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Disturb Us, Lord
Sir Francis Drake
Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our [...]
In his book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt compares two boys.
One boy was white, from a Chicago suburb, and had “smart, solid, encouraging, loving parents who stressed education and family.”
The second boy was black, from Daytona Beach, and was abandoned by his mother, beaten by his father, and had become a full-fledged gangster by [...]
The great leader Gandhi was once approached by a mother who wanted him to have a few words with her son.
The boy was eating too much sugar and it was harming his teeth and diet.
When the mother asked Gandhi to talk to her son he replied, “I cannot tell him that. But you may bring [...]
…you spend more money and time on books than you do on entertainment.
…you stop waiting for others to solve the problems you notice.
…you trust your intuition more than the “wisdom of crowds.”
…you muster the courage to venture inside yourself and discover your intuition in the first place.
…you accept that problems aren’t “out there”; they’re in [...]
Chew on this insight from Steven Pressfield:
“It may be that the human race is not ready for freedom. The air of liberty may be too rarified for us to breathe…The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While [...]
Associated Press writer Ashley M. Heher once reported that,
“Lawyers for slave descendants asked a federal appeals court…to revive a landmark reparations case that demands 17 of the nation’s insurers and banks publicize and pay for their roles in the country’s slave trade.
“The case, which names Wall Street behemoths JP Morgan Chase & Co., [...]
For a nation that has long prided itself on being the personification of freedom in an otherwise unfree world, we’ve been sending some pretty mixed messages lately.
If one is to believe our so-called mainstream and conservative media outlets, we are essentially being offered a choice of aligning ourselves with the lying socialists or the racist [...]
State sex and meth offender registries are clear indications that America is progressively forgetting its constitutional heritage and choosing legalistic security over freedom and virtue.
Donna Leinwand once reported in USA Today that,
“States frustrated with the growth of toxic methamphetamine labs are creating Internet registries to publicize the names of people convicted of making or selling [...]
Ironic, but true: Your results in life are limited when you focus on them too much.
Being frenetically focused on making that sale, connecting with that person and getting their support, getting that raise, building your business just the right way before you launch, etc. is called attachment.
Attachment creates anxiety, which decreases your chances of [...]
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If
Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being [...]
