David Cain

The sooner you do something, the more of your life you get to spend with that thing done.

The most valuable part of my post-secondary education happened during the ten hours a week I spent riding the bus between the campus and my suburban home.

very month I buy a bag of bulk steel-cut oats, a bag of trail mix and a six-pound bag of Royal Gala apples. Every morning I make a heaping half-cup of the oats and cut an apple into slices. About six months ago I added a cup of Ceylon tea to that.

I spent Friday cleaning out my desk and leaving instructions for my successors.

One maddening tendency of any small electronic device is that whenever the battery is low, it wastes most of its remaining power beeping and flashing to tell you that battery is low.

If I had given the angel on the other shoulder a chance to rebut, she would have explained the foolish tradeoff I was making. I gain twenty minutes or so of low-brow pleasure.

Since very early in my blog’s life, fans have been bugging me to both release a Best-Of compilation and give them a way to read Raptitude articles on their Kindle. The time has come.

No matter the setting, all these people are doing the same thing: just closing their eyes and letting themselves disappear.

My problems are always simpler in the eyes of others, just like other people’s problems seem simpler to me than they make them out to be. If a friend came to me today with a dilemma and he didn’t know what to do, I’d have no problem telling him “What I’d do.”

The times in my life I’ve been most self-conscious have been the times I’ve been most judgmental of others. These two qualities seem directly tied to each other, and may even be the same thing.

The typical level of fulfillment in a person’s life is far below where it could be with some self-examination and habit overhauls.

But maybe normal isn’t okay. Normal is five hours of TV a day. Normal is overweight.

Western society has an obsession with productivity. We grow up being taught that we want to “do well” but we’re not often taught explicitly what that means.

As I’ve often said, “Insight is not enough.” We’ve all had breakthroughs in our thinking, but they only make our lives change if they make our behavior change.

Don’t sell your time to someone else’s purpose. You can do better. Be poor for a while if that’s what it will take.

For the entire year that I have lived in this suite, a cardboard-velvet box piled over with envelopes and mail sat on the floor between my filing cabinet and my entertainment unit. Today it is gone because yesterday I took twenty minutes to file it all.

Lying is regular a part of being polite.

Sometimes we want so badly to capture a remarkable moment in progress, that we introduce an unnecessary anxiousness to our experience of it.