Nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort

“Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” Nothing truly meaningful or lasting has ever been created in a short period of time. If you learn the story behind any great success, you realize how many years went by and how many hard choices were made to achieve it. Reaching for more is not only an act of ambition, it also comes from passion

Timothy Ferriss • Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World

Unfortunately, that flabby life is the default we slide into without a deliberate struggle against it. You are always getting weaker unless you’re making efforts to get stronger. If you aren’t finding new ways to push your physical and mental limits, or at least maintain their capacity, they are shrinking. Your capacity is unlikely to be stretched... See more

Nat Eliason • Raising Your Ceiling

There are necessary developmental thresholds someone has to pass through, and there's no real salve or proxy for it. You can give advice from a vantage point of wisdom, but someone has to go through the experience in order to internalize the lesson. Transformation occurs through multiple collisions with reality. Almost everything that holds

Nix 🕊 • Experience Is Incompressible

you need to accumulate your own mistakes for someone to be able to give you personalized, specific advice. And you need to put in the reps to accumulate mistakes. Therefore, the more reps you put in, the more relevant and helpful advice you can receive.

However, it seems most humans are plagued by the tendency to avoid work by staying stuck in the

Recovering Overthinker • Collecting Advice Is Killing Your Progress

Almost everything that holds meaning, weight, and gravity, cannot be reached by a shortcut, by sheer force alone. But by acceptance. Acceptance that what you desire for can survive contact with the world, and will yield meaning. You have to devote the time it takes to inhabit the world, chip away at its interior. No one can break the shell for you!... See more

Nix • experience is incompressible

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

– Theodore Roosevelt

Schmerz ist Bindung. Wer jeden schmerzhaften Zustand ablehnt, ist bindungsunfähig. Intensive Bindungen, die schmerzen könnten, werden heute gemieden. Alles spielt sich ab in einer palliativen Komfortzone. In seinem Buch »Lob der Liebe« weist Alain Badiou auf den Werbespruch eines Dating-Portals hin: »Es ist ganz leicht, verliebt zu sein, ohne zu

Byung-Chul Han • Palliativgesellschaft

A realization I’ve had lately: practically anything that’s great in the world is that way only through constant attention and care—e.g. great products, yards, marriages, companies, friendships. If left alone, practically everything defaults toward mediocrity at best or ruin at worst. “Constant attention and care” always requires time and this is a... See more

Steve Schoeffel • Tweet

Design Satisfaction and Its Opposite

I am not thrilled with the new design for a project I’m about to implement.

When I think about it, I always start comparing it to my work, immediately recalling this and that project, which, although somewhat outdated, I am still very satisfied with. It makes me proud that all the effort that went into such