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“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” —
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“A man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.” —
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“‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodsman; ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’” —
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“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” —
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“Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it….” —
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“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” ― , The Prophet )
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“Now that your worry has proved such an unlucrative business/ Why not find a better job?” ―
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“To fight the good fight is one of the bravest and noblest of life’s experiences. Not the bloodshed and the battle of man with man, but the grappling with mental and spiritual adversaries that determines the inner caliber of the contestant. It is the quality of the struggle put forth by a man that proclaims to the world what manner of man he is far more than may be by the termination of the battle. It matters not nearly so much to a man that he succeeds in winning some long-sought prize as it does that he has worked for it honestly and unfalteringly with all the force and energy there is in hi
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“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.” —
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“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.” —
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“Writing isn’t so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don’t be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don’t strain at them. … Writing can be good. You attack it, don’t let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it!” — , author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in a recently discovered note to himself
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“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.” — , one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century (via Conor White-Sullivan, co-founder of Roam Research)
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“I don't trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me ‘I love you.’ … There is an African saying which is: ‘Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.’” —
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“I am distressed, almost discouraged, and fatigued to the point of feeling slightly ill. What I am doing is no good, and in spite of your confidence I am very much afraid that my efforts will all lead to nothing.” — Claude Monet In a letter to Gustave Geffroy, 1889
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“You know, the matrix says, ‘Pick an identity and stick with it. Because I want to sell you some beer and shampoo and I need you to stick with what you are so I’ll know how to market it to you.’ Drag is the opposite. Drag says, ‘Identity is a joke.’” — (@RuPaul) (Thank you to Claudia Dawson for the quote, which I found in Recomendo: The Expanded Edition.)
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“If we can forgive what’s been done to us… If we can forgive what we’ve done to others… If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.” — , all, and happy holidays to you and yours. Much love, Tim P.S. To wrap up the year, here are the 30 most popular podcast episodes of 2020! If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps us with visibility and recruiting incredible guests. Lots of big things are planned for 2
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“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” —
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“The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.” –
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Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imaginati
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over and over announcing your place in the family of things. — Mary Oliver(Thank you to Jim Dethmer for bringing this poem back to my attention.) And, as always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it. Have a wonderful weekend, all. Much love to you and yours, Tim P.S. Deal of the Week — Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I’
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“I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.” —
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“A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.” ― in If This Is a Man
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“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was the water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.” — James Baldwin(Here is a related exercise you can try: look at leaves or
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“Audacity augments courage; hesitation, fear.” —
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“I said: what about my eyes? He said: Keep them on the road. I said: What about my passion? He said: Keep it burning. I said: What about my heart? He said: Tell me what you hold inside it? I said: Pain and sorrow. He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ―
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“With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.” —
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“Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.” —
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“Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.” —
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“Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness is freedom from hate.” —
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“Give more. Give what you didn’t get. Love more. Drop the old story.” — Garry Shandling(Bonus: The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling documentary)
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“A Chung-nan Mountain Monk” The voice of success and profit May stir the vault of heaven, But not this place. In the rounds of the day, You wear threadbare clothing And eat simple fare. When the mountain snow deepens, Your thoughts Are far from those of people. Occasionally, Immortals pass your door And knock. — Kuan-hsiu (832–912)
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“Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.” ― , Adjustment Day
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“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” —
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“Be a good animal, true to your instincts.” —
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“You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.” — , French poet, novelist, boxing manager, and filmmaker, whose collaborations were the inspiration for the term “surrealism” (This quote was found again after rereading this blog post.)
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“Either peace or happiness, let it enfold you. When I was a young man, I felt these things were dumb, unsophisticated. I had bad blood, a twisted mind, a precarious upbringing. I was hard as granite, I leered at the sun. I trusted no man and especially no woman…. I challenged everything, was continually being evicted, jailed, in and out of fights, in and out of my mind…. Peace and happiness to me were signs of inferiority, tenants of the weak and addled mind. But as I went on ... it gradually began to occur to me that I wasn’t different from the others, I was the same... Everybody was nudging,
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“After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.” —
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“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.” —
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“A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.” — : The Big Red Book[Special thanks to reader Joanna for her blog comment introducing me to this quote.]
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“There have been so many times I have seen a man wanting to weep but instead beat his heart until it was unconscious.” —
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“Would you like 1-5M more followers? Before you answer that, answer this: ...”
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“This is not your responsibility, but it is your problem.” — (@cherylstrayed), hat tip to Ryan Holiday
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“Within you, there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at anytime and be yourself.” —
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“I remember my grandfather telling me how each of us must live with a full measure of loneliness that is inescapable, and we must not destroy ourselves with our passion to escape the aloneness.” —
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“What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children, life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until … a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?” —
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“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” ― , February 25, 1933
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“The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence. [...] But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither
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“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.” ―
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“A genius is the one most like himself.” —
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“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say…. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing...the thing that might be worth saying.” —
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“The purpose of life, as far as I can tell, is to find a mode of being that’s so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant.” — (@jordanbpeterson)
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“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” ―
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“To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.” ― , Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
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“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.” —
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“To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have cost without profits. It never occurs to such people that these products might cost several million dollars more to produce than if they were produced by enterprises operating without the incentives to be efficient created by the prospect of profits.” —
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“Anytime you're practicing renunciation, you're deluded. How about that! You're deluded. What are you renouncing? Anytime you renounce something, you are tied forever to the thing you renounce. There's a guru in India who says, ‘Every time a prostitute comes to me, she's talking about nothing but God. She says I'm sick of this life that I'm living. I want God. But every time a priest comes to me, he's talking about nothing but sex.’ Very well, when you renounce something, you're stuck to it forever. When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you are giv
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“The best fighter is never angry.” ―
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“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” —
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“If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters." —
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“It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.” ―