Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

Steve Jobs, in which the Apple founder urges his audience to search relentlessly for work they love, and never to settle for less, with these words, from the essayist Anne Lamott:

it makes you much less likely to do satisfying things you’d otherwise have done, and that would have been easy,

carte blanche

examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.

instead of thinking ‘What a great day!’ and luxuriating in your achievement, you find yourself thinking: ‘Yes! Now that’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure that this is merely the first of many such days to come!’

Really, of course, what makes the new endeavor more appealing is just that we’re seeing it at a mental distance; we fail to realize, in the words of the psychology writer Jude King, that ‘every worthwhile goal is supposed to feel hard, unglamorous, unsexy,’ at least for some of the time you’re actually putting in the work.

other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems.

it risks implying that taking meaningful action is necessarily a tough or complex challenge.

Almost everything that happens, according to an adage of uncertain origin, is either a good time or a good story.