What is the most inspirational thing you saw or heard that changed your life?
For me it was these.
"A focused fool can accomplish more than a distracted genius"
"Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter"
These two quotes really helped get my @** in gear.
"The first thing that jumps to your mind isn't always what you truly think. Sometimes, it's just what you've been trained to think. What matters, is what you do next"
I grew up in a really racist, queerphobic environment, and that comment really helped me by letting me give myself space to undo the bigoted indoctrination I had been taught, without getting trapped in guilt and self disgust whenever one of the racist or bigoted things I was raised with jumped in to my mind.
It let me recognise the bigoted thought as something I was trained to think, rather than being what I actually believe, and by recognising it, I could disempower the thought, and start to unlearn it
That's a powerful thought.
Conditioning significantly influences our psyche.
These thoughts that are the result of conditioning are like knee jerk reactions.
Our brain is designed to conserve energy so it actually prioritises conditioned knee jerk reactions rather than introspective thoughts.
One needs significant amount of training to bypass this process.
Similarly if you shit talk yourself in your head to motivate yourself it really will eventually start to condition you that way even if it does motivate you
"Everyone you know is facing a battle you know nothing about. Be kind always."
As someone who hasn't had to go through anything that hard, finally accepting this one was so important
That's why whenever someone cuts me off in traffic, I say, "wow, that guy really must have to poop."
Whenever someone in a large truck is driving like an asshole I always think "wow he must be in a rush to go kiss his dad 😊"
Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes.
It's so simple but genuinely words to live by.
a tumblr meme about replacing self deprecating humor with over the top self belief humor.
not even kidding, was doomscrolling, this jumped into my feed and burnt itself into my brain and 4 years of doing precisely that later, i'm better than ever and it's also just a way to break the ice sometimes.
Can you elaborate on the over-the-top self-belief humor?
when you don't know something, saying shit like "despite my infinite wisdom, this eludes me" instead of "sorry i just dont know"
just stuff that stands out, gets a chuckle off of people, but is so obviously exaggerated that people know you don't actually believe that you are infinitely wise.
and the greatest thing is that after a while you also incorporate these phrases when talking about/to others, so when you need help or something, you ask for their infinite wisdom.
(sry for the late answer im not used to getting interactions on social media lol)
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops"
-Stephen Jay Gould
Yeah just imagine if Isaac Newton was born as a sl***e rather than a rich estate owner. We would still be stuck in the dark ages.
Well not really. That is great man theory bs.
Newton did not "invent" gravity, it is an immutable law of the universe, no more did Marx "invent" socialism or the labor theory of value.
In both cases they observed actions and reactions that were testable and quantifiable and in both cases they were not the only ones to reach the same conclusions.
If anything the Gould quote is saying the opposite. That having so many people confined and coerced into such labors for the sole purpose of maximizing profits for a single individual, we are robbing ourselves of many great minds.
Were you spelling slave and misspelled it or am I missing something?
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
Ferris Bueller, from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
I love that movie for so many reasons.
I loved that if you stayed through the credits there was a small bit there.
I think it was the first movie to do that.
“You cannot love someone else until you love yourself.”
My dad raised me on this. If don’t see yourself worthy of love from even yourself, you’ll never be able to accept it from someone else. Healthy love is mutual. Also, this ties back into the idea that if you don’t see yourself worthy of love, it means you need to work on yourself until you do rather than trying to fill that gap with someone else.
I found that same nugget just under a decade ago. Dropped off the dating scene to work on myself. It really made me reflect. I'm still working on myself and honestly I suspect I will be for a while to come.
It took me over 6 years after my first serious relationship to really start figuring myself out and getting in tune with who I really was. I’m definitely still on the path and I realize more and more why my last relationship ended. It really was the best thing for me at the time.
Reminds me of 28 Days.
I did not kill this plant, it was sick or something. I gave it everything. I was talking to it, telling it stories. I drew a sketch of it, and put it on my refrigerator.
Did you water it?
I killed the plant.
Similarly. You cannot forgive yourself until your forgive your transgressor. Pent up anger is no god for your health.
This saying in my local tounge
Which roughly translates to
"You small, I big , this thought of world is incorrect, A Thirsty man feels the the ocean is smaller than than a glass of fresh water"
Imagine above is a really Catchy rhyming.
I don't think anyone will understand but here it is in local tounge trying to write the sound in English.
Tu nano, hu moto, e khyal jagat no koto. Tarsa ne to dariya karta loto lage moto.
I'm unfamiliar with your language, so take this attempt at translation with a grain of salt:
You are small and I am big, this is but a fantasy of the world. For thirst is larger than the vastness of the ocean.
It's likely a metaphor for how any desire (thirst) is infinite (ocean) and cannot be satiated. By trying to resolve your desire it will only grow and increase your suffering.
This further ties into the illusionary nature of worldly matters in the first sentence. For example if you desire say friends, money, knowledge, or anything else, you'll likely have more of that than others, which makes you feel big. However these desires have grown into a prison for you, and that actually makes you smaller than someone who has found liberation from them, who might otherwise appear lonely, poor, or ignorant.
Chatgpt?
You can look it that way too but the meaning we try to say in my culture is that.
No man is above another man, when you need help than smallest of the person can be the most valuable person in the world. Hence the idea of "I am above you" is incorrect, a small person can be more helpful than a big person.
Does it mean that one shouldn't think of others as small or inferior? That one is seeing others as small because of their thirst for(or lack of access to) power or so?
Which language is this in? Some words seem familiar. Hindi(an Indian language) has the word khayal(thought).
“The most important step a man can take is the next one”
And
“Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man in the process of changing”
I am not older than you, i just have been young longer
”Do you miss the person or do you miss the memories?”
It really helps me get over friendship breakups and cope in a more reasonable way, since most of the time I just miss the memories associated with the person.
" I use Arch btw."
"Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Life either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Wow -- great one I haven't heard this before
“There were all kinds of things I was afraid of at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean' horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.” ― Theodore Roosevelt
When I started my now mostly unused school laptop with dualboot (Windows/Debian) at 3 AM in the basement to solve a router issue. This pretty cheap laptop booted in mere seconds to a completely usable state, sparing my tired self from waiting in the cold for too long.
Right there, in the middle of the night, a flash of inspiration struck me!
How could it be that my way too expensive desktop gaming PC took longer to be ready for everything than this old piece of plastic? What if I completely switched my main machine to Linux, not only for testing, but for real? How awesome would it be to have customization freedom and full control over my own device, without a company spying on me, taking away options or using me as their guinea pig for the next untested updates?
And that's how it began. Linux Mint as a safe start, then Kubuntu for more customization with KDE Plasma. After that, EndeavourOS for the latest software, and finally Arch Linux ... for the lulz (btw).
If you won’t care in 10 years, don’t care now.
(In reference to bad things happening)
"Excellence is not an act, but a habit" - Aristotle teaching that good comes from the whole, not from a single step. Focus on the whole, and the steps will follow.
"So, what's the next action for this?" - the GTD approach to task management teaching me to be specific and then go do it (or plan it, or delegate it). This really kicks me into productivity mode.
As someone with anxiety: "the best way out is always through" - Robert Frost
"If you're going thru hell, keep going"
"Erfahrung heißt gar nichts. Man kann seine Sache auch 35 Jahre lang schlecht machen." - Kurt Tucholsky
Which DeepL translates to
"Experience means nothing. You can do a bad job for 35 years."
Not strictly life changing, but a very valuable reminder, if you need to deal with 'that' kind of person.
This and the difference between decades of experience and experience that's decades old.
Sometimes a person that's 30 years in a field or profession just managed to avoid getting fired for 30 years.
"Never perfect. Perfection goal that changes. Never stops moving. Can chase, cannot catch."
It's a video game quote but it helped me realise that there is always some aspect that can be changed for the better
Mass Effect?
Here in darkness, everything's okay. Listen to the waves and let them fade away. Here comes a thought.
Here Comes a Thought from Steven Universe was genuinely life-changing for me. It's all about mindfulness and allowing yourself to process negative thoughts without punishing yourself for having them.
This episode came when I was really struggling with anxiety, like multiple crying breakdowns a week. It finally lead me to getting therapy and I'm in a much better place now, but I still come back to it when I'm feeling overwhelmed.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thank you for reminding me of that song and giving me a reason to think more deeply about it. It already was a gorgeous moment in the show but I didn't dig into it too deeply until your comment. The "looking at your thoughts without judgement" part is the hardest part for me.
The thing with thoughts and feelings is that they can be investigated by other thoughts, and the more you dispassionately investigate them the more you create distance between consciousness and this or that thought, and the more distance you have the less likely you're to be swept into them and more likely to regain your footing faster if you are.
"This too, shall pass"
"In the corporate world, nobody has any compassion, ever." - A friend told me as I was about to take my first real job. Brutal and maybe exaggerated, but exactly what I needed to manage my own expectations.
A Corporation is:
( DarkHexad:
( all this to say that the legalistically-enacted-treason of granting "personhood" to corporations killed strategic-viability for all countries, and the highjacking-of-the-world's-economy AND the world's-governments, by corporations, is global unfolding proof.
What should have happened, is a separate category of pseudopersons should have been created, with systematically-limited rights, including prohibiting the things from interfering in elections,
but that would have required some real integrity & spine... )
( finally, for anybody so young/naive as to believe that charities are inherently-good, go volunteer in the management of one for a few years, & then see how you view integrity.. )
I’ve always prided myself on being empathetic and sympathetic to people no matter what. During the me too times, a lady was being interviewed about why survivors and victims don’t go to the authorities about their treatment from (men) powerful people.
She said something along the lines of “stand with us if you want things to change, but don’t you dare stand opposite to tell me how offended I’m allowed to be”. In an instant I realised I’d been guilty of minimizing the suffering of others simply because I’d not been through what they’d been through (in a sense - if I wouldn’t be offended why should they?). Changed my whole outlook on life actually
The big lez show. It a comedy on youtube that you can watch now for free. It's one of, if not the, best series I've watched and, although strange at times, is unbelievable deep. Specifically, what stuck with me was as when lez, the main character, asks sassy, his friend, how he's supposed to achieve his dreams and be happy in a world that's fucked up, and sassy tells him, "what's the first thing anyone does to start they're day? You wake up."
Probably most speeches by Conan O'Brien.
"Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen" at 23:09 in Conan O'Brien's 2011 Dartmouth College Commencement Address: https://youtu.be/KmDYXaaT9sA
Conan Addresses The Harvard Class Of 2020: https://youtu.be/VI2B3sZ1GaY
Very riveting stuff.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/KmDYXaaT9sA
https://piped.video/VI2B3sZ1GaY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
"Do what you can, where you are, with what you've got." - Teddy Roosevelt
"There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen
"Perfect is the enemy of good." - unknown
"Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering." - Yoda
This is a very brief summary of my 2 year MBA: business school is the scientific method applied to business.
How would you describe the scientific method as applied to business?
They call it PDSA or PDCA, plan do study/check act. They taught me how to make realistic plans, ways to execute and track the execution, ways and metrics to evaluate success, and then how to modify the plan and try again. This is analogous to hypothesis testing in science.
Two things, actually. "You are fired", and "You are hired". Also, does "I do" count?
"being trans isn't a mental illness and it's ok to be yourself"
Of course it's an identity you are born with. Whoever says it's one is themselves suffering from mental illness. Probably one of the ones mentioned below by my assistant.
Starting listening to podcasts is what has probably made the biggest change in how I see the world. It's difficult to single out any individual thing from there but one worth mentioning would be the realization of no free will. It's quite a different looking world once you realize that things happen because of other things that happened in the past - not because an agent with free will just decided to do so.
https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc?si=gYzjaai7eZEoJ5tq
Yellow Parenti. Helped to remove myself from obsession over optics and just do what helps people.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/npkeecCErQc?si=gYzjaai7eZEoJ5tq
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
When I was 16 I had my first job at a shitty fast food restaurant, and on the first day my manager told me, "The difference between a good job and a great one is often just a couple minutes "
20 years later It still pops into my head whenever I'm working on a project, or work task, or even just stuff around the house. Usually it's right when I'm about to quit or give up and call it "good enough". And for the most part, I've found it to be true.
My favourite is:
If you're scared to spell out a scary, bad word, find another word to use instead of trying to hide it behind similar characters.
"Lead, follow or get out of the way."
The mind is the athlete.
If we could understand but a flower it could change our life.