Quotes

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong one stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the one who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends herself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

Ideas

• Build your own dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.
• Where there are hierarchies (real or perceived) there is discrimination.
• Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you
• Everyone knows something that you don't
• The best response to hate is love
• "The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, but that’s normal, because a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows." - Pope Francis
• If you don't heal what hurt you, you'll bleed all over someone who didn't cut you.
• "When something is important enough to you, you do it even if the odds are not in your favour." - Elon Musk
• "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself." - George Bernard Shaw
• We are the universe experiencing itself
• Never loan something to someone if you're not okay with it being destroyed by them or otherwise never getting it back.
• "If the world made sense, we'd all have nothing to talk about" - My Mum

Motivation

• The expert has failed more times than the beginner has tried.
• If you don't try, you get nothing. Garanteed. But if you do, anything in the world is possible.
• A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of it's persistence.
• Get busy living or get busy dying.
• Don't fear failure. Fear being in the exact same place next year as you are today.
• Every expert was once a beginner.
• One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching.
• Nothing worth having comes easy.
• A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
• Practice like you've never won. Perform like you've never lost.
• Strive for progress not perfection.
• If it doesn't challenge you, it won't change you.
• Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.
• If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. It's the hard that makes it great.
• Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow.
• If you don't go after what you want, you'll never get it. If you don't ask, the answer will always be no. If you don't step forward, you are always in the same place.
• Don't think about what can happen in a month. Don't think about what can happen in a year. Focus on the 24 hours in front of you and do what you can to get closer to where you want to be.
• There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
• If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives.
• To improve your lot in life, you first need to improve yourself

Relationships

• "Expect that your spouse will not be able to notice or appreciate everything you do. At the same time, you won't be able to see all they do. Both need to give 60 and take 40. The rest is lost in translation. Think of it as a relationship tax."
• Listen to learn rather than listening to respond

Creative Endeavors

• "You're not born with certain skills, you have to acquire them." - Ry Cooder
• "Copying one person is stealing. Copying ten is research." - Chet Atkins
• "The best way for a student to get out of difficulty is to go through it." - Aristotle
• "If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it." - Louis Armstrong
• "There will come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done." - James Taylor
• “If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better.” - Lindsay Buckingham
• "You get out of life what you put into it ... simple." - Tommy Emmanuel
• “It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• "A genius is a woman most like herself" - Thelonious Monk

Morality

• Just as courage is not absence of fear but rather the willingness to do what you want even though you're afraid, morality is not the absence of desire to do wrong but rather the choice to do right despite your desire.
• "There comes a time when silence is betrayal" - Martin Luther King
• "I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Steven Jay Gould
• "Do the best you can until you know better. When you know better, do better" - Maya Angelou

Happiness

• I don't see it as my role in life to be 'happy'. I think a better metric is whether I'm working on something interesting or if I like the people in my life.
• "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." - Albert Camus
• "Every person has their secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call one cold when they are only sad." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• "When you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit" - Banksy