Answering the call from productivity: becoming a more productive person; advice from Alexander Graham Bell.

Hello again, dear reader.

Recently I've been wondering how I can be more productive as a writer (yes, dear reader, I know this simple answer is to write more.) However there is more to writing than just simply sitting down at a computer and cranking out words. Productive people have a certain structure, a routine. They generally like to follow. It helps with their productivity. So I started looking at those self-help and business websites, but they were all a bunch of touchy-feely exhortations that I just didn't feel we're going to help my productivity very much. So then I started thinking about people like Teddy Roosevelt and other classic examples of people that were very productive. And I stumbled across Alexander Graham Bell, as most people know he invented the telephone (no not the cell phone, the kind that had to be plugged into a wall and did not run on voice commands and used actual operators). In reading about him, I came across what he had written about his routines and how he managed his daily working hours so that he could be as productive as possible. After reading this wisdom, I decided dear reader that I share with you so that you too can be more productive in your daily routines...






Alexander Graham Bell possessed one of the most fertile and brilliant minds in modern history. Though he is famous for inventing the telephone, he also developed or helped develop a photophone (which wirelessly communicated sound on a beam of light), a proto-metal detector, the airplane that made the first manned flight in the British Commonwealth, and a hydrofoil watercraft that set a marine speed record which stood for a decade.
Bell also had some legendarily eccentric work habits. With his shabby tweed clothes and bushy, often unkempt hair and beard, he was every inch the scientist savant. His offices and laboratories were environments of creative chaos, overflowing with enormous stacks of papers, books, and sketches, and strewn with wires, batteries, and research supplies of all kinds. Bell also preferred to work through the night, going to bed as the sun came up, and sometimes driving himself so hard that the effort brought on migraine headaches. In more relaxed moments, he would skinny-dip in the lake by his summer home, floating on his back while puffing on a lit cigar, and the eruption of a thunderstorm might find him dashing outside in swimsuit and rubber boots to immerse himself in the natural spectacle.
While your mileage in adopting these unconventional habits will vary, there was one unique method of Bell’s that might be more universally worth trying: using location-based prompts to prime your mind for certain tasks.

Alexander Graham Bell’s Use of Location-Based Prompts

When Bell was on to some new idea and feeling a surge of inspiration, he could work with obsessive focus. “There is a sort of telephonic undercurrent going on [in my mind] all the while,” the inventor told his wife Mabel, explaining that he had “periods of restlessness when my brain is crowded with ideas tingling to my fingertips when I am excited and cannot stop for anybody.” During such times, Bell went without food or drink, and asked that no one, not even Mabel, disturb him, lest such interruptions burst the gossamer threads of his emerging ideas. “Thoughts,” Bell said, “are like the precious moments that fly past; once gone they can never be caught again.”
However, while Bell’s focus could be laser-like when he was chasing down a "eureka" moment, much of the time his mind was in fact quite scattered and distracted. While he liked to tinker and dream, he hated getting down to the brass tacks of experimentation; he detested dealing with details, the painstaking effort required to verify intuitions, the tedious process of making minute recalibrations, and then testing and re-resting variables. Unlike his fellow inventor, Thomas Edison, Bell even hated the work of commercializing his inventions — applying for patents and popularizing and improving that which he had already created (while he was proud of developing the telephone, he considered the fuss entailed in protecting its patent and promoting its use an irritating distraction from his other work). He enjoyed intellectual exploration more for its own sake, than any concrete results.
Part of Bell’s difficulty buckling down also simply had to do with his resplendent imagination and wide-ranging curiosity. He was interested in so many different things that he had trouble thinking about a single idea for any span of time. His mind wished to jump from subject to subject and from observation to observation; he enjoyed reading through encyclopedia entries before going to bed, and carried around a pocket notebook to jot down his frequent and varied insights (he had a knack for finding inspiration in any setting).
As Mabel told her husband, “you like to fly around like a butterfly sipping honey, more or less from a flower here or another flower there.”
Bell’s “flightiness” was actually a big part of his genius, which largely rested on his ability to find novel connections between disparate ideas. But his desire to work on many things at once also greatly hindered his progress in moving forward on any one project.
To bring a little organization to his often fragmented thoughts, Bell came up with a method of using what we’ve chosen to dub “location-based prompts.” “Convinced that his physical surroundings induced specific trains of thoughts,” his biographer explains, “he established particular workspaces for particular purposes.”
Although Bell’s primary residence was in Washington D.C., he had also built a home on the headlands of Cape Breton, a remote island in Nova Scotia. At first, his family just spent their summers there, but as Bell got older, he spent more and more of his time living at this picturesque outpost. Dubbed Beinn Bhreagh, the Bell estate included a large house, a laboratory built inside a wooden shed, and a moored houseboat — the Mabel of Beinn Bhreagh.
As Bell’s daughter recalls, her father divided his time between these three different “workstations,” according to the cognitive task at hand:
“In the little office near the laboratory he occupied his mind with problems connected with the experiments; in his study in the house, he thought and worked over his theories of [flight]; while the Mabel of Beinn Bhreagh was the place to think of genetics and heredity.”
When back in D.C., Bell similarly alternated between three different workspaces: Inside his study at home, he concentrated on answering his voluminous correspondence. At the Volta Bureau, which he founded to conduct research related to the deaf, he focused his work on just that (both his wife and mother were deaf, and working with the hearing impaired was the main passion of his life). When he was in the mood to do more abstract thinking, he retreated to a small hut that sat in his son-in-law’s backyard and overlooked Rock Creek.

Using Location-Based Prompts in Your Own Life

There’s actually some neuroscience that shows why Bell’s location-based prompt method can be effective. Every thought and action you take corresponds to a series of neurons in your brain. And these neurons connect to other neurons to make what researchers call neural maps. For instance, when you think of the color red, you don’t just think of the color itself, but also likely an object, say an apple or a fire truck. The color is connected to something concrete in your brain. And it does this for higher-level actions as well. As Caroline Webb notes in How to Have a Good Day, “if you once spent an afternoon cranking out great work while settled into that window seat [at home], your ‘window seat’ neural network might be connected with the one representing ‘extremely productive and focused behavior.'”
Once this connection is established and reinforced, the brain begins creating a well-worn neural pathway: “If I sit down in X location, then I do Y.” These if-then connections between particular locations and particular behaviors/thoughts can help you settle down to work quicker on a task and prime the flow of certain ideas with less effort. Conversely, these prompts can work against doing a different activity in a certain location than the one your mind primarily associates with it. For example, it can be hard to stay motivated to work out at home (outside a dedicated garage gym), because your mind associates the living room with relaxing and snacking, not putting yourself in a state of sweat and pain.
To use location-based prompts to your advantage, first choose different locations for different tasks; see if there are places that feel naturally conducive to working on certain things. We’re not all lucky enough to have as many interesting options as Bell did, but you can use the same technique with locations limited to the four walls of your own home. For example, you might choose to always do budget-related work at the kitchen table, reading in your easy chair, and meditation in your closet.
Then do your tasks in their assigned locations as consistently as you can. At the same time, try not to use the same location for other tasks (as much as possible; you can’t avoid also eating at your kitchen table, of course), as this will create interference with the association you’re trying to create between that environment and the primary activity you use it for. For example, it’s not advisable to watch television or surf your phone while you lie in bed, because you want your bed to be solely connected with sleeping and nothing else. Doing other things in bed besides snoozing weakens the strength of its location-specific prompt and can make it harder to fall asleep.
By using Bell’s method of location-based prompts, and making certain places part of certain rituals, and you may find it easier to buckle down to your tasks. Do what Bell would — experiment and see if it works for you.
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Practice may not make perfect after all: 1925 advice on how to hone a mental or physical skill to perfection.

Hello again, dear reader.

I'm sure everyone has heard the old adage, "practice makes perfect" I mean, it makes absolute sense right? The idea being, the more times you repeat an action or process the better at it you become this fact is proven by observing "muscle memory" this phenomenon occurs when a person repeats in action, so many times that a particular action is ingrained in the nervous system and can be performed almost effortlessly.

Well dear reader. It was while thinking about practice making perfect that I came across this 1925 exempt. It explains why practice might not make perfect after all, and it lays out some very interesting information about useful ways to perfect skills, whether they are knowledge (as in having to retain information for a test) or trying to hone a physical skill (such as perfecting a three pointer in basketball). So hopefully dear reader by the end of today's conversation, you too will have a better understanding of how to efficiently improve both your mental and physical skill sets without needless hours of practice...






Side note: The following excerpt — “Practice, and Some Other Things, Make Perfect” — comes from Increasing Personal Efficiency (1925) by Donald A. Laird. Some re-formatting and condensation have been applied to the original chapter. 
Back in the third grade I filled a page of the copy book with the sentence, “Practice makes perfect.” I wrote this particular line twenty-five times; I imagine that altogether I had practice in writing not less than a hundred thousand similar lines before the series of writing books were completed.
That should have been enough practice to have made my writing perfect, but it did not, for the simple reason that practice alone does not make perfect. Practice is only one way – and a very ineffective way at that – of gaining skill, or making perfect.
And what are skills? All animals enter upon life with scores of actions that are entirely unlearned. One does not have to learn to sneeze or to laugh. Just try sneezing when you do not feel like it and see how unsuccessful you are; try laughing when you do not feel like it. It has been estimated that probably 80 percent of the activities of man are of this unlearned type.
The remaining 20 percent of the behavior of man is that which determines his position in industry and life. Even though it may comprise no more than one-fifth of his daily behavior, it is by far the most important fifth when one looks to increasing personal efficiency. This one-fifth is the skills.
The moth does not learn to avoid the flame when its wings are singed once, twice, or a dozen times. Our old friend, the cockroach, is not made perfect through practice. It has been found that he can be taught tricks which he will remember for half an hour, but no longer. But men can modify their skills and become more skilled.

Work to Rest Ratio

Practice does have something to do with gaining skill, but its value depends largely upon how long one practices. The lazy man’s way has been found to be the best way. Distribute your practice over many short periods; do not practice for a few very long periods. The individual who practices a music lesson for half an hour in the morning and again for half an hour in the afternoon will make more progress than the one who practices for an hour at a time once a day.
When you are learning to drive a car, to typewrite, to play some game of skill, or are memorizing, practice for a short while on many days. You will thus make much better progress. When long periods are used their principal benefit is in furnishing drudgery, and they hamper progress in becoming skilled rather than helping it.
At the time of the Spanish-American War a large concern found itself in great need of moving hundreds of tons of pig iron. The pigs were carried by unskilled laborers, at the rate of about seventeen tons a day.
An efficiency expert came along and told the laborers they were working too hard. He suggested that they work easier, rest more, and increase their efficiency with less fatigue. So the foreman blew a whistle at the end of twelve minutes’ work, whereupon the laborers laid down their loads of iron and rested for three minutes, when the foreman blew the whistle again as a signal to resume work.
The laborers now spent one-fifth of the time resting. But by doing so they were able to carry forty-five tons a day rather than fifteen tons; their hours were reduced and their pay increased two-thirds.
By proper rest they had almost tripled their efficiency. By properly spaced rest periods anyone can greatly increase his efficiency. People folding handkerchiefs who work five minutes and then rest one minute do more than those who work steadily. The mental worker who sticks close to this work half an hour and then walks around or, better yet, relaxes in his chair and gazes idly out of the window for three minutes, can do more than by working steadily by the half day. And he will be less fatigued at the end of the day.
Do not make your rest intervals too long; that is a waste of time. Do not make them too short; that does not allow greatest efficiency. Experiment with your work until you have found the best ratio of work to rest throughout the day.

Do Learning

You will acquire skills better if you are active rather than if you are in a position to have someone tell you how to do it. Watching someone while he does what you want to do is a slight aid. You must do it. You will learn to drive a car much quicker by shifting gears from the start instead of having some well-meaning instructor put your hands through the movements.
Doing is essential for learning. The doer is the learner. If you really want to increase your mental efficiency, do things, do not just read about them. Put them to work at the first opportunity.

Push Past Plateaus

Sometimes, after long periods of practice, there is a marked loss of skill. This is a rather discouraging situation. Some days, progress is rapid; on others, it is just dragging along. There may be an actual loss at certain times.
These periods of no progress are called plateaus, because the chart of accomplishment is flat like a plateau during this period. These plateaus of despond and discouragement are common to all. They may be caused by a temporary slump in interest, or – strange as it may seem – too frequent practice may cause this stalling of progress.
These plateaus are not inevitable. Experimental work has shown that, where one bends his best efforts to overcome this period of no progress, the plateau of despond has given way to progress. Look upon the plateau as a challenge to work all the harder!
A close relative to the plateau is the decreased rate of improvement as the higher levels of skill are neared. The progress is much more rapid and spectacular early in the game, but the finishing touches of the expert are gained after practice which is long and perhaps tedious.
So do not stop because you are slowing up – there is much skill in doing and thinking for you to gain.

Train for the Job

Such a thing as general training is largely a myth.
Mathematics and some other school subjects used to be taught, not because of any practical value they might have, but because it was thought that they would develop some imaginary “faculty of reasoning.”
Professor E. L. Thorndike recently put this to a test by having students perform problems in algebra and then giving them the same problems a little while later using a different set of letters. When the second set of problems was given, it was found that the difficulty had been increased, although there had not been a change in the reasoning involved. The students had been in the habit of reasoning with a, b, c, and x, so that when r, w, g, and p were substituted their reasoning fled.
This explains why the close scientific thinker will go astray in making investments, or why the financier is a poor scientist. Each has got into the habit of reasoning with certain facts; when these are changed, their reasoning is altered.
There is no general training. Train yourself on the job; Mah Jong trains for Mah Jong, dancing trains for dancing.
If you want skill in invention, don’t read the biographies of famous inventors: Invent! If you want skill in managing, manage something, don’t play chess!

Feign Interest

It is a commonplace that it takes more effort to do something that is displeasing or uninteresting than it would to do the same thing when it is fascinating. If someone could find out a way to make bore some tasks fascinating, he would increase the efficiency of the world several fold.
Let us see what has been done along this line. About 1905, two German psychologists, Ebert and Meumann, made a very careful study of the way memory work was improved by simply “making believe” that it was interesting, even when it was known that it was a long, boresome job. They found that merely deciding to think that the work was going to be interesting improved the work.
More recently Mrs. McCharles, at the University of California, made a more practical study of the influence of attitude on learning than that of Ebert and Meumann. When Mrs. McCharles’s subjects pretended that the work ahead of them was going to be interesting and heaps of fun, they learned much more than they had learned with their ordinary attitude or when they thought it was going to be an onerous task.
Perhaps the assumption that the work was going to be interesting really made it interesting, but whether it did or not the fact still stands that they actually learned more and with less effort than when they did not feign their enthusiasm.
This may give some explanation of the apparently marvelous minds of men such as Roosevelt. Everything the Colonel entered into, he took with him his characteristic enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is little more than interest plus energy. Interest itself usually taps all of one’s available energy. Faking an interest, whether there is a genuine interest or not, seems to be almost as effective in increasing human efficiency in learning as a genuine enthusiasm.

21 bite sized nuggets of wisdom that will make life easier to swallow: 21 epigrams that everyone should know.

Hello again, dear reader.

Today's conversation stems from doing some research into epigrams as I was looking for a quote or an epigram that I thought might inspire me and could be used as a prompt for writing a blog and the more epigrams I read the more I started to think. Why don't I just write a blog on epigrams themselves. So that's exactly what I did today's conversation consists of 21 epigrams, or if you prefer little advice quotes such as "no man steps in the same river twice." These 21 short and sweet pieces of wisdom are things everyone should have stored away somewhere deep in the memory bank. As they will each contribute to your life in some meaningful way...

       

As long as man has been alive, he has been collecting little sayings about how to live. We find them carved in the rock of the Temple of Apollo and etched as graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. They appear in the plays of Shakespeare, the commonplace book of H. P. Lovecraft, the collected proverbs of Erasmus, and the ceiling beams of Montaigne’s study. Today, they’re recorded on iPhones and in Evernote.

But whatever generation is doing it, whether they’re written by scribes in China or commoners in some European dungeon or simply passed along by a kindly grandfather, these little epigrams of life advice have taught essential lessons; How to respond to adversity, how to think about money, How to meditate on our mortality, How to have courage.

And they pack all this in so few words. “What is an epigram?” Coleridge asked, “A dwarfish whole; its body brevity, and wit its soul.” Epigrams are what Churchill was doing when he said: “To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.” Or Balzac: “All happiness depends on courage and work.” Ah yes, epigrams are often funny too. That’s how we remember them. Napoleon: “Never interrupt an enemy making a mistake.” François de La Rochefoucauld: “We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us.” Voltaire: “A long dispute means that both parties are wrong.”

Below are some wonderful epigrams that span some 21 centuries and 3 continents. Each one is worth remembering, having queued in your brain for one of life’s crossroads or to drop at the perfect moment in conversation. Each will change and evolve with you as you evolve (Heraclitus: “No man steps in the same river twice”) and yet each will remain strong and unyielding no matter how much you may one day try to wiggle out and away from them.

Fundamentally, each one will teach you how to be a better man. If you let them.

“We must all either wear out or rust out, every one of us. My choice is to wear out.” —Theodore Roosevelt

At the beginning of his life, few would have predicted that Theodore Roosevelt even had a choice in the matter. He was sickly and fragile, doted on by worried parents. Then, a conversation with his father sent him driven, almost maniacally in the other direction. “I will make my body,” he said, when told that he would not go far in this world with a brilliant mind in a frail body. What followed was a montage of boxing, hiking, horseback riding, hunting, fishing, swimming, boldly charging enemy fire, and then a grueling work pace as one of the most prolific and admired presidents in American history. Again, this epigram was prophetic for Roosevelt, because at only 54 years old, his body began to wear out. An assassination attempt left a bullet lodged in his body and it hastened his rheumatoid arthritis. On his famous “River of Doubt” expedition he developed a tropical fever and the toxins from an infection in his leg left him nearly dead. Back in America he contracted a severe throat infection and was later diagnosed with inflammatory rheumatism, which temporarily confined him to a wheelchair (saying famously, “All right! I can work that way too!”) and then he died at age 60. But there is not a person on the planet who would say that he had not made a fair trade, that he had not worn his life well and not lived a full one in those 60 years.

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” —Epictetus

There is the story of the alcoholic father with two sons. One follows in his father’s footsteps and ends up struggling through life as a drunk, and the other becomes a successful, sober businessman. Each are asked: “Why are you the way you are?” The answer for both is the same: “Well, it’s because my father was an alcoholic.” The same event, the same childhood, two different outcomes. This is true for almost all situations—what happens to us is an objective reality, how we respond is a subjective choice. The Stoics—of which Epictetus was one—would say that we don’t control what happens to us, all we control are our thoughts and reactions to what happens to us. Remember that: You’re defined in this life not by your good luck or your bad luck, but your reaction to those strokes of fortune. Don’t let anyone tell you different. 

“The best revenge is not to be like that.” —Marcus Aurelius

There is a proverb about revenge: Before setting out for a journey of revenge, dig two graves. Because revenge is so costly, because the pursuit of it often wears on the one who covets it. Marcus’s advice is easier and truer: How much better it feels to let it go, to leave the wrongdoer to their wrongdoing. And from what we know, Marcus Aurelius lived this advice. When Avidius Cassius, one of his most trusted generals rebelled and declared himself emperor, Marcus did not seek vengeance. Instead, he saw this as an opportunity to teach the Roman people and the Roman Senate about how to deal with civil strife in a compassionate, forgiving way. Indeed, when assassins struck Cassius down, Marcus supposedly wept. This is very different than the idea of “Living well being the best revenge”—it’s not about showing someone up or rubbing your success in their face. It’s that the person who wronged you is not happy, is not enjoying their life. Do not become like them. Reward yourself by being the opposite of them. 

“There is good in everything, if only we look for it.” —Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the classic series Little House, lived this, facing some of the toughest and unwelcoming elements on the planet: harsh and unyielding soil, Indian territory, Kansas prairies, and the humid backwoods of Florida. Not afraid, not jaded—because she saw it all as an adventure. Everywhere was a chance to do something new, to persevere with cheery pioneer spirit whatever fate befell her and her husband. That isn’t to say she saw the world through delusional rose-colored glasses. Instead, she simply chose to see each situation for what it could be—accompanied by hard work and a little upbeat spirit. Others make the opposite choice. Remember: There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

“Character is fate.” —Heraclitus

In the hiring process, most employers look at where someone went to school, what jobs they’ve held in the past. This is because past success can be an indicator of future successes. But is it always? There are plenty of people who were successful because of luck. Maybe they got into Oxford or Harvard because of their parents. And what about a young person who hasn’t had time to build a track record? Are they worthless? Of course not. This is why character is a far better measure of a man or woman. Not just for jobs, but for friendships, relationships, for everything. When you seek to advance your own position in life, character is the best lever—perhaps not in the short term, but certainly over the long term. And the same goes for the people you invite into your life.

“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” —Nicholas Nassim Taleb

A man shows up for work at a company where he knows that management is doing something wrong, something unethical. How does he respond? Can he cash his checks in good conscience because he isn’t the one running up the stock price, falsifying reports or lying to his co-workers? No. One cannot, as Budd Schulberg says in one of his novels, deal in filth without becoming the thing he touches. We should look up to a young man at Theranos as an example here. After discovering numerous problems at the health care startup, he was dismissed by his seniors and eventually contacted the authorities. Afterwards, not only was this young man repeatedly threatened, bullied, and attacked by Theranos, but his family had to consider selling their house to pay for the legal bills. His relationship with his grandfather—who sits on the Theranos board—is strained and perhaps irreparable. As Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, and us: “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” It’s an important reminder. Doing the right thing isn’t free. Doing the right thing might even cost you everything.

“Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone is better than you at something. This is a fact of life. Someone is better than you at making eye contact. Someone is better than you at quantum physics. Someone is better informed than you on geopolitics. Someone is better than you are at speaking kindly to someone they dislike. There are better gift-givers, name-rememberers, weight-lifters, temper-controllers, confidence-carriers, and friendship-makers. There is no one person who is the best at all these things, who doesn’t have room to improve in one or more of them. So if you can find the humility to accept this about yourself, what you will realize is that the world is one giant classroom. Go about your day with an openness and a joy about this fact. Look at every interaction as an opportunity to learn from and of the people you meet. You will be amazed at how quickly you grow, how much better you get.

“This is not your responsibility but it is your problem.” —Cheryl Strayed

It is not your responsibility to fill up a stranger’s gas tank, but when their car dies in front of you, blocking the road, it’s still your problem isn’t it? It is not your responsibility to negotiate peace treaties on behalf of your country, but when war breaks out and you’re drafted to fight in it? Guess whose problem it is? Yours. Life is like this. It has a way of dropping things into our lap—the consequences of an employee’s negligence, a spouse’s momentary lapse of judgement, a freak weather event—that were in no way our fault but by nature of being in our lap, our f*cking problem. So what are you going to do? Complain? Are you going to litigate this in a blogpost or an argument with God? Or are you just going to get to work solving it the best you can? Life is defined by how you answer that question. Cheryl Strayed is right. This thing might not be your responsibility but it is your problem. So accept it, deal with it, kick its ass.

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” —Marcus Aurelius

In Rome just as America, in the forum just as on Facebook, there was the temptation to replace action with argument. To philosophize instead of living philosophically. Today, in a society obsessed with content, outrage, and drama, it’s even easier to get lost in the echo chamber of the debate of what’s “better.” We can have endless discussions about what’s right and wrong. What should we do in this hypothetical situation or that one? How can we encourage other people to be better? (We can even debate the meaning of the above line: “What’s a man? What’s the definition of good? Why doesn’t it mention women?”) Of course, this is all a distraction. If you want to try to make the world a slightly better place, there’s a lot you can do. But only one thing guarantees an impact. Step away from the argument. Dig yourself out of the rubble. Stop wasting time with how things should be, would be, could be. Be that thing. (Here’s a cool poster of this quote).

“You are only entitled to the action, never to its fruits.” —Bhagavad Gita

In life, it’s a fact that: You will be unappreciated. You will be sabotaged. You will experience surprising failures. Your expectations will not be met. You will lose. You will fail. How do you carry on then? How do you take pride in yourself and your work? John Wooden’s advice to his players says it: Change the definition of success. “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” “Ambition,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “means tying your well-being to what other people say or do . . . Sanity means tying it to your own actions.” Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.” That’s all there needs to be. Recognition and rewards—those are just extra.

“Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.” —Epicurus

A lot has been said of so-called “F*ck You Money.” The idea being that if one can earn enough, become rich and powerful enough, that suddenly no one can touch them and they can do whatever they want. What a mirage this is! How often the target seems to mysteriously move right as we approach it. It calls to mind the observation of David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson who said that “beyond a specific amount, f*ck-you money can be a state of mind. One that you can acquire well in advance of the corresponding bank account. One that’s founded mostly on a personal confidence that even if most of the material trappings went away, you’d still be happier for standing your ground.” The truth is being your own man, being self-contained, having fewer needs, and better, resilient skills that allow you to thrive in any and all situations. That is real wealth and freedom. That’s what Emerson was talking about in his famous essay on self-reliance and it’s what Epicurus meant too.

“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.” —Jose Ortega y Gasset

It was one of the great Stoics who said that if you live with a lame man, soon enough you will walk with a limp. My father told me something similar as a kid: “You become like your friends.” It is true not just with social influences but informational ones too: If you are addicted to the chatter of the news, you will soon find yourself worried, resentful, and perpetually outraged. If you consume nothing but escapist entertainment, you will find the real world around you harder and harder to deal with. If all you do is watch the markets and obsess over every fluctuation, your worldview will become defined by money and gains and losses. But if you drink from deep, philosophical wisdom? If you have regularly in your mind role models of restraint, sobriety, courage, and honor? Well, you will start to become these things too. Tell me who you spend time with, Goethe said, and I will tell you who you are. Tell me what you pay attention to, Gasset was saying, and I can tell you the same thing. Remember that the next time you feel your finger itching to pull up your Facebook feed.

“Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue.” —Zeno

You can always get up after you fall, but remember, what has been said can never be unsaid. Especially cruel and hurtful things.

“Space I can recover. Time, never.” —Napoleon Bonaparte

Lands can be reconquered, indeed in the course of a battle, a hill or a certain plain might trade hands several times. But missed opportunities? These can never be regained. Moments in time, in culture? They can never be re-made. One can never go back in time to prepare for what they should have prepared for, no one can ever get back critical seconds that were wasted out of fear or ego. Napoleon was brilliant at trading space for time: Sure, you can make these moves, provided you are giving me the time I need to drill my troops, or move them to where I want them to be. Yet in life, most of us are terrible at this. We trade an hour of our life here or afternoon there like it can be bought back with the few dollars we were paid for it. And it is only much much later, as they are on their deathbeds or when they are looking back on what might have been, that many people realize the awful truth of this quote. Don’t do that. Embrace it now.

“You never know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” —Warren Buffett

The problem with comparing yourself to other people is you really never know anyone else’s situation. The co-worker with a nice car? It could be a dangerous and unsafe salvage with 100,000 miles. The friend who always seems to be traveling to far off places? They could be up to their eyeballs in credit card debt and about to get fired by their boss. Your neighbors’ marriage which makes you so insecure about your own? It could be a nightmare, a complete lie. People do a very good job pretending at things, and their well-maintained fronts are often covers for incredible risk and irresponsibility. You never know, Warren Buffett was saying, until things get bad. If you’re living the life you know to be right, if you are making good, solid decisions, don’t be swayed by what others are doing—whether that is taking the form of irrational exuberance or panicked pessimism. See the high flying lives of others as a cautionary tale—like Icarus with his wings—and not as an inspiration or a source of insecurity. Keep doing what you’re doing and don’t be caught swimming naked! Because the tide will go out. Prepare for it! (Premeditatio Malorum)

“Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.” —Benjamin Franklin

Marcus Aurelius would say something similar: “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.” Why? For starters because the only person you control is yourself. It’s a complete waste of time to go around projecting strict standards on other people—ones they never agreed to follow in the first place—and then being aghast or feel wronged when they fall short. The other reason is you have no idea what other people are going or have been through. That person who seemed to rudely decline the invitation you so kindly offered? What if they were working hard to recommit themselves to their family and as much as they’d like to have coffee with you, are doing their best to spend more time with their loved ones? The point is: You have no idea. So give people the benefit of the doubt. Look for good in them, assume good in them, and let that good inspire your own actions.

“The world was not big enough for Alexander the Great, but a coffin was.” —Juvenal

Ah, the way that a good one liner can humble even the world’s greatest conqueror. Remember: we are all equals in death. It makes quick work of all of us, big and small. I carry a coin in my pocket to remember this: Memento Mori. What Juvenal reminds us is the same thing that Shakespeare spoke about in Hamlet:

“Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O’ that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’ expel the winder’s flaw!”

It doesn’t matter how famous you are, how powerful you are, how much you think you have left to do on this planet, the same thing happens to all of us, and it can happen when we least expect it. And then we will be wormfood and that’s the end of it.

“To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.” —Winston Churchill

While this is probably not a Churchill original (he most likely borrowed from Cardinal Newman: “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”), Churchill certainly abided this in his life. He’d even quip about his constant change of political affiliation: “I said a lot of stupid things when I worked with the Conservative Party, and I left it because I did not want to go on saying stupid things.” As Cicero would say when attacked that he was changing his opinion: “If something strikes me as probable, I say it; and that is how, unlike everyone else, I remain a free agent.” There is nothing more impressive—intellectually or otherwise—than to change long held beliefs, opinions, and habits. The more you’ve changed, the better you probably are.

“Judge not, lest you be judged.” —Jesus

Not only here would Jesus call us on one of our worst tendencies but immediately also ask: “And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?” This line is similar to what the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who historical sources suggest was born the same year as Jesus, would say: “You look at the pimples of others when you yourselves are covered with a mass of sores.” Waste no time judging and worrying about other people. You have plenty of problems to deal with in your own life. Chances are your own flaws are probably worse—and in any case, they are at least in your control. So do something about them.

“Time and patience are the strongest warriors.” —Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy puts the above words in the mouth of Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov in War and Peace. In real life, Kutuzov gave Napoleon a painful lesson in the truth of the epigram over a long winter in Russia in 1812. Tolstoy would also say, “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.” When it comes to accomplishing anything significant, you are required to exhibit patience and fortitude, so much patience, as much as you’d think you’d need boldness and courage.

“No one saves us but ourselves / No one can and no one may.” —Buddha

Will we wait for someone to save us, or will we listen to Marcus Aurelius’s empowering call to “get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.”

Because at some point, we must put articles like this one aside and take action. No one can blow our nose for us. Another blog post isn’t the answer. The right choices and decisions are. Who knows how much time you have left, or what awaits us tomorrow? So get to it.