Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.

At one time or another, we all indulge a sort of gratifying label making. Yet every culture seems to produce words of caution against early pride.
- Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
- Don’t cook the sauce before catching the fish.
- The way to cook a rabbit is first to catch a rabbit.
- Game slaughtered by words cannot be skinned.
- Punching above your weight is how you get injured.
- Pride goeth before the fall.

Euthymia

“What you desire, to be undisturbed, is a great thing, nay, the greatest thing of all, and one which raises a man almost to the level of a god. The Greeks call this calm steadiness of mind euthymia … What we are seeking, then, is how the mind may always pursue a steady, unruffled course, may be pleased with itself, and look with pleasure upon its surroundings, and experience no interruption of this joy, but abide in a peaceful condition without being ever either elated or depressed: this will be ‘peace of mind.'”
- Seneca

Euthymia, translated to English as Tranquility, the calmness of the mind is one of the greatest qualities to live a peaceful and successful life. It is the quality of being undisturbed by any other external factors.

You see after you set a goal and set out for it, you begin to meet others who are better than you, who have more experience, who have a mastery. And the ego, being an ego, always wants to be better, to have more than, and to be more impressive than the others, or from anyone ever you get to know. And the outcome? Not Pleasant. You start to pick up the pace to level up with others; You begin to compare yourself with others; You begin to adjust your choices, your decisions to get better than others. And what happens? You end up far away from your initial vision, or goal. You disturbed your path, your plan to adjust to the outside.

Life is full of trade-offs. The popular saying, "You can't have your cake and eat it." sums it up. But the ego wants it all. Because you can do it all, you can get it all.
The reality is far on the opposite end. You have to choose, and forsake the rest, say "No" to whatever takes you aside from your journey. Staying determined, undisturbed, and calm. There you can achieve tranquility, calmness, and joy with yourself. There you achieve independence.

He said, "For a woman of your age and education to talk such nonsense is shocking. Why would dragons appear among the main enemies of man? Why not other living beings with a hundred times more victims than dragons? Why not hirikkhis, giant centipedes, manticores, amphisbaena or griffons? Why not wolves?"

The sorceress looked at him and smiled, only with her lips.
"Let me tell you. The superiority of man over other breeds and species, the fight for his rightful place in nature, his vital place, will only succeed when man has put an end to his aggressive, nomadic search for food, where he moves about in accordance with the changing of the seasons. Otherwise, it will be impossible for him to multiply quickly enough. Humanity is a child without any real independence. A woman can only give birth safely sheltered by the walls of a city or a fortified town.

Fertility, is what's needed for development, survival and domination. Then we come to dragons: only a dragon can threaten a city or fortified town, no other monster. If dragons are not exterminated, humans will scatter to ensure their security instead of uniting against it. If a dragon breathes fire on a densely populated quarter, it's a catastrophe - a terrible massacre with hundreds of victims. That's why every last dragon must be wiped out.", She replied with tense face.

He looked at her with a strange smile.
"You know, I'd prefer not be alive when the time comes that your idea of man's domination will come true and the time when the same will take up their rightful place in nature. Fortunately, it will never arrive. You will consume each other, you will poison yourselves, you will succumb to fever and typhus, because it will be filth and lice, not dragons, that will threaten your splendid cities where the women give birth every year, but where only one newborn baby out of ten will succeed in living more than ten days. Yes, Yennefer, of course: breeding, breeding and more breeding. Take care, my dear, go and make some babies, as it's a more natural function with which to occupy yourself rather than wasting time spouting nonsense. Goodbye."

The Sword of Destiny,
The Witcher II

A Contemplation for the weekend😊

Can you handle success? Or will it be the worst thing that ever happened to you?

Receive feedback, maintain hunger, and chart a proper course in life. Pride dulls these senses. Or in other cases, it tunes up other negative parts of ourselves: sensitivity, a persecution complex, the ability to make everything about us.

When I look up in the universe, I know I’m small, but I’m also big. I’m big because I’m connected to the universe and the universe is connected to me.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.”

- Epictetus

- Addiction is the progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
- A good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure.

Neuroscientist explains why the First Hour of The Morning is Crucial.

Full Interview here.

"For a long time, I thought I had time. We always think we have time. We constantly put off for tomorrow what we can do today. And we also base our happiness on this concept."

A man really becomes a man when he accepts total responsibility—he is responsible for whatsoever he is. This is the first courage, the greatest courage. Very difficult to accept it, because the mind goes on saying, “If you are responsible, why do you create it?” To avoid this we say that somebody else is responsible: “What can I do? I am helpless … I am a victim! I am being tossed from here and there by greater forces than me and I cannot do anything. So at the most I can cry about being miserable and become more miserable by crying.” And everything grows—if you practice it, it grows. Then you go deeper and deeper … you sink in deeper and deeper.

The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence
by Josh Waitzkin

Through his own example, Waitzkin explains how to embrace defeat and make mistakes work for you. Does your opponent make you angry? Waitzkin describes how to channel emotions into creative fuel. As he explains it, obstacles are not obstacles but challenges to overcome, to spur the growth process by turning weaknesses into strengths. He illustrates the exact routines that he has used in all of his competitions, whether mental or physical, so that you too can achieve your peak performance zone in any competitive or professional circumstance.

🌟4.05 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀 | 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲↗️

Recently, I have been reading this book. It has great insights on how to tackle new things and enjoy learning by making it an interesting experience. Here is a summary from one chapter titled, Investment in Loss.

Investment in Loss

The author narrates his mastery of the Push Hands classes in his Tai Chi journey. After receiving an invitation from his master William C. Chen, Josh says that he was of two minds before he agreed to join the class. The thing is the Tai Chi beginner class he's been taking has been a practice in which he can feel peaceful and wonderful alone, after a rough patch of the Chess Championship road he's been on since his childhood.

On the other hand, he pushes himself to level up the challenge, and maintain what he has in the class in even an increased pressure with an opponent. Besides, he explains, Tai Chi is not a clash with the opponent but an art to flow and bend with their energy, which can be an interesting opportunity to master complete relaxation under intensified situations.

After he started the class, Josh writes that he was completely astonished and puzzled by how his master and the other advanced students dissolved and defied his attacks with a little effort. It took him a long journey of being tossed around and fly and smash against walls before he even knew what was happening. The idea is, as he explains, to resist an incoming attack without resisting, which sounds absurd even to speak. Unless you have experienced it, you'll probably never get it only by knowing.

He continues his classes with deeper and rigorous exercises. He explains how he kept a wide eye for every new bit of information(verbal or physical) that he didn't know before. His master is an expert at teaching that their communication was very implicit and deep, without the need for exchange of words. Other students, even if they started the class long before him, couldn't advance because they were stuck in their own ego and habit. Rather than absorbing what's around them, they'd try to prove themselves correct as they stood their grounds. They haven't given themselves a chance to invest in loss, to make mistakes, to get beaten up as they got disappointed when they do. Josh explains how he got used to the blows of one particular strong opponent. He couldn't even see let alone dodge the other's attacks that it took him months to finally to neutralize the attacks. His fear of the shots was dead as he just took them when they came.

In conclusion, Josh states that it's fundamental to have such incremental approach to learning. You'll need to make mistakes and lose before you even get to know what you're doing. You should focus on gradual progressing, by increasing pressure and challenge, in which inevitably comes a losing and getting tossed.

The Art of Learning, Josh Watzkin

It’s worth saying: just because you are quiet doesn’t mean that you are without pride. Privately thinking you’re better than others is still pride. It’s still dangerous. “That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin,” Montaigne had inscribed on the beam of his ceiling. It’s a quote from the playwright Menander, and it ends with “you who think yourself to be someone.”

The Danger of Early Pride
Ego is the Enemy

Key Takeaways from the Chapter "Making Smaller Circles" - The Art of Learning

"My search for the essential principles lying at the hearts of and connecting chess, the martial arts, and in a broader sense the learning process, was inspired to a certain extent by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ll never forget a scene that would guide my approach to learning for years to come. The protagonist of Pirsig’s story, a brilliant if eccentric man named Phaedrus, is teaching a rhetoric student who is all jammed up when given the assignment to write a five-hundred-word story about her town. She can’t write a word. The town seems so small, so incidental—what could possibly be interesting enough to write about? Phaedrus liberates the girl from her writer’s block by changing the assignment. He asks her to write about the front of the opera house outside her classroom on a small street in a small neighborhood of that same dull town. She should begin with the upper-left hand brick. At first the student is incredulous, but then a torrent of creativity unleashes and she can’t stop writing. The next day she comes to class with twenty inspired pages."

The heart of pursuit for excellence lies in the theme depth over breadth. Understanding the essence, and plunging to the deep mystery behind the scenes is very mandatory to mix ourselves with our subjects and feel it inside.

Taking the author's experience on how he mastered chess, given that he started to learn formally by keeping two or three pieces on the board and playing game endings rather than remembering classic game opening techniques, one can clearly see how he had the chance to understand the true potential of each pieces individually before using them together for a strategic attack.
In every skill set, it's mandatory to break each component to the tiniest detail, go in depth through it and get a clear understanding of its essence. One should avoid unnecessary abstractions and cover ups, which usually happen for the sake of saving time or get to the results quickly, if they want to truly master what they desire. The author summarizes this in the following words,

"I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture. We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect."

* * *

"The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both."

“But how do you fight it?” Conor asked, his voice rough. “How do you fight all the different stuff inside?”

"By speaking the truth, the monster said. As you spoke it just now."
"You do not write your life with words," the monster said. "You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do."

There was a long silence as Conor re-caught his breath.
“So what do I do?” he finally asked.

"You do what you did just now, the monster said. You speak the truth."

“That’s it?”
"You think it is easy?", The monster raised two enormous eyebrows. "You were willing to die rather than speak it."

A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness

Intolerance and superstition has always been the domain of the more stupid amongst the common folk and, I conjecture, will never be uprooted, for they are as eternal as stupidity itself. There, where mountains tower today, one day there will be seas; there where today seas surge, will one day be deserts. But stupidity will remain stupidity.

Blood of Elves - The Witcher Series

Never make the same mistake, little girl,” he murmured, indicating the wagon with his eyes. “If someone shows you compassion, sympathy and dedication, if they surprise you with integrity of character, value it but don’t mistake it for . . . something else."

Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.”
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended sideeffect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”

Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi