Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in

Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves.

Finally, I climb over a small boulder and the view opens up. I can see from here to the infinite horizon. It feels as though I’m staring at the edge of the earth, where water meets the sky, blue on blue. The wind screams across my skin. I look up. It’s bright. It’s beautiful.

Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.

When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say, “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded.

Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.