• Don't internalize rejection.

When people reject something, they're rejecting that something. They're not rejecting you.

After all these years, you barely know yourself. So let alone a stranger who's spent a grand total of 5 minutes with you.

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• You can blame the world or you can get what you want, but you can't do both.

The statement "everything is in my control" is just as false as "nothing is in my control."

Internal locus of control vs. External locus of control in psychology.

But the former is much more conducive to you achieving your goals.

If you have that belief, you'll fuck up occasionally (thinking something was in your control that wasn't) but you'll also correctly identify the cases where you're right.

If you have the latter belief, you won't make the mistake of believing something is in your control that isn't, but that comes at the cost of missing every single instance where something was inside of your control but you believed it wasn't.

Nihilism & cynicism are exceeding costly ways to go through life.

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• Quality matters more than quantity. But quality comes from quantity.

Your best content comes from tons of fuck ups.

Meeting your person comes from going on a lot of bad dates.

Finding your dream job or starting your dream business is a result of many failures.

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• Luck exists but the harder you work, the luckier you get.

Luck is a factor. You can't deny that.

However, some people swing to far and use that as a way to diminish anyone's success.

According to Dissonance Theory, this helps preserve the self-image of those people. If you wanna see yourself as capable, you can either build yourself up or tear others down. Both are viable pathways to maintain your self-image. But the former is more productive.

If you decide to hit a golf ball 200 times per day and after 10 years you hit a hole in one, technically you got lucky...

But does any rational person truly belief that?

Put yourself in a position to get lucky.

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• The people who're important to you now, may not be in 5 years.

Relationships change. Friends move. People get different job, kids, or other responsibilities.

And that's just a part of life.

If you're aware of that, you'll try to approach the "golden times" that much more when you're in them.

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• Think for yourself and don't blindly obey the culture.

Everyone wants to believe they think for themselves... But most don't.

Their beliefs just so happen to perfectly align with that of their in-group?

Impossible.

Try to reason carefully and critically and see if you yourself, independently, come to the same conclusions.

You get 1 life. Don't waste it living someone else's.

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Notes

Re: the quality/quantity point, this parable is insightful:

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A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.

All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on.

Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

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