To overcome your fear

To overcome your fear, make a list of all the worst possible scenarios that might happen and what you’d do if they came true: When you label your fear, it gets smaller, and you’ll have a plan for any unlikely scenario.

Some poisons are impossible to avoid

There are poisons all around us. The arsenic in your rice, the drain cleaner under your sink. In addition to actual physical poisons, most of us wrestle with the emotional and spiritual poisons that are dumped in front of us every day. Persistent systems are good at sticking around, and that’s true even when they’re bringing actual poison with them. As we seek to build a more resilient path forward, perhaps it pays to experience the short-term discomfort associated with fixing a dangerous system now rather than living with the poison it creates over time.

Criticism is the easy part

The second you do something different, you become a target. Some people criticize from fear, some from threatened egos, some from genuine concern disguised as caution. But criticism is the easy part. The hard part is that you lose the map. If you've outsourced your definition of success your whole life, having to define it yourself feels like losing GPS mid-drive. You have to build your sense of direction while you're already moving.

The only way to avoid collisions

What we’ve learned from thousands of years of practice is that the only way to avoid collisions is to find the confidence and empathy to yield. The shortest way to get to where we’re going involves cooperation and the resilience that comes with empathy and awareness. When we exchange appropriate spacing and yield when we can, connections occur, and we can flow forward. Selfish brutality might work in the short run, but it always breaks.

We are all self-taught

Teaching is not about assignments, textbooks, or authority. It’s about the pedagogy, connection, and approach that create the conditions for a willing student to change their mind. Everything else is simply grunt work. Sooner or later, we are all self-taught.

“No” is an option

“Maybe” is the problem. If you’re serious, say, “yes.” And if it’s not for you, walk away. But endlessly reconsidering opportunities without forward motion is a place to hide.

A tunnel that can reduce our choices

We often think that we want an open road and the ability to choose any direction for ourselves. But sometimes, what we need is a tunnel that can reduce our choices and send us in a focused direction.

Praise others

Praise others. It will bring them peace of mind. Do not expect others to praise you. It will bring you peace of mind.

I have lived through this horror

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You can say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Simplicity isn’t something you earn

You keep waiting for “after”. Peace always lives in the future: after the exams, after the summer, after you save more, so life feels on hold. Instead: Prove to yourself that simplicity isn’t something you earn, it’s something you choose. Today, do one thing differently: leave dishes for tomorrow, write with your left hand, or say no to one draining thing.

Is this a real problem right now?

You worry about problems that haven’t happened yet. Your mind spins with “what ifs,” mistaking mental rehearsal for preparedness. Most of these imagined disasters never happen. ↪Instead: Pause and ask, “Is this a real problem right now?” If not, redirect to something grounding: your breath, a sip of tea, the feel of your shirt.

What if not knowing is the point?

We often chase certainty about our future; our careers, passions, and even happiness, but research shows we’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy or who we’ll become. Our tastes, goals, and even identities shift more than we expect, and that’s not a flaw. What if not knowing is the point? When you treat life like an experiment instead of a fixed plan, failure becomes a valuable source of feedback, and curiosity becomes your guiding compass. You stop forcing a perfect future and start discovering who you are, one evolving interest at a time. Uncertainty isn’t the problem; it’s where all the possibility lives.

Smarter approaches aren’t universal shortcuts

Telling someone to “work smarter” is useless because it assumes they already know what smarter looks like. If they did, they’d be doing it. “Work smarter, not harder” is often framed as the opposite of hard work, but working smart is itself a derivative of hard work. You have to work hard just to figure out what working smart means. Smarter approaches aren’t universal shortcuts; they’re contextual insights uncovered through deep, sustained effort.

You can be happy and depressed

If for you happiness means thrills, fun, pleasure, then, yes, depression and happiness are contradictory. But thrills, fun, and pleasure are not happiness. What are they? They’re thrills, they’re fun, they’re pleasure. They’re not happiness. Happiness is a state of nonattachment.

Moving without traveling

Moving is physical, travel is an emotional journey. Moving takes us from one place to another, one job to another, one situation to another. But if we seek to insulate ourselves from the emotional labor of travel, we can build a cocoon around our experience and discover nothing. Once we choose to see what’s actually in front of us and experience it, then we can travel whenever we choose, even without moving. The alternative is to spend the time and money to move around, but never go anywhere.

Curiosity is often the antidote to rumination

Learn something completely unrelated to your problems. Watch a 10-minute YouTube video about how cheese is made, or why octopuses have three hearts, or how ancient Romans built roads. Curiosity is often the antidote to rumination. Your brain can’t obsess over your life when it’s busy absorbing random, fascinating facts.

Staying the same

There’s no such thing as “staying the same.” You’re either:

Getting sharper or duller

Hardening up or breaking down

Building something… or being built by someone else

The longer you wait to take back control, the more of yourself you lose. Don’t wait until it’s unbearable. Start now- when you still have a say.

Hesitation is decay

Do what you’re avoiding: Pick the one thing you’ve been putting off and attack it. Training. Cold shower. Hard conversation. Deep work. Hesitation is decay. Action is armor.

Reinvention starts with release

The reason most people never change is that they’re too attached to who they’ve always been. Change requires death: The death of old stories, old habits, old comforts, old beliefs. Reinvention starts with release.

Make mistakes cheap, not rare

People think good decision-making is about being right all the time. It's not. It's about lowering the cost of being wrong and changing your mind. When the cost of mistakes is high, we're paralyzed with fear. When the cost of errors is low, we can move fast and adapt. Make mistakes cheap, not rare.

Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass

Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass. You won’t feel sad forever. At some point, you will feel happy again. You won’t feel anxious forever. In time, you will feel calm again. You don’t have to fight your feelings or feel guilty for having them. You just have to accept them and be good to yourself while you ride this out.

It’s okay to let go

It’s okay to let go of those who couldn’t love you. Those who didn’t know how to. Those who failed to even try. It’s OK to outgrow them, because that means you filled the empty space in you with self-love instead. You’re outgrowing them because you’re growing into you. And that’s more than okay, that’s something to celebrate.

As if it were the last time

Life is a journey, not a competition! One day, you are going to hug your last hug, kiss your last kiss, and hear someone’s voice for the last time, but you never know when the last time will be. Live every day as if it were the last time you will be with the person you love.

Be the reason someone feels welcome

Be the reason someone feels welcome, seen, heard, valued, loved, and supported. Cherish those you have in your life because you never know when they won’t be around anymore.

We need both means and meaning

To realize the amazing present and future we want, we need both means and meaning. More generally, the greater our means, the harder it may be to find meaning. Why? There is a thrill in striving. Purpose in striving. Even those who have put in decades of work are overcome by a sense of melancholy when they finally achieve their aim. The idea is that technology creates means, but that we shouldn’t expect it to create meaning. That’s up to us.

The most meaningful things in life

The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Try to press on a creative task, and you become less innovative. Try to force yourself to fall asleep, but you stare at the ceiling, awake. The most meaningful things in life take a long time to build, which is precisely why they’re so meaningful. If you got dropped at the top of the mountain, you'd pass out from the altitude. The climb physically and mentally prepares you for the summit. Never seek to do fast what is meant to be done slowly.

The time must come from somewhere

It is common to think about what you would like to accomplish. It is less common to think about what must be discarded to make space for your new endeavors. The time must come from somewhere. What do you need to give up to make space for what you would like to achieve?

Next play mentality

Take great care to avoid mistakes when the decision is hard to reverse. But! If you make a mistake that is hard to reverse, there is no sense beating yourself up about it. Your responsibility is to make the best next choice given your current position. You must always make the most of the situation you are in.

Every ordinary moment

It doesn’t matter what position you find yourself in right now. What matters is whether you improve your position today. Every ordinary moment is an opportunity to make the future easier or harder.

We fear our highest possibilities

We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities. So often, we run away from the responsibilities dictated, or rather suggested by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident.

Are you doing your best?

Doing your best is not a weakness. It's a sustainable strength. It's showing up with the best energy you can bring today. It requires honesty and integrity. To look in the mirror. To tell yourself the truth. So, the next time you catch yourself feeling like you aren't doing enough, pause and reframe it: Are you doing your best? Because if you're doing your best, you're doing enough.