Life Choices

she had “wanted to lead what I thought of as a ‘normal’ existence, but I soon found I wasn’t as normal away from the theater as in it.”

She concluded, “Acting is my highest form of intelligence, the time when I use the best part of my brain.”

The person makes his commitments maximal commitments. He doesn’t just have a career; he has a vocation. He doesn’t just have a contract marriage (What’s in it for me?). He has a covenantal marriage (I live and die for you). He doesn’t just have opinions. He submits to a creed. He doesn’t just live in a place. He helps build a community. Furthermore

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Normal behavior is forgotten. Only weird behavior survives.

Nobody tells stories of when you did the expected — they only tell stories when you did the unexpected.

Normal behavior costs nothing in the short term — but it disappears into the abyss.

Unconventional behavior costs a social price in the short term — but the actions live on as story assets ... See more

two paths: the money path and the life path . The money path is the belief that “one day when I sort this out I’ll get to do what I want.” Suffer now for a future payoff. The alternative is something he calls the “life path.” This is the idea that you can “do what you love and the more you follow it you will have your needs met with and without mon... See more

I sense there is a shift happening where people are realizing that they are channeling an ambitious impulse - the desire to grow and evolve - into dumb goals. Rejecting legible ambitious might be the most ambitious thing you can do.

A shift from legible ambition (my parents can easily brag about me) to illegible ambition (no one, including me know

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The best long term fuel source is some repeated act that energizes you in a way that then lets you become a generative person, who uses the energy to make things for others. A great question is "what is your renewable fuel source?"

“Don’t run away from what you don’t want; run toward what you do.”

In the university program where I was supposed to be emancipating myself from the kitchen, preparing myself to go back to New York having at least answered the question of my own potential, the novelty and thrill had thoroughly worn off. I could not find the fun or the urgency in the eventless and physically idle academic life. It was so lethargic

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By looking around himself a man can find out how to use the little virtues—moderately and when they are necessary—he can drink them in from the air, because the little virtues are of a kind that is common among men. But one cannot breathe in the great virtues from the surrounding air,