Tag: life lessons

Zuihitsu, 2025-11

~ cafebedouin ~ Leave a comment

Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

  • History doesn’t turn on hunger. It turns on humiliation.
  • Transparency loses to power unless failure becomes unaffordable.
  • Drawing is putting a line around an idea.—Henri Matisse
  • The Earth was made round so we do not see too far down the round.
  • The true effort is not creating rules, but creating the scarcity that forces excellence and ethical choice.
  • Understanding without integration is entertainment.
  • There’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred.—David Foster Wallace
  • Ninety percent of problems can be solved by a shower, eating, sleeping or relaxing.
  • Wisdom emerges in the space between voices.
  • People don’t have audiences, audiences have people.
  • Vacation homes feel like wealth. They’re actually lifestyle anchors that bleed cash.
  • If you run into one asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.
  • Competent performers demonstrate, they don’t declare.
  • After financialization, the bottleneck isn’t capital, it is talent.
  • As a rule of thumb, everyone really good in infosec has a mental illness, and when you talk to them, you have about 30s to figure out which one or else you’re in danger.—Gwern
  • Everyone may have a book inside them, but some should keep it inside them.
  • Risk is not about predictability. It is about vulnerability.
  • There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.—Frank Chimero
  • It’s always easier to grab a tool and bypass the mess of coordination, even if that means doing more and doing it alone.—Frank Chimero
  • [Y]ou can’t get enough of what you don’t need.—Frank Chimero
  • Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes it permanent.
  • You just have to do it. You don’t have to dig it.
  • Discipline equals freedom.—Jocko Willink
  • People write because no one listens.
  • Il n’est pas besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. Roughly, you don’t need hope at the outset or success to persevere.
  • If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.—Meister Eckhart
  • Your choices don’t have to make sense to anyone else.

3/3/3, A Method For Structuring Your Day

~ cafebedouin

“Every normal working day, my intention is:

• to spend three hours on my most important current project, having defined some kind of specific goal for the progress I aim to make on it that day;

• to complete three shorter tasks, usually urgent to-dos or “sticky” tasks I’ve been avoiding, usually just a few minutes each (I count calls and meetings here, too); and

• to dedicate time to three ‘maintenance activities’, things that need my daily attention in order to keep life running smoothly.”

—Oliver Burkeman, “3/3/3, a method for structuring the day.” ckarchive.com. Undated.

A web search suggests that this is popular. New to me.

Zuihitsu, 2025-06

~ cafebedouin

Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

  • You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.—Rumi
  • I ain’t a-saying you treated me unkind / You could’ve done better but I don’t mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time / But don’t think twice, it’s all right.—Bob Dylan
  • Will this decision take me in the direction of greater aliveness?
  • Aliveness isn’t about feeling better; it’s about feeling better.
  • The next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.—Wendell Berry
  • Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience.—bell hooks
  • Isolation, loneliness, and disconnection are the natural consequence of a culture of fear.
  • Develop your tolerance for uncertainty.
  • Learn to be silent.
    Practice to become the person you want to be, daily.
  • What can be destroyed by the truth should be.
  • You cannot calm the storm, but you can calm yourself. The storm will pass.
  • The only people that can betray us are the people we trust.
  • Nature trades in fine balances.
  • Rare is the one who gets the gift but not the curse.
  • Never negotiate piecemeal.
  • Time pressure makes for bad decisions.
  • If the New York Times notices the Buddha, the enlightened one has already left town.
  • If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.—Timothy Snyder
  • Specialization increases productivity.
  • Love and death will find you. Everything else you have to find for yourself.
  • Believe in your ability to learn and that learning is easy.
  • …the endless din of people talking, talking, talking.
  • The bigger the group, the greater the percentage that are dissatisfied.
  • λάθε βιώσας, live under the radar—Epicurus
  • Our narratives say more about our need for coherence than Reality.
  • Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge (or feel).—Carl Jung
  • Comfort dulls the mind, saps courage.
  • Move the horizon closer.
  • It’s a great privilege to know any one true thing about someone, such as their favorite food, their favorite song, etc.
  • Good is subjective but to be the best requires some kind of ranking system.
  • Complacency kills. Evolve with your surroundings.
  • Keep a good heart but be selective about who has access to it.
  • Start noticing other people’s “glimmers”: the little moments, words, places, situations that cause them to light up.
  • Politics is concerned with persuasion. Best to not need to persuade other people.
  • Some people need crowds to forget that they are nothing alone.
  • Ear over grammar.
  • Everybody wants the view, but few want to make the hike.
  • Cruelty requires justification.
  • Before you worry about effort, worry about direction.
  • Keep secrets, keep your integrity.
  • Proof of a way of life is in the quality of life of those that follow it.
  • There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it.—Richard Feynman
  • Possibility over punishment.
  • If hard work led to success, the donkey would own the farm.
  • I need no leader and no god. I am my own leader and my own god. I make my own bibles. I believe in myself—that is my whole credo.—Henry Miller
  • Real love makes you softer with yourself others. If it’s making you more irritable, more cold, more bitter, it’s not love.
  • Find the strength to do both.
  • Listen; give tea.
  • Not all wounds heal.
    Improvement is contingent on recognizing failure and commiting to improvement.
  • To each its art, to art its freedom.—motto of International Symbolism

Zuihitsu, 2025-05

~ cafebedouin

Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

  • The exclusive purpose of human existence is to purify our hearts.— Radhanath Swami
  • Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.—Octavia Butler
  • Bitterness is like sadness, but stuck eternally at a table for one.
  • The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck.
  • If it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter.—Cher
  • Spread positive gossip.
  • Take a mini-vacation.
  • Start a weird ritual.
  • Hang out with younger people.
  • Cherish the everyday.
  • Don’t accept criticism from someone that you wouldn’t accept advice from.
  • Our minds don’t know why we do things. Its job is to create stories to protect us from accusations of norm violations.
  • Don’t read the textbook. Argue with it.
  • Crucibles over comfort.
  • Light is right.
  • Don’t follow me / I secretly do not want to be found / I’m still a beginner / Still on the ground / So I feel free in knowing no one is around
  • Emotions are signals. Anger signals boundary crossing. Anxiety signals too much living in the future.
  • Habits shape your life, not motivation.
  • Your past is a book. Read it. Don’t live in it.
  • Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.—Nietzsche
  • Without revision, there can be no improvement.—Phil Tetlock & Dan Gardner in Superforecasting
  • Passions often engender their opposites.
  • I don’t believe in different brows—high, low, middle. I believe if you write about things with the proper excitement, they’re accessible to everybody.—Elizabeth Pochoda
  • Performance always drops at scale.
  • People don’t abandon the people they love. They abandon the people they’re using.
  • Every augmentation is also an amputation.—Marshall McLuhan
  • Write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.—Octavia Butler
  • Even programs need compilers.
  • Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.—Rumi
  • Does anyone notice when a fish cries?
  • Life is a picnic on a precipice.—W.H. Auden
  • If you can control yourself, you don’t need to control anyone else.
  • What you cannot see, you can’t control.
  • Many questions are best not asked, nor answered.
  • Resist the human urge to fix it, say it could be worse, or to find the bright side. Then, just listen and ask questions.
  • Escalate the negative as little as possible.
  • Politeness is for people we don’t know or like.
  • What very important truth do few people agree with you on
  • We are never as fortunate or unfortunate as we imagine.—La Rochefoucauld
  • We all have enough strength to bear the troubles of other people.—La Rochefoucauld
  • No disguise can long hide love where it exists, or simulate it where it does not exist.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Silence is the safest policy for someone that doesn’t trust himself.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Everyone complains of his memory; and no one complains of his judgement.—La Rochefoucauld
  • To listen and answer well is the only quality needed to be a great conversationalist.
  • Few people are wise enough to prefer useful criticism to treacherous praise.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Often, those that do not wish to be ruled must rule others.
  • A mind is best employed bearing real misfortune rather than one imagined.
  • A great fault, like a great talent, requires eliminating weaker ones.
  • For many, it is better to be in the vanguard than to be right.
  • Kindness without the capacity to be bad is laziness or lack of agency.
  • Many people disdain possessions, but few know how to give them away.
  • We can forgive the boring, but we cannot forgive those that find us boring.
  • Lovers who never bore of each other are those that can always talk about themselves.
  • We forgive as long as we love.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Say little about your spouse and less about yourself.
  • The treasure is safe only when it is unsought.
  • Fortune and temperament rule the world.
  • The only thing rarer than true love is true friendship.
  • Excellence looks beautiful, but the work to get there is brutal.
  • Training alone helps you get in touch with yourself.
  • Avoid persons and circumstances which make you feel inferior.
  • Small hinges swing big doors.
  • Either learn or earn. Best to do both. If neither, quit.
  • Love is the desire to amplify someone else’s will.
  • Survived too many storms to be bothered by raindrops.—Rumi
  • Obedience is thinking’s opposite.
  • Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool, hateful to living things.
  • The Wadsworth Constant says that you can safely skip the first 30% of anything you see online.
  • Bitterness is like sadness, but stuck eternally at a table for one.
  • Have patience with unresolved questions.
  • What is your reason to live? Are you living or dead?
  • If love doesn’t cost you anything, is it even really love?
  • Competition is not a threat, but an opportunity to grow.
  • People think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking. This is why they don’t get better at writing.
    People pleasing is people using.

Zuihitsu, 2025-04

~ cafebedouin

Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

  • Information scarcity rewards knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition.—Adam Grant
  • Resilience does not prioritize efficiency.
  • You cannot back into the future.
  • Engage with things that someone put a lot of work into.
  • The best countertrend setups don’t come from just buying dips. They come after failed breakdowns or clear bullish divergences. Without those signals, you’re simply buying weakness and hoping for a bounce.—Mike Shell
  • It’s sort of inevitable if you stay alive and you keep working that you have to do something different.—Bill Murray
  • Life is and should be hard, it should be challenging. It’s hard enough without getting miserable.
  • Don’t we love life because we love seeing everybody else enjoying it too?—Brian Eno
  • One cannot have all the lives one desires. A choice is always necessary.—Star Trek: Discovery, Season 4, Episode 1, Kobayashi Maru
  • Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.—Ursula K. Le Guin in The Telling
  • The 3x3x3 review: 3 things learned, 3 surprising things, and 3 remaining questions
  • Became anything the way other men become monks: as a devotional practice, as an act of love, as a lifelong commitment to the search for grace and transcendence.—paraphrased Elizabeth Gilbert, on Jack Gilbert, in Big Magic
  • Turn and face what wants to change you. —Elizabeth Lesser
  • Freedom is the distance between hunter and prey.
  • It’s good to be a beginner at something.
  • Feedback is better than planning.
  • Talking is the greatest intimacy of all.
  • Books are spells that can transform you into a different person for the rest of your life.
  • Discomfort signals adaptation.
  • Imagination is intelligence having fun.
  • Be sharply focused, not well rounded.—Derek Sivers
  • You are the notebook.
  • Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.—Voltaire
  • You’ll achieve much more by being consistently reliable than by being occasionally extraordinary.
  • Life is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.—Molière
  • Spending time alone is the beginning of thinking for yourself.
  • If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.—Cheryl Richardson
  • Survival requires living life on your own terms.
  • Strife is life.
  • If you get on the wrong train, get off at the nearest station. The longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be. —Japanese proverb
  • The toes you step on today might be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.—Brian Morton
  • Rebellion is a response to an abuse of power.
  • Collaborating is facilitated by brevity not info dumps.
  • Don’t wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom.—Jim Rohn
  • The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.—Schopenhauer
  • The thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed; the deed develops into habit; and habit hardens into character. So, watch the thought and its way with care.
  • Everyone wants to talk about the light, but who speaks for the good dark?
  • Only the paranoid survive.
  • To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.—Theodore Roosevelt
  • Money is heroin for boring people.
  • You don’t have to have an opinion.—Megan Monahan, Don’t Hate, Meditate
  • You can’t push a rope.
  • Everyone is isolated from everyone else. The concept of society is like a cushion to protect us from the knowledge of that isolation. A fiction that serves as an anesthetic.―Paul Bowles
  • No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it’s the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people’s indifference is the only horror.—Paul Bowles
  • Yet it is not just we who remember music. Music also remembers us. Music reflects the individuals and the societies that create it, capturing something essential about the era of its birth.—Jeremy Eichler
  • If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.—Haruki Murakami
  • Thoughts are fast. Feelings are slow.
  • Partner with someone who can regulate their nervous system, has sexual discipline, and who tells the truth even when it doesn’t feel good to hear. You cannot build a life with someone who sabotages their own.—Nicole LePera
  • Self-motivation, working well with others, addressing challenges, being personable are the secrets to living a satisfying life.—Teacher Tom

Zuihitsu, 2025-03

~ cafebedouin

Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

  • Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.
  • Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.—Arthur Schopenhauer
  • The three Ps–property, prices, and profits and loss. Property incentivizes us. Prices guide us. Profits lure us to new changes and losses discipline us.—Pete Boettke
  • In marriage, everything is subject to peer review.
  • Don’t talk, unless you can improve upon the silence.–Jorge Luis Borges
  • Don’t piss in a ditch and call it an ocean of lemonade.
  • All cruelty springs from weakness.—Seneca
  • In matters of the heart, you only know what you want when you find it.
  • Accept the loss, and move forward.
  • Who do you serve?
  • Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
  • If you have no edge, correct position size is don’t buy. Position sizing is determined by downside. All great investing records employed leverage.

Zuihitsu, 2025-02

~ cafebedouin

Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

  • Money loves speed. Poverty loves waiting.
  • Resist the urge to maximize value.
  • Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.—Rumi
  • A man with a taste for blood, money or women is not to be trusted.
  • Science is only path to the future.
  • Everything changes. What is true today may not be true tomorrow. So, take no one’s word without reservation.
  • Strength leads to responsibiliy not happiness.
  • Facing facts is preferable to facing defeat.
  • Imposing on another point of view is a kind of violence.
  • The dice cannot read their own spots.
  • First admit, then live with your difference. Embrace it, if you can.
  • We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish.—Marshall McLuhan
  • Happiness is rarely a product of understanding.
  • Disobedience isn’t a problem if obedience isn’t the goal.
  • Prioritize time, friends, mind and body over money.
  • There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.—Sun-Tzu
  • …the truth is out there. But so are lies.—Dana Scully, The X-Files
  • Don’t do other people’s thinking for them.
  • Society has three elements: experts, elites, and masses. Experts have specialized knowledge. Elites lead. The masses are everyone else.
  • There is a lot of alpha in dirty jobs.
  • Always make your boss look good.
  • Never power struggle, especially not if you don’t have power.
  • What’s the most expensive thing you’ve broken?
  • Price’s Law, the square root of the workforce does 50% of the work.
  • Licensing protects people with licences, not the people using their services.
  • You love what you give to—and in proportion as you give.
  • Love is the death of duty.
  • KTF, kill them first.
  • Divide your activity into neck-down and neck-up.
  • Outside of loving relationships, power is always supported by violence or the threat of violence.
  • The defining feature of love is struggle.
  • Rudeness is a sign of inner struggle.
  • Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.
  • Judgment in application is superior to following rules.
  • Our awareness of life, of its great variety and beauty and possibility, emerges out of uncertainty.
  • Being nice is not the same as being good.
  • No feeling is final.
  • Criticism is a whetstone of character.
  • Possession or benefits require staying in the dream. Waking up to Truth requires forsaking everything you have or could have.
  • Be brave enough to break your own heart.—Cheryl Strayed
  • Respect your anger enough to shape and direct it.
  • Art lives in constraints and dies from freedom.
  • Competence is being good at earning. Character is being good for others when there is nothing to gain.

Be Brave Enough To Break Your Own Heart

~ cafebedouin

“You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart.”

—Cheryl Strayed