. They need fathers who have themselves emerged from the gauntlet of their own socialization with some degree of emotional intactness. Sons don’t want their father’s ‘balls’; they want their hearts. And, for many, the heart of a father is a difficult item to come by.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“Research teaches us that the capacity to reach out to others for help in dealing with fear and pain is the best single remedy for emotional injury. Whether the person is struggling with the effects of combat, rape, or childhood injury, the best predictor of trauma resolution is good social support.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“The key component of a boy’s healthy relationship to his father is affection, not ‘masculinity.’ The boys who fare poorly in their psychological adjustment are not those without fathers, but those with abusive or neglectful fathers. Contrary to the traditional stereotype, a sweet man in an apron who helps out with the housework may be just the nurturant kind of father a boy most needs.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“As with intelligence, so too with behaviors—malleable kids live up, or down, to our expectations.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“I think not touching a child for decades at a time is a form of injury. I think withholding any expression of love until a young boy is a grown man is a form of emotional violence. And I believe that the violence men level against themselves and others is bred from just such circumstances.” ~ Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It
“When it comes to nutrition I am an, ‘anti-perfectionist.’ I am a lot more concerned with building a consistent routine that you’re actually going to stick to, rather than building the perfect diet.” ~ Thomas Frank, via YouTube
“Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“Can one tiny change transform your life? It’s unlikely you would say so. But what if you made another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change. The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting—even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you. A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“I can guarantee that if you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it, there will be days when you feel like quitting. When you start a business, there will be days when you don’t feel like showing up. When you’re at the gym, there will be sets that you don’t feel like finishing. When it’s time to write, there will be days that you don’t feel like typing. But stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits
“Genes can’t make you successful if you’re not doing the work. Yes, it’s possible that the ripped trainer at they gym has better genes, but if you haven’t put in the same reps, it’s impossible to say if you have been dealt a better or worse genetic hand. Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.” ~ James Clear, Atomic Habits