David Cain

If there are any obligations in your life that you continue to uphold, even though you aren’t particularly excited about them anymore, consider just dropping them.

For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer.

We like to complain about the hard stuff we have to deal with, and often people validate us, and take the chance to share their own. It’s a big part of our culture. See any reality show for examples.

The feeling of being me changed drastically, over only a couple of days. Life lost its normal mildly-threatening background hum. Today, in almost any given moment I actually feel prepared for the rest of my life. That used to be a rare feeling.

Out of all your sexual experiences, how often were you doing it simply because you wanted to make a baby? The vast majority of people use birth control. We try to minimize baby-making but we’re still highly interested in sex, and so for humans sex obviously serves another extremely compelling purpose.

There is nothing you can do tomorrow. I have never done anything tomorrow and neither have you.

Wisdom comes back when only you stop freaking out. It just can’t get to work on a panicked mind.

This “shakeup” phenomenon is probably a major reason why it’s so hard for human beings to make a lasting major change in life, even if it’s clearly in a better direction. Change the way you do something, and in other areas what used to work might not work anymore.

I want to write down what I’m going to do the next day, and actually do it.

At first, you will probably experience some angst at the thought of abandoning what you were going to say. Drop it anyway, and see if your life suffers. (It won’t.)

Breakthroughs tend to come in the form of forehead slapping moments where you realize that you’ve been creating a problem for yourself your whole life, and you realize you don’t have to any more. Often it’s a simple insight you read or hear someone say.

I bet Einstein would have been someone who understood that compound interest applies to much more than money. Compounding works everywhere, and our interests concern a much broader set of values than money.

If you spend a decade reading different people’s accounts of how to be happy, you discover that almost all of them can be boiled down to a few principles, and the primary one by far is to keep your attention in the present moment.

So much of our lives consists of conditions we’ve fallen into. We gravitate unwittingly to what works in the short term, in terms of what to do for work and what crowd to run with.

Whether or not you infer religious overtones into this lyric (or into your life), there does seem to be some sort of divine plan to the ups and downs of our lives.

We grow up with this rigid idea that we should behave ethically, as if the word “should” itself is all the reason we need.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

I have power over my happiness precisely to the extent I take responsibility for it. You too. Same goes for achievement, wealth, discipline, even the state of the world itself.