Stop counting your fuckups. it is self-gratification. you sit at night running the numbers, thinking the math makes you wise. it makes you nothing. it makes you a man with a list. lives do not add, lives turn, five or six times, thats it. one real move erases the record. not forgiven, not healed, erased. ask any man who finally did the thing he was supposed to do. did the old life follow him? no. it died. it was not even real to begin with. it was rehearsal. every wrong thing you did was practice for the right thing you havent done yet. so do it, or shut up about your regrets. one or the other. there is no third option. there is no working on yourself. there is the move or the lying
The single most important thing you can do in today's world is to stop operating from the old paradigm. If you need to be told what to do next (go to school, get a job, retire at 65) the outcome of your life will always be in someone else's hands. You must learn how to direct your own work. You must learn how to tolerate and mitigate risk and uncertainty. You must figure out what you want and teach yourself everything necessary to get it. It's extremely difficult, but not as difficult as the silent suffering people learn to accept as "normal."
Game theory teaches: never enter a game you haven’t studied, never reveal your strategy until the incentives are locked, and never play to be liked, play to make the rules irrelevant by building leverage.
When I was sixteen, I won a great victory. I felt in that moment I would live to be a hundred. Now I know I shall not see thirty. None of us know our end, really, or what hand will guide us there. A king may move a man, a father may claim a son, but that man can also move himself, and only then does that man truly begin his own game. Remember that howsoever you are played or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone, even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power. When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus," or that virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice. Remember that
- King Baldwin IV
A man who felt everything and didn't die from it is the most terrifying thing on this earth. Pharaoh didn't fear armies he feared Moses. a stuttering man with God in his spine. that's what a sensitive man becomes when the world fails to kill him. not soft, not healed, appointed.
And fear, no matter how well it’s packaged, will always whisper the same thing.
“Stay where you are. Don’t climb too high. Don’t become something we can’t relate to anymore.”
"I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than the rest of men, but yet he sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others."
Marcus Aurelius; Meditations .
Blessed are the hungry for they shall devour worlds, blessed are the broken for they know which pieces matter, blessed are the sleepless for they see what dreams hide. Cursed is the man who never bleeds for his blood runs thin, cursed is the child who never wants for his wanting grows weak, cursed are the comfortable for comfort is the first death. The strong were forged in fire they did not choose, the weak were spared the flames they needed most