“Not smart is a passive act, remedied with learning, experience and thought. Stupid is active, the work of someone who should have or could have known better and decided to do something selfish, impulsive or dangerous anyway. The more experience, assets and privilege we have, the less excusable it is to do stupid things. And at the same time, the more useful it is to announce that we’re not smart (yet).”
Seth Godin
“The act of concentrating on a given subject is, conversely, the act of temporarily forgetting everything else. This is one reason why, in most cases, highly successful people seem to be possessed of great calm and impressive reserves of energy. Capable of intense concentration on basic questions, they are not worn down by superficial difficulties, distracting side issues or the enervating friction of a divided mind. Professionally hard at work, they are psychologically on vacation: this is one case where conventional acheivement is completely in accord with mental and physical health.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 106)
“If you are fearful of some event in the future, and all reasonable efforts to calm your fear have failed, try worrying about it as intensely, lengthily and specifically as possible. The exhausting experience of worry, which is a kind of preliving of events, may well defuse your anxiety when the event actually occurs. In the same sense, conscious worry encourages us to formulate solutions to the problems we will be facing. At any rate, do not try to repress or stifle your fear of what is to come. This is a sure path to anxiety in action.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 103)
“Plans made swiftly and intuitively are likely to have flaws. Plans made carefully and comprehensively are sure to.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 102)
“Each person carries an invisible backpack full of unfinished tasks. These things can weigh on you, especially the ones that you feel like you should do but know you probably won’t make time for. There are two ways to lighten the load: finish the task or let it go. Give yourself permission to stop worrying about the things you’re never going to do. What’s weighing down your backpack that needs to be released?”
James Clear
“The best we can do, I think, is not to pick nits but rather to consult broader purposes, taking time off every few days to review our position in life, evaluating the present in terms of past and future, memories and plans, and determining the ways in which recent and present choices may suggest larger patterns. In so doing, we rise temporarily above the ordinary flow of time and reacquaint ourselves with the larger pattern of forces which is our enduring identity.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 99)
“One of the chief benefits of games: liberation from all our other concerns. In this sense, games are more relaxing than relaxation: for when we ‘relax,’ we often open ourselves up to a hive of worries and impulses, but when we concentrate on a game, or anything else that is meaningful and definite, our life temporarily becomes simple and pure.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 94)
“Free space is useless without uncluttered time. Indeed, a nest of time need not require a special place at all: its only two requirements are that it concern some desirable activity and that it be, barring emergencies, inviolable.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 91)
“Even if we succeed in removing ourselves from the world, we cannot remove the world from ourselves. But with some concentration and stubbornness we can establish for ourselves another sort of nest in time, a refreshing period of solitude or conviviality sanctified by regularity and guarded like sacred ground.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 90)
“Whenever I go and do something with my kids (like a trip or an activity or an errand) I try to tell myself: Success is wanting to do this again. That is to say, it’s not about accomplishing anything or checking off certain boxes—did we see all the sights, did we get what we needed to get, did we arrive on time or whatever—it’s ultimately whether we got along well enough, enjoyed the experience enough, that at some point in the future they’ll say: ‘Hey, remember when we went to that concert? Can we do that again?’ or ‘Oh, you’re driving across town to grab that thing? Can I come?'”
Ryan Holiday
“We generally save [expression of love] for special occasions, forgetting that love, which is the most precious form of human sustenance, is needed daily. We tend to grow amorous when we need love rather than when we sense that others need it. We are upset and annoyed by another person’s request for our love, feeling that it insults our emotional integrity; when in fact it is usually a healthy invasion of the coldness and distance which guard our egocentric lives. Victims of a romantic illusion which is itself a form of selfish crudeness, we ignore the fact that love can and should be offered by the mind and will as well as by the inspired emotions. By omitting the regular expression of love, we alienate ourselves from the common channels of understanding and sympathy with our fellows, and thus indeed with the sources of inspired emotion as well. We would do well to remember that small children, who express love and appeal for it many times each day, are in this not different from our own inner selves.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 89)
“We generally have a volcanic attitude toward our own intrafamily annoyances and frustrations, not expressing them openly until they have grown so strong that it is impossible either to put them sensibly or hold them back. The eruption usually either provokes or occurs during a family squabble, when all parties involved have lost their tempers or are scared stiff. At these times no one listens carefully, and criticisms are exaggerated; we tend to characterize the actions which upset us, not as temporary and reparable failings, but as the products or ingrained vice or genetic debility. Thus expressed, our anger not only fails to correct disorder but rather becomes an injury which prolongs it. To say that we lack self-control is not enough. What we lack is the courage and providence to have expressed ourselves sooner.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 88)
“People who make moral compromises in order to achieve good ends find that their compromises irrevocably alter the ends achieved. Thus they learn that, in a world of process, it is method rather than goal which carries the burden of moral value; that in the final analysis nothing should be mistaken either for a means or for an end.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 80)
“Written history is composed of actions; real history is actions compounded invisibly with refusals to act.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 68)