Each month I keep a list of thoughts, ideas, opinions, and insights that I come across and find interesting. From this list I’ve selected some to share with you:

• "The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them." - Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
• "Do fewer things. Do them better. Know why you're doing them” - Cal Newport
• Tell people what you want from them. “Unspoken expectations are pre-meditated resentments.” - Neil Strauss
• J.K. Rowling on setbacks: “The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.”
• I spend a lot of time thinking about this simple idea: The person who aligns themselves with the general principles of the world goes further and faster than the person who doesn’t. - Source
• “The alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.”... "By biding his time – seeing time as an ally – and building up his capabilities to match his ambitions, he gained more power than even Julius Caesar had, maintaining the facade of the Roman Republic while in reality leading the new Roman Empire. And he avoided his predecessor’s downfall, ruling over the Empire for the next 13 years until dying of natural causes just short of his 77th birthday."... "If you have Level 1 capabilities, you need to level up before going after Level 10 aspirations." - Source
• "Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired." - Eric Jorgenson

Another longer gem:

"One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear. Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, and you go out of business. It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. In all of these, the rich get richer. You can't understand the world without understanding the concept of superlinear returns. And if you're ambitious you definitely should, because this will be the wave you surf on." — Paul Graham, Superlinear Returns

I appreciate you.

M