Mark Manson on how to win at life:
1. Commit to doing a hard thing.
2. Do the hard thing.
3. Feel good about doing the hard thing.
4. Become someone who enjoys doing hard things.
Be so naturally good. Be so fucking competent. Be so exceptional in every domain of human performance that people have no option than to admire you, envy you or be magnetically attracted to you.
one common trait I find in high achieving individuals is urgency. it looks almost like impatience until you understand it is closer to reverence, a deep refusal to waste the one thing they can’t buy more of. the alarm goes and they rise. the message is answered while it is still warm. the small task is done before it can find a shelf to hide on. they commit and move in a single motion. an idea sparks and they chase it that day, before the world talks them out of it. they run at their own lives like something is at stake, because they have decided something is.
This sentence by Van Gogh hits hard:
“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”
Stop treating housekeeping like a punishment. Put on music, light the candles, burn the incense, and romanticize it. You’re not cleaning the house… you’re restoring order to your little kingdom.
Major cheat code for life: Make peace with being unimpressive to the outside world. Drive the normal car. Wear the simple clothes. Live below your means. Stay in the committed relationship. The ability to look ordinary while building an extraordinary life is wildly underrated.
you must believe you are special and then go so hard, for so long, with such violent refusal to accept any other ending, that reality itself starts running out of ways to tell you no. you must wage a war daily against the ordinary outcome, until the belief you invented out of nothing in a room by yourself has been hammered into the world so many times that it stops being a claim and becomes reality.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got: If you want a calmer life, you need to address small problems while they’re still small. The cost of dealing with an issue rarely gets cheaper with time. Procrastination turns uncomfortable things into unavoidable things.
You should constantly ask yourself this: Are you utilizing every minute of your life to its full capacity to push you towards the person you wish to become or are you wasting it away on frivolities?
Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something.
There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.
it is an unwritten rule of life that after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty, there is going to be a period when you are going to achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. the only requirement is that you do not give up on yourself.