Once I stopped trying to be successful in other people’s eyes, I was able to slow down, pay attention, and notice the things I did naturally, like writing.

To override this impulse, I try to jump to that imagined future state when everything will be “okay” and ask myself how I can embody that state, right now.

“Good work and good education are achieved by visitation and then absence, appearance and disappearance. Most people who exhibit a mastery in a work or a subject have often left it completely for a long period in their lives only to return for another look. Constant busyness has no absence in it, no openness to the arrival of any new season, no

The culture decrees that you should do what you are good at rather than what you most like to do; that what you produce rather than what you get out of what you produce is what counts; that your ability, reflected in achievements, is what matters. Given cultural expectations, it is all too easy to equate personal and professional worth.

He realized that “the best long term fuel source is some repeated act that energizes you in a way that then lets you become a generative

Helping people live courageously so that they can thrive is one of the most important things in the world. I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live.

How much great work is never started because of people’s dedication to the standard workweek?

once you know this kind of path exists, the right way to find it is to be open to it, to ask lots of questions, and to assume, despite your doubts, that you are already on the right path.

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”⁠1