Inspiration Quote

 

1.    Everything takes longer than you plan, never happens the way you want, and always gets worse before it gets better. This is not a bug. It's a feature to weed out people who are just playing lip service to the idea of self-improvement and who don't want to do the work.

2.    I’m the first person to say that once you’re an adult, your childhood is no longer an excuse. With that said, I understand the power of the environment you’re raised in. My life was my responsibility, but that didn’t negate the influence of my early environment. I couldn't do anything about the past, but I could improve the future. I could only do that by accepting the truth of my present circumstances.

3.    An easy way to tell the difference between attention and respect is to see how often you're invited to respectable functions. Do your friends invite you to meet their family members or make introductions and recommendations on your behalf that could bring you money or opportunities?

4.    When people just like you for the entertainment you provide, they aren't going to attempt to get to know you beyond casual interactions. They're trying to maximize their exposure to the parts of you that they like while minimizing their exposure to your character. Put differently, if people don't respect you, they won't feel comfortable putting their reputation on the line for you, even with something as casual as a family gathering.

5.    People respond better to humility and respect, even amid chaos. Good manners and emotional control never make a situation worse.

6.    Money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it can keep you from being miserable.

7.    If you walk the same path as everyone around you, you'll end up at the same destination. However, if your trajectory is just one degree different from everyone else's, you’ll eventually be in completely different places.

8.    You make your own luck, but paradoxically, only when acting in a way that reduces the need for luck. In this way, creating luck comes from strategic decisions that reduce uncertainty. The old saying, "The harder I work, the luckier I get," perfectly encapsulates this.

9.    When you get in the ring, you're not afraid of losing, getting hurt, or even dying. You're afraid of the other man dancing over your corpse while the body is still fresh. If his celebration of your failure is a deep stab wound to your pride, then the knife twist is the audience’s reaction. In the mind of the fighter, a loss reduces him to nothing.

10. Life is not what happens to us. Life is how we perceive what happens to us and around us. How we see those events determines how we'll react to them, and our reactions determine the quality of our lives.

11. Whether you're up against oppressive parents, relentless bullies, or the unforgiving grind of life itself, you learn to fight by fighting.

12. Hurtful things said and done to me still caused me pain and sadness. I still got angry at the people who did me harm. I couldn't control that, but I could control my behavior towards them.

13. Life will keep giving you the same test until you pass it. And even then, it likes to occasionally give you a pop quiz to make sure you didn't forget.

14. A fixed mindset robs a person of grit and resilience, two essential skills for success in any domain, because everything worthwhile will, at some point, challenge you.

15. You should be kind because it genuinely makes you feel better and makes the world a better place to live.

16. Every fighter fights for different reasons, but rarely are those reasons born from a state of abundance and fulfillment.

17. We seek hardship while the masses seek comfort. We confront pain while everyone else pursues pleasure. We walk side-by-side with uncertainty and fear while most people embrace the safe and sure path.

18. Becoming a fighter to build an identity is like joining the army to learn how to fold your sheets. Sure, you’ll get what you came for, but it comes with so much pain, hardship, and restriction that the cost of admission must exceed the value received.

19. You don't do it to make the other person feel better. You don't even do it to make yourself feel better, though that's often a benefit. You practice forgiveness so that past events lose their grip over your present emotions and you don't do something in the future that ruins your life.

20. The main idea I remember when forgiving myself is that the past isn't real. Understanding this concept is crucial to forgiving yourself and others. I'm not implying that what happened in the past is a figment of your imagination, nor am I suggesting that past events don't affect present and future events. More specifically, the past is something that you can't interact with. Just like your imagination takes you to a future location that does not yet exist, your memory takes you to a past that no longer exists. The only difference between memory and imagination is that the yet-to-exist future can be modified by what you do now, but the past cannot be changed.

21. Muhammad Ali once said, "The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life." New experiences and information can instantly change an opinion you held for decades. As you change your perspective, you will inevitably see your old behavior in a new light. You didn't know better then, but now you do.

22. Justice and forgiveness are not substitutes for one another. Justice holds a person accountable for their actions and is carried out as a punitive and preventive measure. Just because we can forgive people doesn't mean we invite them to harm us or others. The purpose of justice is to dissuade people from committing injustices and keep them from harming others in the future.

23. I can’t change the past or undo what I’ve done. The guilt and shame may never fully disappear. But instead of wallowing in them, I’ve taken steps to forgive myself and use my experiences to help others avoid a similar path. Owning my past helps me live better in the present and build a future where I’ll have less to forgive myself for.