Leave Your Mark — essays and old wisdom on living well.
Reflections "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." It sounds like nonsense until you realize it's the only actually useful advice anyone has ever given about decision paralysis.
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Reflections One of the richest men alive sleeps in a five-bedroom house he paid $31,500 for, because the disciplined, non-self-indulgent decision, repeated for sixty-five years, beat every flashy one he could have made instead.
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Reflections Strangers who met him once, years ago, for ninety seconds, keep posting the same story: he remembered their name, their kid's name, the thing they mentioned in passing.
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Reflections A 27-year-old poet wrote letters to a teenage cadet who wanted to know if his poems were any good. Rilke barely answered that question — and instead gave advice that's outlasted both of them.
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Reflections Two teams raced to the South Pole in 1911. One planned for boredom. The other planned for glory. Only one of them came home.
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Reflections The version of self-improvement built for an audience is not self-improvement — it is a different project entirely.
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Reflections Hemingway said the first draft of anything is garbage. He said it more colorfully than that. He was describing something beyond writing.
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Reflections Confucius taught for forty years and claimed to know almost nothing. His students found this confusing. It was the whole point.
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Reflections There is a Rumi line that gets quoted at graduation ceremonies and painted on motivational posters. It is also correct.
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Reflections The old Taoist idea of effortless action is not about doing nothing. It's about doing the one thing that makes the rest unnecessary.
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Reflections Navy SEAL training is an extreme version of something every wisdom tradition already knew: constraint is not the enemy of growth. It is the mechanism.
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