Life Lessons From Others
An evolving collection of impactful life lessons that others have learned.
Self-Narratives can influence and mold who you are.
"Now, as I’ve gotten older, I would say starting in my mid to late 20s, I could not help but notice the effect on people of the stories they told about themselves. If you listen to people, if you just sit and listen, you’ll find that there are patterns in the way they talk about themselves. There’s the kind of person who is always the victim in any story that they tell. Always on the receiving end of some injustice. They’re the person who’s always kind of the hero of every story they tell. The smart person, they delivered the clever put down there. There are lots of versions of this, and you’ve got to be very careful about how you tell these stories because it starts to become you, that you are in the way you craft your narrative, kind of crafting your character. And so I did at some point decide, 'I am going to adopt self-consciously as my narrative, that I’m the happiest person anybody knows.' And it is amazing how happy-inducing it is."
— Michael Lewis (Source)
On imposter syndrome
Even Michael Lewis—one of the most successful American writers of all time—has imposter syndrome (Source, 31:00). It's not just you and me.
"Yes and..." when evaluating ideas
"When someone in this room says something, don’t ask if it’s true, ask what might it be true of. What value might there be in that thing that was said? Don’t try to show me how smart you are by showing how stupid everybody else is. Show me how smart you are by showing me how smart everybody else is.” — Daniel Kahneman
Money cannot buy you everything
"A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned."
— Naval Ravikant
Excellence or mastery is ultimately a habit
Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.
When a swimmer learns a proper flip turn in the freestyle races, she will swim the race a bit faster; then a streamlined push off from the wall, with the arms squeezed together over the head, and a little faster; then how to place the hands in the water so no air is cupped in them; then how to lift them over the water; then how to lift weights to properly build strength, and how to eat the right foods, and to wear the best suits for racing, and on and on.
Each of those tasks seems small in itself, but each allows the athlete to swim a bit faster. And having learned and consistently practiced all of them together, and many more besides, the swimmer may compete in the Olympic Games... the little things really do count."
— Daniel Chambliss from The Mundanity of Excellence
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”
— Aristotle
Decision-Making
“The essence of commitment is making a decision. The Latin root for decision is to ‘cut away from,’ as in an incision. When you commit to something, you are cutting away all your other possibilities, all your other options.”
– The Lombardi Rules #6 – Be Totally Committed
Helping Others
"If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain."
— Emily Dickinson