Hey!
Here are this week’s three insights that will help you improve yourself:
1. Burn to death
[Anger enters mind] after having replaced intelligence altogether, and shut it out of the house. And then the situation is similar to when people burn to death in their own houses, in the sense that anger makes the inside full of chaos, smoke and noise, with the result that the mind is incapable of seeing or hearing anything beneficial.
—Plutarch, On the Avoidance of Anger
We do not realize it, but when anger, we do the most stupid things, which at the moment seem the wisest things. For anger blocks us from thinking clearly.
“Grant yourself no licence when angry,” said Seneca. “Why? Because then you want complete licence.”
Or you will only burn to death in your own house.
2. Prayer
They say that there is a high god, supreme and heavenly, whom they worship every day with incense burned in censers, asking only to be sound of mind and strong in health.
—Marco Polo, The Travels
Marco Polo says this describing the religion of certain people. But that’s not important. Most who believe, pray for their lives to be easy and full of pleasures. They pray for heaven—a place full of pleasures.
But that, as Lao Tzu might say, is only hell.
Such people can never know what’s it like to overcome difficulties. That pleasure of overcoming pain is greater than constant pleasure. I’m not so stupid as to say that we should seek misfortune deliberately. I’m saying, we should not wish to avoid a life of hardship.
Because those who do will be most unhappy even when they face small difficulties. Whereas those who pray only for a sound mind and strong body will be ready to face anything, in fact, they will embrace everything—everything is a time to test their abilities.
3. It’s okay to quit
—according to Seth Godin, quitting takes a lot more guts than continuing to be carried along like debris on an ocean wave. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.
—David Epstein, Range
The point is, it’s okay to quit.
It’s not okay if you’re quitting because you lack persistence. But if you really want to do something else, and you know what you’re doing is not what you really want to do, you should quit.
Persistence for the sake of persistence, says Epstein, can get in the way. You would be persisting because you lost, just to lose even more.
Until next time,