Emotional about enlightening teachings

If you forget your feelings about things, they become enlightening teachings. If you get emotional about enlightening teachings, they become worldly.

Life isn’t trying to defeat you.

When life gets tough, some of us feel that we’ve lost the game and life has won. But life isn’t trying to defeat you. Life isn’t even a participant—the game is yours.

A tea gathering

Sure, you can have a hundred tea ceremonies. You can ever have them all with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then the moment evaporates forever.

The mediocrity trap

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap: situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

You are waiting for jackpot

You are waiting for jackpot, refusing to do anything until an option arises that dominates all other options on all dimensions. Strangely, this never seems to happen.

Calendars are a choice

Humans are unique. We give names to the days of the week (we even have weeks). We eat something different for breakfast than dinner. We chronicle the passage of time. In fact, our chronicling of time is what makes it noticeable.

The system has fingerprints

We all make mistakes. We all do things that we then realize weren’t in our interest, or useful to the community. If we do it a second time, it’s worth taking a hard look at the system that set us up for failure. How did the system get here? Who benefits? When we can see the system, we have a chance to fix it.