˗ˏˋ Nico 🧙‍♂️ ˎˊ˗

[Aristo @aristomarinetti]

“You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

“Attack life, it’s going to kill you anyway.”

- Steve McQueen

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

pick a degree you don’t want to cheat. choose a city you don't want to flee. work a job you don’t want to quit. marry a person you don’t want to change. live a life you don’t want to escape.

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

When Marcelo Bielsa became Leeds United manager in 2018, he asked a simple question: how long does the average supporter have to work to afford a match ticket?

After learning the answer was around three hours, Bielsa gathered his players and assigned them an unusual task.

Instead of training, they spent the next three hours picking up litter around the club’s training ground.

The exercise wasn’t meant as punishment. Bielsa wanted his squad to understand the effort, sacrifice, and hard work that ordinary fans put in to support their team.

By spending the same amount of time doing manual work, the players were reminded that every ticket purchased represents hours of labor by loyal supporters.

The story became one of the most famous examples of Bielsa’s unique leadership style and his deep respect for football fans.

[𐙚⋆ @voidwithverses]

“When a tree falls, everyone hears the sound. But when a tree grows, no one hears it.”

— Persian Proverb

[Atlas Press @realAtlasPress]

Another contender for the most wisdom in the fewest words

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

“Conquer yourself rather than the world.”

- René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

[History Nerd @_HistoryNerd]

In a rare interview, Tolkien is asked why he spent 14 years building the world of The Lord of the Rings.

His answer reveals a philosophy of creation rooted in something deeper than storytelling.

When pressed on whether the hobbits and their world emerged from his unconscious, Tolkien pushes back. He describes himself as a "meticulous sort of bloke" who spent those years "finding time schemes and getting everything right."

The appendices, the languages, the social customs, and the histories all existed before the story itself.

In fact, the world came first.

The Hobbit was almost an accident:

"It existed in posy and in large scale plan before The Hobbit was written. The Hobbit was intact originally an attempt to write something outside it and drew into it."

The interviewer, surprised, asks why.

Why create an entire world before writing a single story within it?

Tolkien's response gets to the heart of his creative philosophy:

"Because being made by a creator, one of our natural factors is wishing to create. But since we aren't creators, we have to subcreate. Let's say we have to rearrange the primary material in some particular form which pleases us, which may it isn't necessarily a moral pleasing. It's partly aesthetic pleasing."

This idea of subcreation is central to Tolkien's worldview.

Humans cannot create something from nothing, but they can reshape what already exists into forms that satisfy an aesthetic vision, not merely a moral one.

When the interviewer suggests that moral concerns should outweigh aesthetic ones, Tolkien disagrees.

He argues that an "aesthetic facet is as strongly to be predicated as a moral one in this world."

On the question of good and evil, Tolkien explains that the Dark Lord was not always dark. He fell, "several stages down of Lucifer."

The One Ring, he says, represents "a power so enormous that even if a good man were to use it against a bad it would corrupt the good man."

He emphasizes that this idea predates the atomic bomb. He had been developing these stories since his undergraduate years, long before modern allegorical interpretations could be applied.

Asked whether he would rather be remembered as a man who said something or a man who made something, Tolkien rejects the distinction:

"I don't think you can distinguish. The made things unless it says something won't be remembered."

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.”

— Miles Davis

[Sheila of the Most High @sheilatebra]

I finally understand what Machiavelli meant when he said, “Never play fair in a game where others cheat.” It doesn’t mean become evil. It means stop being naive. Stop bringing honesty to people who study manipulation, stop giving access to people who weaponize closeness, and stop expecting clean hands from people who already showed you they’ll throw dirt. Sometimes wisdom is not revenge. Sometimes wisdom is learning the rules of the room before the room uses your goodness against you.

[The Sigma Mindset @thesigmamindset]

Next time you're feeling sad or down remember what Eddie Murphy once said...

[0xDipper @Dipper_pol]

Nassim Taleb: the richest man in the Roman Empire woke up every morning pretending he was poor.

Seneca had more to lose than to gain from his wealth - so he rehearsed losing it. Every so often he'd live on bread and water as if shipwrecked, just to make the downside familiar and harmless.

That's the whole game, Taleb says: arrange your life so you have far more upside than downside - then randomness stops scaring you.

"Make more when you're right than you lose when you're wrong - that's antifragile."

"Always keep more upside than downside from random events."

"The Stoics aren't unmoved by the world - only by bad events."

~70 min, free. the oldest trick for surviving a world you can't predict ↓

[Hesse Philosophy @HermannHessed]

“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

[Emir Han @RealEmirHan]

Mad Men creator said the show was never about advertising. It was about the gap between what people want and what they can actually have. "Happiness is always in that gap in between," he said. Don is a man who has everything the era told him to want, and cannot feel any of it.

[Restoring Your Faith in Humanity @HumanityChad]

He is collecting them like infinity stones

[successmovers @successmoverss]

“The world owes no man a living, but it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.”

— John D. Rockefeller

[Physics In History @PhysInHistory]

"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained."

-- Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934)

[T @Ashtweetzzz]

Your prime is not in your 20s. Your prime is the moment you realize nobody is coming to save you and you have to do the work on your own.

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Warren Buffett: "If you look back a couple hundred years, we've gotten where we are not because we've gotten smarter or not because we work harder. [It's] because we've found ways to unleash more of the human potential." 🇺🇸

"What does that? Rule of law helps. A market system helps. Equality of opportunity helps. All of these things that are still a fundamental part of the American system."

(Charlie Rose Show || 2009)

[Camus @newstart_2024]

“If someone does something bad to you once, they’ll do it again and again.”

Robert Greene dropped this truth: People rarely do something harmful “just once.” That apology (“that wasn’t me”) is almost never true, it’s part of a pattern. The same goes for our own compulsive behaviors. To break them, you have to catch the thinking loop early and repeat the mantra: let go, let go, let go.

This is one of those simple but brutal lessons that saves you so much pain once you actually internalize it.

Spotting patterns, in others and in yourself, is one of the highest-leverage skills you can develop.

What’s a pattern you’ve finally started to recognize in yourself or someone else?