When everything is quiet, you have the time to meditate, time to read, time to rebuild, time to focus, time to become a new person and superior to your own past…let’s go
-Frodo Baggins
7.-10.
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7.Cut your losses quickly.
Don’t give small problems enough time to grow into big disasters. You’ll have to balance this with a little bit of grace because there are people in your life who are only better because you’re in it even though they themselves seem like a net loss for you. (See 5. & 6.)
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8.Choose your inner circle carefully. Building out your inner circle should always be done carefully but when it’s done right it is a beautiful thing. Find good people of value and never cheapen the price of admission – the reward for this will make you far richer as a man and pay dividends throughout your life.
“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself…Regard him as loyal and you will make him loyal.”
—Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
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9.Inventory your time.
You don’t know how much time you have, use it wisely and carefully. Every beat of your heart is the sound of a clock ticking down and you don’t know when your time is up.
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10. Stop pursuing your passions as your life’s focus, instead, learn to passionately pursue your responsibilities. Passion is overrated, discipline will bring you freedom.
1. Read. You could be the most powerful person on the planet if you could read peoples thoughts. When you read a book, you are in fact, reading peoples thoughts. Read widely. Read for knowledge and depth. Take notes in the margins of your books.
Give yourself permission to not finish books right away or at all. Most people fail reading books because they think if they start to read one they have to keep reading until they’re finished in a short amount of time feel free to scan or jump chapters. It’s not a contest, you’re reading for yourself and what you can get out of it.
Create your own library and not one just for show.
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2. Journal. They say that reading helps you understand the world and writing helps you understand yourself. If you want to be better one day to the next, take time to reflect on things you need to change about yourself or your circumstances.
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3. Be humble enough to respect the authority of the truth. Don’t get caught up in this whole, my truth, your truth nonsense.
There’s a lot of people who’ve made serious errors in life, but stuck with it because it was “their truth” -it doesn’t matter if you’re sincere if you’re not right, in fact, it could even be more harmful in the end. Many people and sometimes large groups of people are very sincere and still make very bad decisions. Many men throughout the ages have been very sincere, but died fighting for what turned out in the end to be nothing short of their own or someone else’s lie.
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4. Learn to be comfortable being alone. You will be alone in life more often than you realize if you’re trying to accomplish anything worthy. Overtime you’ll come to realize that many people in life view your relationship as transactional meaning that they’re your friend when they need you to be your friend but when you need them, they do not show up.
If you can’t be comfortable being alone, overtime, you will discover that you have compromised on things you’ve sincerely believed and and may have even traded your integrity in order to keep people around you. It’s not worth it.
You may be alone from time to time, but it will never be permanent and overtime it will be less often as people come to understand that you’re somebody Who plays a premium on your own personal sense of integrity and honor.
“If it is worth saying or doing, it is worth being criticized for saying or doing.”
Marcus Aurelius.
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5. Be kind. You’ll discover that many people don’t have what it takes to be alone I don’t have the spinal fortitude to stand against the crowd. Secretly people will respect you for being somebody that they cannot be but outwardly, they will try to attack you and bring you down into the mud with them. Be kind to them. Not so much for their sake, but for yours.
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6. Be quick to forgive. You have a limited amount of emotion in your life - spend it wisely and where it matters and on people it matters too. Forgive people and repair relationships or forgive people so you can forget them and move on.
I’ll stop here for now.