Ten Pieces of Inspiration #43

Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

1. Walt Whitman on living
If you manage to do these things, you’ll live a very great life.

This is what you should do:
Love the earth and sun and animals,
despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people…
reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
dismiss what insults your very soul,
and your flesh shall become a great poem.
- Walt Whitman, excerpt from the preface to Leaves of Grass

The thing I find fascinating is that many of the tenets of a better life are consistent no matter what your philosophy or religion is. They’re constantly repeated because they’re so true.

2. Dick and Rick Hoyt
Rick Hoyt is Dick Hoyt’s son. Rick was born with cerebral palsy. Yet, the two of them have competed in Ironman triathlons as a team.

It’s just an amazing story.

3. Thomas Jefferson on attitude
I often write that you can’t make someone adopt better behaviors if they don’t want to. On the other hand, people who want something can often go to amazing lengths to achieve it.

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. – Thomas Jefferson

The right attitude can lead to almost anything. The wrong attitude can lead to almost nothing.

4. Pamela Meyer on how to spot a liar
This is a really fascinating look into the science behind lying.

This video made me think quite a lot over the past week.

5. Orchard in Bloom, Louveciennes (1872) by Camille Pissarro
Ever since our family’s trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, I’ve been adding a lot of Pissarro’s art to my desktop background folder. This is just another great example of it.

Great landscapes make me want to be there, and this easily achieves that.

6. Thoreau on character
Good character is built one small action at a time, one small difficult decision at a time. It’s much easier to be of bad character.

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one. – Henry David Thoreau

Have you ever noticed that I quote Thoreau a lot in these articles (and Ralph Waldo Emerson, too)? I can’t tell you how much of an impact Thoreau and Emerson’s writings have had on me over the course of my life.

7. Failure doesn’t write your story
If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived.

Failure is often the forge for better things. It’s a chance to learn what doesn’t work so that next time you can discard those mistakes.

8. CometDocs
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a document from a friend in a format that’s basically unusable to me. This is the easiest tool I’ve yet found for solving this problem in a general way.

CometDocs does nothing more than convert documents from one format to another about as easily as possible. That’s a tool that’s got a permanent place in my bookmarks now.

9. Aldous Huxley on ceilings and floors
Often, when people achieve success, it becomes their new standard. Successful people often repeat that success.

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right. – Aldous Huxley

Why is that? It’s something I’ve observed, but it’s something I can’t quite quantify.

10. Nat King Cole, Mel Torme, and Judy Christy performing How High the Moon
I would love to hear a great recording of this. The scratchiness of this recording adds some charm, though.

I love old jazz standards lately.

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Ten Pieces of Inspiration #39

Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

1. Epicetus on blame
It’s easy to get angry at others. It’s much harder to look at ourselves for solutions.

“When we are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.” – Epictetus

Every time I look at myself for an explanation for the problems in my life, I find something I can improve.

2. Sunni Brown on the power of doodles
I keep a notepad on my desk for random thoughts. Sometimes, I find myself doodling on it. Weirdly, there are times when that doodling will cause me to put together some idea in my head.

Something that seems like a time waster isn’t really a time waster.

3. Chogyam Trungpa on the fear of facing ourselves
We are who we are. We can’t change that.

“We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible. We can’t do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our excrement, our most undesirable parts. We have to see them. That is the foundation of warriorship, basically speaking. Whatever is there, we have to face it, we have to look at it, study it, work with it and practice meditation with it.” – Chogyam Trungpa

We succeed when we accept who we are and think about how we can use that in the world.

4. Autumn leaves
The evenings are getting very cool here and the leaves are just starting to turn.

Thanks to Yves Cosentino for the picture.

5. John Bogle on impulsiveness
Impulsiveness is our biggest opponent in life. It’s exciting, but it’s also quite capable of sinking our ship.

“Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.” – John Bogle

Patience, on the other hand, keeps our ship headed the right way.

6. Baseball
The reason I love baseball so deeply was rekindled this past week with perhaps the single best evening of sports I’ve ever seen in my life.

I would have given anything to watch all of those games with my father and my grandfather there.

Thanks to Sean Winters for the picture.

7. Will Rogers on life
Whenever I struggle with time management, I come back to this quote.

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” – Will Rogers

The entire reason for thinking about time management is to have more time for the stuff you want to do. Nothing more, nothing less.

8. Louis Armstrong performing Mack the Knife
Something about this puts a big smile on my face every time.

This is just an amazing performace.

9. Twosides
This is just an amazing site. If you’ve ever wanted to understand the perspectives that others have on an issue, particularly those that disagree with you, this is the place for you.

I’ve met people on both sides of the political spectrum who seem to not fundamentally understand what the other side thinks or wants (or else abstracts it to the point of nonsense). I wish I could send this to every one of them and that they’d actually take a moment to use it.

10. Jonathan Swift on the value of money
Money isn’t what you want.

“A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.” – Jonathan Swift

Money is a tool to achieve what you want.

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