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What’s the next best step | PR & Comms girly

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

A rule that will lower your anxiety: Don’t replay conversations you can’t change, and don’t pre-live ones that haven’t happened. Focus on the next right action. Most stress comes from living everywhere except the present.

[hmm @itsjerri_]

“At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.”

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

As someone who partially grew up among European elite kids like him, this reminds me just how incredibly hollow some of them are.

For a quick background, I went to one of the poshest high schools in France (Janson de Sailly, for those who know) and, afterwards, to what was at the time - and probably still is - the most expensive undergraduate school in Europe (EHL in Lausanne, Switzerland).

Needless to say, many of my classmates were from unbelievably privileged backgrounds. Just in my classroom in Lausanne I had the son of a (very famous) Russian oligarch, the son of Italy's largest real estate developer and the son of Spain's largest real estate developer (funnily, the latter two were flat mates).

Another classmate of mine came from the richest family in Naples, Italy and - while we were at school - his father (known in Naples under the nickname "Il Sultano") got arrested for having bribed half of Naples's city council - which, if you know Naples, ought to tell you something.

These were the kids I was doing group projects on business ethics with (literally) 😅

Anyhow, my story, and probably my luck, was that - before going to high school in Paris - I was raised in very normal public schools in the South of France where my friends were anything but wealthy. Their parents were farmers and everyday workers.

Which means - and I'd come to realize this was very important in life - that it was easy for me to understand how big a mistake it is to see money as identity and meaning - and to confuse someone's net worth with their actual worth.

What really struck me at the time was the contrast with my "poor" classmates of earlier in my life. They couldn't define themselves by what they had - by definition - and this forced them to reach deeper for their identity: their skills, knowledge, humor, etc.

Rich kids can skip that entire process, and the tragedy is that most of them do: they reach for the readymade identity that money provides. I remember being incredibly frustrated by many of my classmates, like "ok, I get it, your dad is rich and you own a lot of nice things but who are YOU, what else is there?" The answer, more often than not, was nothing.

To be fair, there were exceptions. One of my classmates I was most impressed by came from one of Zurich's wealthiest families (which, if you know Zurich, means insanely wealthy) yet he was almost OCD in not showing he had money: driving the shittiest car imaginable, living in a small studio, etc. He was very intellectual, very contrarian, and clearly at war with the idea that his family's wealth ought to define who he was.

I only discovered who he actually was when I started my first company and he approached me to invest: to discuss the investment I went to one of his family homes, which it turned out was a literal palatial castle on the shores of Geneva lake. The guy had decided to live in a small rundown studio when he literally had a castle sitting empty a 5-min drive away.

THAT I was impressed by: it's easy to see that money isn't meaning when you don't have any. To see it when you have more than almost anyone - when everyone around you is organized around the opposite assumption - is much harder. But to actually live it, to choose the studio when you have the castle keys in your pockets - with no audience to applaud you for that - that shows real depth.

At the end of the day, I think, the real distinction isn't between rich and poor but between people who exist from the inside out and people who exist from the outside in.

Wealth just happens to make it incredibly easy to be the latter, to skip the work of becoming someone and settle for a borrowed identity that glitters from the outside but is hollow all the way through. A Potemkin village identity.

This is actually a real societal issue, and magnified by social media (with idiotic posts like this one 👇): the more "outside in" folks out there, the less people with genuine internal anchors, the more fragile everything becomes.

When you think about it, everything that genuinely matters in a society is built by people who think for themselves: they take the world in, pass it through something genuinely their own, and give back something that didn't exist before: an idea, a conviction, a stand.

Every reform, every invention, every act of moral courage in history came from someone with an internal anchor strong enough to resist the current. Remove those people and all you have left is the current.

This isn't new, by the way. Most ancient traditions warn against exactly this, from the Bible (the golden calf story) to Confucius, who built his entire ethics around the distinction between the exemplary person (the Junzi, 君子) - oriented around internal cultivation and righteousness - and the petty person (Xiaoren, 小人), oriented around profit and gain. The junzi builds himself from the inside, the xiaoren chases what's outside.

So please, do not make the mistake of being impressed by wealthy people flaunting their wealth. Don't focus on the glitter, focus on the hollowness it's trying to hide.

[Sherry @SchrodingrsBrat]

My biggest gripe with influencer culture is how it narrows language - everything is described as “it’s SO good / I’m OBSESSED/ I LOVE” - and if language is how we interact with reality then low resolution language means shallow interaction with our own life. Being precise in thinking (and therefore speech) makes living more embodied: you feel like you’re IN the details, the nuances, forming your very own subjective, irreplicable and individual experience of something

[AMARA @Amy_beke]

Corporate life will teach you that knowing the job is only half the battle. The real skill is staying calm in meetings, reading the room, managing ego, receiving vague feedback, and not replying emails with your real thoughts.

[Kevwe @kevwe_od]

I’m amazed at people who are addicted to consuming content that triggers them.
Can never be me. If the algorithm starts to move weird, I immediately start pushing the “not interested” and “show less content like this” buttons.

[aylin ☽ @weepingcaesar]

once you turn 20 you have to fight everyday for the rest of your life to not lose your personality & spirit...bc what once came naturally to you will be exhausted into nothing if you don't actively Try. it's terrifyingly easy to become a lethargic, soulless adult

[- @chanteshanice_]

romance is less about grand gestures and more about how alive we can feel in our bodies at the same time — how present we can be to the sensual nature of everything that exists around us.. and to match our movement with it, and how that movement always brings us closer.

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm a big fan of the "GPS Theory" when you miss a turn, your GPS doesn't judge you, it recalculates. No matter how many detours you take, it finds another way forward. Life works like that too. You'll make mistakes, but your destination doesn't vanish. The route just changes.

[Nuelxx @nuel_szy]

I realized when you're a lil too understanding, people become a lil too inconsiderate of you.

[𝓓𝓾𝓴𝓮 🧃 @fwsodiq]

To be honest, we are not meant to address everything we find out. Sometimes, just adjust your guard.

[Fav ⛧ @Favwontmiss]

i fear the hottest relationship dynamic is when a woman acts like a chaotic creature and the man finds it deeply amusing instead of spiritually exhausting

[dr. local angry blk man @afropessimistic]

Students see no issue using AI to complete their assignment because they have been conditioned to treat schooling as a means to a capitalist end and not a tool for acquiring knowledge. The proliferation of AI is just making this very explicit for those who didn’t already know.

[Ben Mwaba, PEIZ @mwaba_ben]

One thing about adulthood that way too many people learn way too late (and have no choice but to learn the hard way): you have to be deliberate/proactive about everything. For the first time in your life, you can't be passive participant in anything.

[Brandon Streussnig @BrndnStrssng]

beyond "nobody reads anymore," this is because many modern filmmakers work off of a base of the filmmakers they were inspired by, whereas those people were building off of art, sociology, history, and yes, literature. Obviously isn't true across the board, but you know

[Ronke Lawal @ronkelawal]

I enjoyed this advert.😁

Lidl got it right with this one.

Judi Love x Liberty X

[The Shift Journal @TheShiftJournal]

Just do things…

[Mind and Glory 🎖 @mindandglory]

An intelligent man never lets urgency from others override the patience his strategy requires.

[Emmanuel Omasheye🇩🇪 @4pf_pixel]

Arsenal fans all over the world 😮‍💨

[DailyAFC @DailyAFC]

Arsenal players & staff celebrating as Premier League champions at the training ground tonight… ❤️🥺