When you get there you will only be right here, right now.
How I can live now and not defer my living to some future now?
Category: quotations
The right things
Or as Peter Drucker put it:
“Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things.”
Efficiency is meaningless, or even harmful, without effectiveness. What’s the point in going in the wrong direction faster?
Focus on the essentials first. Keep checking your direction. Then drill down to efficiency and methods.
Tyranny
“I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” –Thomas Jefferson
Every moment has its energy
See for yourself
“Place no head above your own.” –The Buddha
Don’t believe something because someone says to believe.
Use your own head.
See for yourself.
Follow reason.
Discard what doesn’t hold up to honest inquiry.
Pursue truth, no matter the cost.
When you understand someone
Profound, but so straightforward and simple.
When you feel inclined to judge, try instead to understand.
Just to be alive
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” –Alan Watts
Arrogance masks cowardice
Laser-like focus
Good hours
Lawrence of Arabia on happiness
What triggers a flow state for you? Can you make that happen more often?
More happiness is there to be tapped, and it’s those flow states where you’re most likely to produce remarkable work, meaningful art, and deep connection with others.
Your path
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” –Joseph Campbell
Excellent.
The supreme excellence
Ants marching
Whether you’re doing things right or just doing things to stay in step with the crowd, to stay busy and to complain (or brag) about being busy, it’s pointless if you’re not doing the right things.
Small mercies
The power of low expectations and the joy of “small mercies”:
“I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
via BrainPickings
If I’m expecting the universe to grant me a great parking space or extravagant prosperity or fairy tale love, I better get used to disappointment.
The universe is busy spinning galaxies into infinity and keeping my atoms together so I can go on being me for a little while longer.
But wonders abound, and I just need to see and be grateful for the small joys I continually stumble across every day.
I’m thankful for a car to park anywhere, my average middle-class comfortable prosperity, and my sweet, everyday-joy kind of love.
Small mercies and authentic wonders can fill a day — and a life’s worth of days — with the best the universe has to offer.
Busy Saturday
“BEWARE THE BARRENNESS OF A BUSY LIFE.
—Socrates”
My busy Saturday today centers around two key commitments with my daughters: the pool this afternoon and the movie Tomorrowland tonight. I might squeeze in some reading if I find some down time.
This is my kind of packed schedule.
Change happens
My work team had a facilitated workshop today on the subject of change.
One of my colleagues, when asked by the facilitator for his first reaction when thinking about upcoming change, simply responded with “Resistance is futile.”
Exactly.
Change is the constant of reality. Accept what comes. You don’t have to like it. But, you get to choose your response. Resistance is a futile response.
Be like water. Flow with, around, over the obstacles bound to come your way.
Don’t just survive. Master change to thrive.
Choose kind
My 7-year-old daughter came by my office after school on Tuesday. It’s the last week of school, and she was lively and lighthearted and spent some time, as usual, writing on the whiteboard in my office. When I left work I noticed she had written this on the board: 
“When given a choice to be right or kind, choose kind.”
I paused and wondered where a 7-year-old came up with such a thoughtful bit of wisdom, but I forgot to ask her about it.
The next day my wife and I attended the end-of-year party for her second-grade class. Her teacher, Ms. McCranie, is a superhero of a teacher, and she’s retiring this year after a long and remarkable career. As Ms. McCranie was giving out the academic awards she came to the Citizenship Award and explained that it was awarded primarily for kindness. She said she tells her students that, “when given a choice to be right or kind, choose kind.”
“Aha”, I thought. That’s where my Annie got that wisdom. And I was so impressed that this thought had been impressed in my daughter’s consciousness so distinctly.
And then Ms. McCranie announced that the Citizenship Award for her class was being awarded to Annie.
Her mom and sister and I are entitled to smirk at this slightly, knowing what it’s like to live with her occasionally feisty and fiery moods. But if in public and at school, at least, she’s demonstrating enough kindness to win a class award and she can quote verbatim such solid wisdom, I’ll take it.
I need to have that wisdom impressed on me regularly as well.
Leap
Einstein: Have holy curiosity
“Don’t think about why you question, simply don’t stop questioning. Don’t worry about what you can’t answer, and don’t try to explain what you can’t know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren’t you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind—to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.” –Albert Einstein
Excellent Journey 