Daily Dose of Positivity- October 23, 2021

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

— Elinor Smith

Charles Darwin deliberately looked for thoughts that disagreed with his own. He wrote, “whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.” Darwin was out for truth, not to confirm his view of the world.

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change,” Marcus Aurelius said. “For I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance.” 

Daily Dose of Positivity- October 22, 2021

 “He who will not economize will have to agonize.” – Confucius

Once upon a time, we saved for the things we wanted to buy and bought them once we could afford them. However, over the past few decades, we have seen a dramatic increase in the use of credits cards, personal loans, and home equity loans, allowing us to borrow money for purchases we could not otherwise afford to make. The latest iteration of this trend is the rapid growth of the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) loan industry.

Regularly borrowing significant money to pay for something that depreciates, such as a car, furniture, or a vacation, can pull people into a perpetual cycle of debt.

Living within your means, on the other hand, has many benefits. It helps you learn to be content in the present, allows you to buy things without having to borrow money, and, perhaps most importantly, gives you the ability to survive an unexpected setback or emergency.  

Daily Dose of Positivity- October 21, 2021

 Certainty is an illusion. Perfect safety is a mirage. Zero is always unattainable, except in the case of absolute zero where, as you remember, all motion and life itself stop. … the biggest risk of all is that we stop taking risks at all."

— The Biggest Risk

 “Worrying” about a problem or idea. It’s a good word, because it evokes anxiety and upset while also conjuring an image of productivity: a dog worrying a bone, chewing at it to get to the marrow—the rich, meaty part of the problem that will lead to its solution. In this view of creative momentum, the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the unwatched pot boil."
—  New Ideas

Daily Dose of Positivity- October 20, 2021

 “When you focus on the past, that’s your ego. ... When I focus on the future, that's my pride. I try to focus on the present. That's humility.”

— Giannis Antetokounmpo (source)

Focusing on past accomplishments creates obstacles to success in the present. If you're still talking about something great you did 20 years ago like it was yesterday, your ego is getting in the way.

What you did in the past makes a good story. What you're doing now makes a difference.

Daily Dose of Positivity- October 19, 2021

While empathy is about stepping into someone’s shoes, compassion, as Bloom shared in an interview, is, “a feeling of concern for another person’s suffering which is accompanied by the motivation to help.” The key distinction is that being compassionate does not require you to share the other person’s feelings or state of mind. 

Daily Dose of Positivity- October 18, 2021

 "We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you."

— General Jim Mattis