Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than in

pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about doing so. By embracing your limitations in this way, you’ll be in a position to do more to fight the battles you do pick, and also thereby to feel better about yourself, than the person who tries to care about everything.

It will be found, I believe, in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work.

a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have fifty pounds in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of pounds’ worth of movie-making equipment

‘It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection.’ – ANN PATCHETT

Where could you take useful action on an important project, today, despite not really knowing how to proceed on it beyond that initial step?

Really, though, showing up more fully in the present is about how you pursue your plans for the future; it certainly doesn’t require that you abandon them.

That said, titles on the topic that have genuinely helped trigger action in my own life include Steve Chandler’s Time Warrior and Gregg Krech’s The Art of Taking Action: Lessons from Japanese Psychology.

‘If you find yourself lost in the woods, fuck it, build a house. “Well, I was lost, but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament!”’ – MITCH HEDBERG