Category: Books & Quotes

Start date: December 18, 2024

End date: February 24, 2025

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Look, everybody learns in a different way and we’re gonna figure out how you learn. She deduced that I needed repetition. That I needed to solve the same problems over and over again in a different way to learn, and she knew that took time.

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Everything I did was to get a reaction out of the people who hated me most because everyone’s opinion of me mattered to me, and that’s a shallow way to live.

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The ritual was simple. I’d shave my face and scalp every night, get loud, and get real. I set goals, wrote them on Post-It notes, and tagged them to what I now call the Accountability Mirror, because each day I’d hold myself accountable to the goals I’d set. At first my goals involved shaping up my appearance and accomplishing all my chores without having to be asked.

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If you have worked for thirty years doing the same shit you’ve hated day in and day out because you were afraid to quit and take a risk, you’ve been living like a pussy.

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Whether it’s a career goal (quit my job, start a business), a lifestyle goal (lose weight, get more active), or an athletic one (run my first 5K, 10K, or marathon), you need to be truthful with yourself about where you are and the necessary steps

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there is a difference between being competent and comfortable in the water, another big gap from comfortable to confident

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I had to flip it and convince myself that all that self-doubt and anxiety was confirmation that I was no longer living an aimless life.

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forgetting happens the second we give control over our emotions and actions to other people, which can easily happen when pain is peaking.

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I went into Hell Week knowing I put myself there, that I wanted to be there, and that I had all the tools I needed to win this fucked-up game, which gave me the passion to persevere and claim ownership of the experience. It allowed me to play hard, bend rules, and look for an edge wherever and whenever I could until the horn sounded on Friday afternoon.

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On the other hand, people who are secure with themselves don’t bully other people. They look out for other people, so if you’re getting bullied you know that you’re dealing with someone who has problem areas you can exploit or soothe. Sometimes the best way to defeat a bully is to actually help them.

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the ticket to victory often comes down to bringing your very best when you feel your worst.

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didn’t realize that he saw something special in me and like any strong leader wanted to see how far I could take it,

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I stopped seeing myself as the victim of bad circumstance, and saw my life as the ultimate training ground instead. My disadvantages had been callousing my mind all along and had prepared me for that moment in that pool with Psycho Pete.

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Until you experience hardships like abuse and bullying, failures and disappointments, your mind will remain soft and exposed.

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If you choose to see yourself as a victim of circumstance into adulthood, that callous will become resentment that protects you from the unfamiliar. It will make you too cautious and untrusting, and possibly too angry at the world. It will make you fearful of change and hard to reach, but not hard of mind.

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Remembering that you’ve been through difficulties before and have always survived to fight again shifts the conversation in your head.

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To develop an armored mind—a mindset so calloused and hard that it becomes bulletproof—you need to go to the source of all your fears and insecurities……was rejecting my past and therefore rejecting myself. My foundation, my character was defined by self-rejection……Even after I’d reached a point where I no longer cared about what others thought of me, I still had trouble accepting me……Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you finally stop running from your past.

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during Hell Week you need a solid boat crew to survive, which means depending upon your classmates, not defeating them.

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When we’re comfortable we can’t answer those simple questions that are bound to arise in the heat of battle because we don’t even realize they’re coming.

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was hard on myself when I looked in the Accountability Mirror, but I also praised myself whenever I could claim a small victory, because we all need that, and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes.

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Most of us give up when we’ve only give around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Event when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give……The 40% Rule.

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You will be made fun of. You will feel insecure. You may not be the best all the time. You may be the only black, white, Asian, Latino, female, male, gay, lesbian or [fill in your identity here] in a given situation. There will be times when you feel alone.

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if you are on the hunt for your 100 percent you should catalog your weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

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If you get injured or other complications arise that prevent you from working on your primary passion, refocus your energy elsewhere.

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All of us can be the person who flies all day and night only to arrive home to a filthy house, and instead of blaming family or roommates, cleans it up right then because they refuse to ignore duties undone.

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Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind.

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My job as head of PT wasn’t to demand that my guys live up to the Navy SEAL legend I loved, it was to help them become the best version of themselves.

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We can’t control all the variables in our lives. It’s about what we do with opportunities revoked or presented to us that determine how a story ends.

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I was so confrontational I created needless enemies along the way, and I believe that’s what limited my access to the top SEAL Teams.

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The kid I always judged so harshly didn’t lie and cheat to hurt anyone’s feelings. He did it for acceptance. He broke the rules because he didn’t have the tools to compete and was ashamed for being dumb. He did it because he needed friends. I was afraid to tell the teachers I couldn’t read. I was terrified of the stigma associated with special education, and instead of coming down on that kid for one more second, instead of chastising my younger self, I understood him for the first time.

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I’d judged myself constantly and I’d judged everyone else around me, too.

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What if is the power and permission to face down your darkest demons, your very worst memories, and accept them as part of your history.

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The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.

Yellow highlight | Page: 122

As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He held a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on some muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief.

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“Have you gone Asiatic?” I gasped. “You know you can’t keep that thing. Some officer’ll put you on report sure as hell,” I remonstrated as I stared in horror at the shriveled human hand he had unwrapped.

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There was nothing unique in the conversation. Thousands like it occurred every day among infantrymen scheduled to enter the chaos and inferno of an attack. But it illustrates the value of camaraderie among men facing constant hardship and frequent danger. Friendship was the only comfort a man had.

Yellow highlight | Page: 228

I expected to get hit. So did the others. I wasn’t being brave, but Redifer was, and I would rather take my chances than be yellow in the face of his risks to screen us. If he got hit while I was cringing in safety, I knew it would haunt me the rest of my life—that is, if I lived much longer, which seemed more unlikely every day.

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War is mostly waiting. The men around me sat silently with drawn faces. Some replacements had come into the company to make up for our earlier losses.

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I vividly recall grimly making a pledge to myself. The Japanese might kill or wound me, but they wouldn’t make me crack up.

55
In retrospect, I realize that we did not exhaust all the options available to us…..I was young and impatient, and did not see any virtue in waiting. Escape seemed the only way.

84
We were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues.

182
I saw how my own people had remained in one place, while I had moved on and seen new worlds and gained new ideas…..if I had returned, my political evolution would have been stunted.

192
I was not going to let my involvement in the struggle and the scope of my political activities be determined by the enemy I was fighting against.

201
A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.

267
The key to being underground is to be invisible. Just as there is a way to walk in a room in order to make yourself stand out, there is a way of walking and behaving that makes you inconspicuous.

298
Guerrilla warfare…was not designed to win a military victory so much as to unleash political and economic forces that would bring down the enem…..not to neglect the political side of war……international public opinion…is sometimes worth more than a fleet of jet fighters.

305
A liberation army is an egalitarian army. You must treat your men entirely differently than you would in a capitalist army……But when you are off duty, you must conduct yourself on the basis of perfect equality.

367
many leaders of the newly independent states of Africa, who accepted the need for some form of socialism to enable their people to catch up with the advanced countries of the West.

390
It would be very hard if not impossible for one man alone to resist. I do not know that I could have done it had I been alone.

488
To survive in prison, one must develop ways to take satisfaction in one’s daily life.

526
There are times when a leader must move out ahead of the flock, go off in a new direction, confident that he is leading his people the right way.

623
I was not born with a hunger to be free. I was born free — free in every way that I could know.

Like many, I watched Jon’s TED talk years ago; before I was married, before I had a kid. I have been feeling trapped, at work and at family, these 2 years. That gave me the motive to attend his speech in Taipei.

• The meaning of happiness is different for everyone.
  • shopping, traveling, sex, etc.

Being poor and suffer

• TV is the first thing that tell us we’re poor.
• Before, we call it “suffer”, we suffer because there’s not enough food, so we find it in the forest. No enough bamboo to build a home, so we cut it with the neighbors.
• Because of poor, we must work in the city.

Poor in the city

• I worked hard, but I don’t have anything. I only have the money to live day by day.
• The bird does not have to go to school, no credit card debt, and flies to feed itself. But clever people like me don’t have enough food.

The system (capitalism) and fear

• Education and school doesn’t teach us to face fear. If anything, it designed more fear and worry.
• Objective of business and the system: eat less healthy, eat more.
  • organic food is expensive, so I buy instant noodle. I need organic rice, but I’m tired from work, so I spend it on coffee.
  • this world is full of food, but people live without having enough.
• Happy people consume less.

How it started

1. Went back home, a small land to farm.
2. Lists out the 50 vegetables I want to eat.
3. ask for seeds
4. collect cow poop and fertilize
5. people think I’m crazy
6. 3 months later, it grew and it’s more than we can consume
7. Everyday, I could sell the 20 excess vegetables for money.

Design my life and self-esteem, confidence

• When I’m a kid, I know the people and land 2 to 3 km around me. I have no fear.
• Most people let society design our life, it builds the fear of no choice.
• Being natural means having no formula, it needs to be designed.

Living as a community 

• Living in community is easier than living alone. I only have to cook 1 day a week, my kid is with other kids so I only have to ask “where is my kid?”
• No leader, no rule, no regulations. It’s not fun to live with dictator.
• Everyone must take turn do the work: cook, gardening, seed saving
• this month we build home for this person, next month for another person.
• our kids learn to be a farmer this month and artist the next month.
  • people never learn from listening or reading (memorize), they must do it (understand).

Finding a community

• Reconnect with ourself
  • be with ourselves, don’t run away from our feeling.
  • if I feel sad, then sit down and watch my sadness. How long will it last?
  • When we like it, every problem will be fun.
• reconnect with people
  • a community is build by a shared space and activity, not particularly land.
  • do we really love the nature? If we’re not sure, spend a month to live there to experiment.
• diversity
  • Diversity keeps it the society function.

Loc 453

If a man must live in a mud and go hungry and risk his flesh, you must give him a reason for it, you must give him a cause. A conclusion is not a cause.

Loc 1398

Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability.

Loc 2820

Right private has no chance against a wrong major.

Loc 3898

The nurses talked only to doctors and the doctors talked only to God.

Loc 4371

Heroes turn traitor, warriors age and grow soft — but a victim is changeless, sacrifice is eternal.

Page 20

At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.

Page 25

In the long run, what people think about shepherds and bakers becomes more important for them than their own Personal Legends.

Page 26

Most people learn, early in their lives, what is their reason for being…maybe that’s why they give up on it so early, too. But that’s the way it is.

Page 34

The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.

Page 42

I’m going to become bitter and distrustful of people because one person betrayed me. I’m going to have those who have found their treasure because I never found mine. And I’m going to hold on to what little I have, because I’m too insignificant to conquer the world.

Page 67

He suddenly felt tremendously happy. He could always go back to being a shepherd. He could always become a crystal salesman again. Maybe the world had other hidden treasures, but he had a dream, and he had met with a king.

Page 129

There is only one way to learn…it’s through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey. You need to learn only one thing more.

Page 133

Why should I listen to my heart?……Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you’re thinking about life and about the world.

Page 155

When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.

Page 24
Big ideas and big plans are often easier – certainly no more difficult – than small ideas and small plans.

Page 57
Action cures fear.

Page 67
Your mind wants you to forget the unpleasant. If you will just corporate, unpleasant memories will gradually shrivel and the teller in your memory bank will cancel them out.

Page 88
Suppose you say, “We face a problem.” You have created a picture in the minds of others of something difficult, unpleasant to solve. Instead say, “We face a challenge”, and you create a mind picture of fun, sport, something pleasant to do.

Page 124
It isn’t so much what you know when you start that matters. It’s what you learn and put to use after you open your doors that counts most.

Big success calls for persons who continually set higher standards for themselves and others, persons who are searching for ways to increase efficiency, to get more output at lower cost, do more with less effort.

Page 129
The bigger the person, the more apt he is to encourage you to talk; the smaller the person, the more apt he is to preach to you.

Page 152
The child is a living reflection of how his parents or guardians think; for he learns through imitation.

Page 153
The way we think toward our jobs determines how our subordinates think toward their jobs.

Page 204
Get the family on your team. Give them planned attention.

Page 209
You don’t get a raise on the promise of better performance; you get a raise only by demonstrating better performance.

Page 221
Recognize the fact that other fellow has a right to be different…you don’t have to approve of what another fellow does, but you must no dislike him for doing it.

Page 234
Excellent ideas are not enough. An only fair idea acted upon, and developed, is 100 percent better than a terrific idea that dies because it isn’t followed up.

Page 238
The test of a successful person is not an ability to eliminate all problems before they arise, but to meet and work out difficulties when they do arise.

Page 246
I make myself sit down at my desk. Then I pick up a pencil and go through mechanical motions of writing. I put down anything. I doodle. I get my fingers and arm in motion, and sooner or later, without my being conscious of it, my mind gets on the right track.

Page 274
When you hit a snag, don’t throw up the whole project. Instead, back off, get mentally refreshed.

Page 280
Visualize your future in terms of three departments: work, home, and social.

Page 324
Many people fail to tap their creative leadership power because they confer with everybody and everything else but themselves.

Page 330
You never gain anything from an argument but you always lose something.

Page 2
Premise of this book is that doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

Page 7
History never repeats itself; man always does.

Page 12
Your personal experience with money make up maybe 0.000000001% of what’s happened in the work, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

Page 14
If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low. If you happen to grow up when the stock market was strong, you invested more of your money in stocks later in life compared to those who grew up when stocks were weak.

Page 18
Every financial decision a person makes, makes sense to them in that moment and checks the boxes they need to check.

Page 20
Before World War II most Americans worked until they died.

Page 34
When things are going extremely well, realize it’s not as good as you think. You are not invincible, and if you acknowledge that luck brought you success then you have to believe in luck’s cousin, risk, which can turn your story around just as quickly.

But the same is true in the other direction.

Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor.

Page 62
“Charlie and I always knew that we would become incredibly wealthy. We were not in a hurry to get wealthy; we know it would happen. Rick was just as smart as us, but he was in a hurry.” – Warren Buffett.

Page 84
More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you wan, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.

Page 85
On my first day I realized why investment bankers make a lot of money: They work longer and more controlled hours than I knew humans could handle. Actually, most can’t handle it. Going home before midnight was considered a luxury, and there was a saying in the office: “If you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t bother coming back on Sunday.” The job was intellectually stimulating, paid well, and made me feel important. But every waking second of my time became a slave to my boss’s demands, which was enough to turn it into one of the most miserable experiences of my life. It was a four-month internship. I lasted a month.

Page 106
One of the most effective way to increase your saving isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.

Page 186
Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.

Page 208
Become OK with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.

Page 217
The independent feeling I get from owning our house outright far exceeds the known financial gain I’d get from leveraging our assets with a cheap mortgage.

Page 217
Good decisions aren’t always rational. At some point you have to choose between being happy or being “right”.

Loc 138
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.

Loc 202
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

Loc 233
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.

Loc 393
The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.

Loc 426
Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something.

Loc 457
“What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

Loc 505
If you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself.

Loc 675
Entitlement plays out in one of two ways:

1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserver special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.

Loc 1142
We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond…if you get run over by a clown car and pissed on by a busload of schoolchildren, it’s still your responsibility to interpret the meaning of the event and choose a response.

Loc 1642
Making a million dollars could threaten your identity just as much as losing all your money; becoming a famous rock star could threaten your identity just as much as losing your job. This is why people are often so afraid of success…it threatens who they believe themselves to be.

Loc 1751
If it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up.

Loc 1756
If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.

Loc 1882
Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me…Because I failed to separate what I felt from what was, I was incapable of stepping outside myself and seeing the world for what it was: a simple place where two people can walk up to each other at any time and speak.

Loc 1917
Action isn’t just the effet of motivation; it’s also the cause of it……Action -> Inspiration -> Motivation

Loc 2039
The desire to avoid rejection at all costs…is a form of entitlement. Entitled people, because they feel as though they deserve to feel great all the time, avoid rejecting anything because doing so might make them or someone else feel bad.

Loc 2080
Healthy love is based on two people acknoledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support…”If I refused, how would the relationship change?”

Loc 2152
People with strong boundaries are not afraid of a temper tantrum, and argument, or getting hurt.