Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.*
Seneca

The ability …
… to work hard
… to say no
… to practice good habits and set boundaries
… to train and prepare
… to avoid temptations and provocations
… to keep your emotions in check
… to endure painful difficulties.*
Ryan Holiday

What the point of all that discipline?

Freedom to become and,
Out of our becoming,
To give.

To do what you want, when you want,
How you want, for whom you want:
I and Thou,**
I-in-Now.^

*Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny;
**Martin Buber’s I and Thou;
^Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.

Whatever you value most in your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now.*
Oliver Burkeman

There’s always something just beneath the surface, the element that most people simply don’t notice. But we can if we choose.**
Seth Godin

Someone happened to loan me this book,
I bumped into and had a conversation with this person,
It turned out that someone saw my blog and passed it to a friend …
Again and again, happenstance has shaped my life in
larger and smaller ways –
At no point did I sit down and map all of this out,
But one thing I did determine to do,
As often as I was aware of what was happening, was to
look beneath the surface, to go
deeper, to open and explore the
randomness, towards making something from it,
Which will hopefully lead me into more happenstance.

(I begin my day journalling, for which one of my sources is
last year’s journal entry, and
it just so happened that I read tomorrow’s entry
rather than today’s by mistake – happenstance in action –
So perhaps these thoughts might help you in
some random way today.)

*Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**Seth Godin’s blog: The things you can’t see.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live …

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.*
David Whyte

Today, if there’s something I don’t know, it’s almost certainly because I haven’t cared enough to find out … Now that information is widely and freely available, our sense of agency around knowledge needs to change. It pays to acknowledge that this is a choice, and to be responsible for it. What else have we chosen not to know?**
Seth Godin

Beyond the plan
for today
there is a story,
One that eats
information for breakfast and
turns it into wisdom,
Transforming you into a giver –
Maker of difference for
someone, somewhere.

*David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea: What To Remember When Waking;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Willfully uninformed.

I have seen your greatness
The strength of your will
What it took this far
Is what will take you further still*
Lemn Sissay

learning is about becoming incompetent on the way to getting better**
Seth Godin

If you got this far, you
can go further, though, be warned, the greatest
resistance is within you, and whilst your
competence tastes sweet in this moment, your greater
possibility lies in your incompetence, your
getting lost, becoming
a beginner again;
Don’t assume this is as far
as you can go – the only
way you’ll know how much
distance there is in you is when you
happen, and, when you happen,
Things will happen around you:
Happening changes the story.

The enemy is Resistance. The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing , alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/shouldn’t/won’t do what we know we need to do. Start before you’re ready.^

*Lemn Sissay’s let the light pour in;
**Seth Godin’s blog: In search of competence;
^Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work; I was reflecting on the resistance when these words appeared in the next book I picked up this morning.

If you really consider differences of opinion and dissenting views and different experiential bases, what you get is a richer and more accurate view of the world.*
Carmen Medina

Here lies a man who was able to surround himself with men far cleverer than himself.**
Andrew Carnegie

The same idea or thought or opinion repeated
over and over
isn’t smart:
The smartest person in the room is
the room;^
I love it when ideas resonate –
How people in different fields can be
saying similar things to each other about life, but,
Better still when they add to or subtract from or supplant –
Life is more than complicated:
Complex systems create unexpected and
unpredictable outputs. They’re probabilistic and
unstable, not deterministic
the way we expect.^^

*Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas;
**gapingvoid’s blog: Should We Bring Back the Jester;
^Part of the subtitle of David Warren’s Too Big to Know;
^^Seth Godin’s This is Strategy.

Our keys (skills, talent, traits, interests) are best utilised when we try enough things to figure out some doors that they’ll open.*
Gabe Anderson

It’s now around thirty years since
I set out on a path of trying to identify what I
what I am good at and effective in –
With the aim of focusing on these things;
There have been plenty of things I have needed to
add, like the importance of passion, and
meaning that satisfied and grew me, the learning that
competency isn’t everything, and
to stop trying those keys in the same kinds of doors –
I’m getting there, and, perhaps,
I can help you get there, too.**

What’s your mountain of what doesn’t work?

*Gabe Anderson’s blog: What Good is a Key …;
**Drop me a line if you think I can help.

I adore it when I see two people … sharing the burden of a shopping bag or sack of laundry by each gripping one of the handles … I suppose part of why I so adore the sack sharing is because most often this is a burden one or the other could manage just fine solo … Yes, it’s the lack of necessity of this that’s precisely why it delights me so.*
Ross Gay

When we feel like doing something selfish, indulgent, hurtful or short-term, we can simply decide to do it later. And when it occurs to us that we might be able to make a useful contribution or do something important, perhaps we could do it now.**
Seth Godin

It’s a wonderful thing to be human, in this
moment to be capable of spontaneous goodness –
Born of gratitude growing a generous heart, an alternative to
unpleasantness, which we can
put away, perhaps forever.

I always need more practise.

*Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights;
**Seth Godin’s blog: Later or now.

Eventually, I had an epiphany. I actually love being wrong, even though it cracks my confidence, because that’s the only time I learn. I actually love being lost, even though it fuels fears, because that’s when I go somewhere unexpected.**
Derek Sivers

It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.^
Epictetus

Don’t give up on yourself,
There’s an awful lot of learning out there;
It’s possible to turn getting things wrong, being clueless or lost, admitting
incompetence, into great learning and a life of wisdom –
Some would say that it’s the only place to begin.

*”Numpty” is a Scottish slang term, primarily used in a lighthearted way, that means someone who is silly, foolish, or clueless;
**Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No;
^Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic.

Energy may change forms, but the total cannot increase or decrease.*
Alan Lightman

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches … The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.**
Jesus of Nazerath

Perhaps we should not say that
we gain or lose energy;
The energy that we are is
simply residing in a different state, waiting or acting,
Until the day that we hand it back to
our god or the universe –
The energy that is seed or yeast must die, though,
It must suffer, meaning to allow, and if we are to
use our energy for some creativeness,
There will be a cost to overcoming the resistance –
Which is always there –
We must allow something to die for
something else to live,
All that energy waiting for us to
play.^

We don’t play in order to distract ourselves from the world, but in order to partake in it.^^

*Alan Lightman’s The Transcendent Brain;
**The Gospel according to Matthew: 13:31-33;
^This is serious play: see Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens;
^^Ian Bogost’s Play Anything.

Without in the least undervaluing the element of destiny, especially biological destiny, we as psychotherapists consider destiny as the ultimate testing-ground for human freedom.*
Viktor Frankl

We don’t see the world as it is; we see it as we are.**
Lisa Cron

Where we’re born, the expectations of
family, the streaming of
education, our body and our mind –
We ignore these at our peril, but
more important is or imagination, and
what we do with it.^

Imaginations can be trained.

*Viktor Frankl’s The Doctor and the Soul;
**Lisa Cron’s Story or Die;
^Our aim is not to overcome our reality, but to alter it in real ways through our playfulness, imagination and creativity.