Some blokes smell powerful. It’s like they have so much mass that it leaks into the air around them. Jocko Willink is one of those blokes. He was a Navy SEAL officer for many years in the Middle East, and he told me this trick to flip the switch on adversity. And when Jocko tells […]
Tag: stoicism
Today is important
One evening a few years back, an old Super-Bowl winner told me about a prayer his college coach made him repeat every morning. It struck a chord so I began to repeat my own little version of it. It’s quite long so I won’t repeat it all now. But the message that would often send […]
The girl with one eye
Once upon a beach, a girl with one eye said something about pain that still rings in my ears today. She’d been flung off a speeding motorcycle and had faceplanted a tree stump. It was a miracle she’d survived. The impact took out half her skull, and I could still feel the steel plates in […]
Being unmotivated is good
Did you know that ‘motivation’ is a pretty new word? It’s only been around for about 150 years, probably less. Shakespeare had no idea what it meant, and he made up a bagful of silly words. Before the English picked it up, nobody was motivated to do anything, and so nothing got done. Everyone just […]
Mistakes are sexy
You’ve probably heard that scars are sexy. Some psych students even ran an experiment and found it to be true enough. But why? Scars are sexy because they’re a sign that we’ve lived. That we’ve tried; we fought for something we care about. They’re a visible reminder of a mistake. Shakespeare wrote, “A scar nobly […]
How to predict the future
Not many people saw the pandemic coming. And nobody predicted what actually happened in 2020. Don’t believe anyone who says they know what’s going to happen in the future. At best, it’ll be a lucky guess. We can’t predict what happens to us, but we can decide what we do next. We always get to decide […]