Philosophy, Self-Knowledge

I was obsessed with money… then I found philosophy

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found philosophy

Last week I was walking through town with my wife and our son in the stroller. We ran into a former high school classmate. We were both pleasantly surprised to see each other after so many years.

He looked at my wife and said: “He was always the cool guy in school.”

I laughed because it reminded me how much I cared about how I looked and what people thought of me back then.

For a sixteen-year-old, that’s probably normal. But at some point, you’ve got to stop living like that.

The thing is, most people don’t actually stop. They just trade one obsession for another.

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Inspiration, Life Lessons, Personal Development

Your life matters (even if you’re not famous)

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You sit down somewhere quiet. Maybe in a coffee shop. Maybe on your couch after a long day. And out of nowhere, a thought hits you.

Why am I not more successful?

Maybe you thought you’d have kids by now. Or a business that prints money. Or a name people actually recognize. Maybe you thought you’d own a house. And that you’d have it all figured out.

But none of that has happened.

So you start comparing.

  • This guy was a millionaire by 30.
  • She had a bestseller by 26.
  • He became a CEO at 40.
  • She retired at 48.

So what?

They are not you. But it still stings, right?

“Why not me?”

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Life Lessons, Philosophy

How to deal with negative people and criticism

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negative

My wife told me a story recently that I couldn’t get out of my head.

Her close friend works as a waitress at a restaurant. Hard worker, nice person. One evening she made a mistake at a table of seven people. She served six dishes and one had to wait a little longer.

One of those seven people went home and wrote a one-star review and named her specifically.

The boss saw it, and she was told she was no longer allowed to work as a waitress. Her salary was cut. She was moved to the kitchen.

A single negative review destroyed someone’s livelihood.

I know this isn’t rare. But it still makes me angry every time I hear it.

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Philosophy

The courage to live on your own terms

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche had been on my reading list for years. I finally got to it recently.

While I didn’t really like the book, there was one chapter that really got to me, called “Of Voluntary Death.”

This is the idea:

Live so fully and intentionally that when death comes, it feels like a completion rather than an interruption.

I love that.

Think about it. Most of us don’t live that way.

We drift, we delay, we stay on a trajectory that we know is not the right one.

And then one day it’s over…

This is why we fear death.

Nietzsche wrote:

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