“Procrastination comes naturally, so apply it to bad things. ‘I want to hurt myself right now. I’ll do it in an hour.’ ‘I want a smoke now, so in half an hour I’ll go have a smoke.’ Then repeat. Much like our good plans fall apart while we delay them, so can our bad plans.”
Ideopunk, LessWrong
“To start defining your problems, say (out loud) ‘everything in my life is completely fine.’ Notice what objections arise.”
Ideopunk, LessWrong
“Defining yourself by your suffering is an effective way to keep suffering forever (ex. incels, trauma).”
Ideopunk, LessWrong
“You have a plan. A time-traveller from 2030 appears and tells you your plan failed. Which part of your plan do you think is the one that fails? Fix that part.”
Ideopunk, LessWrong
“’Where is the good knife?’ If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.”
Ideopunk, LessWrong
“Be pliable. When a man is living, he is soft and pliable; when he is dead, he becomes rigid. Pliability is life; rigidity is death, whether one speaks of man’s body, his mind, or his spirit.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 5)
“Life is an ever-flowing process and somewhere on the path some unpleasant things will pop up—it might leave a scar, but then life is flowing, and like running water, when it stops it grows stale. Go bravely on, my friend, because each experience teaches us a lesson. Keep blasting because life is such that sometimes it is nice and sometimes it is not.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 5)
“When people say ‘Do you have 5 minutes?’ I don’t think they’re cognizant of the 30+ minutes of context-switching I’d have to do for that 5 minutes.”
Sahil Lavingia, Twitter
“There are two very clear indications of real science and real art: the first inner sign is that a scholar or an artist works not for profit, but for sacrifice, for his calling; the second, outer sign is that his works are understandable to all people. Real science studies and makes accessible that knowledge which people at that period of history think important, and real art transfers this truth from the domain of knowledge to the domain of feelings.”
Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 196)
“Remember that you cannot do anything wonderful driven by competition; you cannot do anything noble from pride.”
John Ruskin, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 196)
“Art has such an impact on people that many strange things can happen in their souls: mysteries become clearer; opaque things become evident; complicated things become simple; what is probable becomes necessary. A real artist always simplifies.”
Henri Amiel, A Calendar of Wisdom (Page 196)
“When you create a difference in someone’s life, you not only impact their life, you impact everyone influenced by them throughout their entire lifetime. No act is ever too small. One by one, this is how to make an ocean rise.”
Danielle Doby, I Am Her Tribe
“Realize the fact that you simply ‘live’ and not ‘live for.'”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 3)
“I seek neither your approval nor to influence you. So do not make up your mind as to ‘this is this’ or ‘that is that.’ I will be more than satisfied if you begin to learn to investigate everything yourself from now on.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page 2)
“To [Bruce] Lee’s way of thinking, any answer he could provide is worth nothing to any other individual, unless that individual has come to see its validity as a result of his own independent thought on the matter.”
John Little, via Striking Thoughts (Page xxiv)
“[Bruce Lee’s] answer to problems was to turn a stumbling block into a stepping stone. For instance, when he was confined to bed rest for six months because of a back injury, he used that opportunity to compile his training methods and his philosophical thoughts into several volumes.”
Linda Lee Cadwell, via Striking Thoughts (Page xvii)
“A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts (Page xvi)
“Accomplished people have an obsession with completing tasks. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave, almost compulsively, to finish it. […] It’s this constant stream of finishing that begins, over time, to unlock more and more interesting opportunities and eventually leads to their big scores.”
Cal Newport
“[Bashō] prized sincerity and clarity [in poetry] and instructed, ‘Follow nature, return to nature, be nature.’ He had learned to meet each day with fresh eyes. ‘Yesterday’s self is already worn out!'”
Bashō, Narrow Road To The Interior (Page 191)
“[Bashō’s] fundamental teaching remained his conviction that in composing a poem, ‘There are two ways: one is entirely natural, in which the poem is born from within itself; the other way is to make it through the mastery of technique.’ His notion of the poem being ‘born within itself’ should under no circumstances be confused with its being self-originating. A fundamental tenet of Buddhism runs exactly to the contrary: nothing is self-originating.”
Bashō, Narrow Road To The Interior (Page 190)