“When drawing boundaries, it may be uncomfortable. You don’t need to protect people from feeling uncomfortable or feel obliged to smooth the tension. It’s okay for people to feel bad and weird when they’ve crossed someone’s boundary.”
Unknown, Talking Points For Life
“Boundaries are the edge territory of what belongs to us and what belongs to someone else. They are the ways we communicate our needs. They are what allow us to feel safe among strangers, in everyday interactions, and in our closest relationships. Boundaries aren’t just the hard nos, they are also the maybes and the yesses-with-limits.”
Dr. Faith G. Harper, Unf*ck Your Boundaries
“The potential of future suffering is not a reason to suffer now. On the contrary, it’s a reason to be present now. To be good now. To love and live, now. That future may come…and you’ll meet it. If there’s something you can do to prevent it, do it. But hopelessness and despair and dread and anger? They do nothing for nobody–least of all you.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“If you raise people to praise only wealth, power, and glory, then naturally they will praise only these things. If you raise people to love the feeling of love, they will start to live in love.”
Mee-Tee, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 363)
“Your calendar is a better measure of success than your bank account.”
James Clear, Blog
“No one is perfect. We all have bad days. It’s okay to feel a little discouraged. But to give up? To not even try? That is criminal. ‘Disgraceful,’ Marcus Aurelius would say, ‘for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong.’ All of us have fallen short in the last year…and the years before that. We broke our resolutions. We made the same mistakes again and again. We were ‘jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,’ as Marcus said. But now it’s time to pick ourselves up and try again. We have to keep going. We can’t give up. Because the alternative is unthinkable.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“Either don’t blame anyone…or blame yourself. For whatever happens. For everything that happens. Those are the options.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“It is not the blaming of evil but the glorifying of goodness that creates harmony in our life.”
Lucy Malory, via A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 359)
“The highest creative expression for a human being is to be able to create something new right in the face of adversity, and the worse the adversity, the greater the opportunity.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“You have three aspects of reality that nobody gets to avoid. Pain, uncertainty, and constant work. Those are things you’re just gonna have to live with, no matter what. What will make you happy is the process. You have to learn how to love the process of dealing with those three things.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“Part X is the judgmental part of you, the antisocial part of you. It’s an invisible… force that wants to keep you from changing or growing. It wants to block your evolution. It wants to block your potential. Part X is the voice of impossibility. Whatever it is you think you need to do, it’s gonna tell you that’s impossible.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“Your relationships are like handholds to let yourself get pulled back into life. The key of it is you have to take the initiative. If you’re waiting for them to the take the initiative, you don’t understand. You could invite somebody out to lunch that you don’t find interesting, it doesn’t matter, it will affect you anyway, in a positive way. That person represents the whole human race, symbolically.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing — their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights — then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.”
Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian
“Look for situations where the energy is already flowing downhill. Invest in relationships where there is already mutual respect. Create products that tap into a desire people already have. Work on projects that play to your strengths. And then, once the potential of the situation is already working for you, add fuel to the fire. Pour yourself into the craft. Act as if you have to outwork everyone else—even though the wind is at your back. The idea is to sprint downhill, not grind uphill.”
James Clear, Blog
“A tool is a bridge between what you realize the problem is and the cause of the problem to over here, actually gaining at least some control over the symptom. It all has to do with possibility. And not a bullshit definition of possibility. Possibility means you feel yourself reacting differently. It sounds, trite, but it’s actually the truth.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz
“In traditional therapy, you’re paying this person, and you save all of your problems for them, and they just listen, and your friends, who are idiots, give you advice. Unsolicited. And you want your friends just to listen. And you want your therapist to give you advice.”
Jonah Hill, Stutz
“A tool is something that can change your state, your inner state, immediately, in real time. It takes an experience that’s normally unpleasant, then it turns it into an opportunity. Tools change your mood and then just give you a sense of hope that won’t be your mood forever.”
Phil Stutz, Stutz