The Weekly Compendium
It’s not certain you’ll win by doing your best.
A valuable network is the number of people you provide value to who are willing to reciprocate with information, opportunities or money. Building goodwill is thus the best skill a man can acquire, for the compulsion to recompense a good deed is highest in the best humans.
It’s good to be friendly and helpful for its own sake. And since you have to make a living, you can extend the same radiance to business, where what you provide aligns with self-interest. Make effort to pay individual attention to and help people and you’ll own the world.
Affairs as delicate as business, mastery and relationships ought to be approached in the longest and winding road possible if we intend for them to have that lasting and deep quality furnishing our existence with a cosmos of joy. A life worth living.
On matters as delicate and profound as whether you love your romantic partner or how you want to curve a career path, the highest wisdom is to trust your feelings. But on the hard tactical and strategic matters in the same situations, it’s good to devote yourself to reason.
This idea is based on one simple fact. It’s hard to commit yourself fully to a pursuit you feel meh about. You won’t have the energy to sustain you when it gets hard or the will to make a necessary sacrifice. It’s a terrible fault of reason to underestimate the power of love.
It’s necessary to not lose your confidence no matter how much you fumble, the doubts you feel, whoever criticizes you, or whatever station you’re at in life. Your sovereignty is the only thing you own that no one can take from you or talk you out of. Don’t give it up haphazard.
To navigate independence and relationships you ought to aim to give love, good vibes, kindness and gifts first more than you want to receive them and without expectations, and recalibrating your investment to compound what’s mutual.
Only the self-sufficient person can love purely and for no other reason other than it’s natural to want to be social and to use people to practice kindness and love. Seen this way, the pain of betrayal, loss and rejection can be overcome as you can always find someone else to love.
It’s wise to not only focus on what you control, but also what you can impact — if receptive — for you don’t want to miss out on compounding mutual life-changing opportunities. It’s thus wise to go with the flow rather than cling to a want outside your control. Open yourself up to possibilities; there's a lot more you can influence.
Going with the flow isn’t a passive lifestyle. You’ll want to sometimes re-strategize, adapt, learn and get good at your presentation so that whatever you go for always has a high chance of success. A mark of greatness is therefore to want always give more and the best instead of aiming to receive. Genius must look for opportunities, preferably challenging, to practice its essence, for it’s the effort, skill and careful attention that brings the most pleasure.
Respect what’s best and noble in you. It’s what prevents you from submitting to fear and being miserably lost in addictions. It’s what ennobles you to achieve your goals. It’s what strengthens your relationships. It’s what secures your confidence, freedom and happiness. Nothing else compares. But you’re free to fuck around. Just ensure you’re honest with what you find out and commit to it without reservations.
Know that time passes, whatever you’re going through. And if you handle it as a chance to help you grow stronger and learn, you’ll be happy it happened in retrospect. The antidote is to love what has happened and get busy living as this misfortune demands. Not to avoid it.
Your misery will seem trifling a few months down the road. You’ll laugh at it all. And best of all you’ll be proud of yourself for being courageous to feeling the wretchedness, trusting nature to care for you, never submitting to self-pity or losing confidence—even getting bolder with your risks.
This journey won’t be as pretty and smooth as you think. You’ll have some doubts and moments of weakness. What matters is never losing your presence of mind. Your soul. From this ordeal, you’ll have known freedom, an eternal joy. One you can always call up at will through reflection.
It’s not certain you’ll win by doing your best, but it gives you something to hold on to when you fail instead of ruminating and being resentful, thus helping you see reality as it is in this moment, let go of phantom wishes, and adapt more easily and fast to increase your luck.
The best thing you can do when you catch your thoughts meandering into what you imagine other people are doing, saying or thinking about you is to tell yourself there’s no way you can prove that fact without seeming insecure, and it’s none of your business. Besides, it doesn’t matter. Don’t ruin your mood or deter your confidence on purpose. Be a good friend to yourself.
How to Get Out of a ‘Funk’
“It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.” — Marcus Aurelius.
First, acknowledge and observe those feelings: the apathy, the impulse to distract yourself with social media. Or to eat even if you’re not hungry.
You might even want to write down the emotions on a journal especially if they’re recurrent.
Those actions help with cognitive detachment where you recognize yourself as a separate entity from what you feel. You’re an observer. A soul carrying around a body.
You then remind myself that those feelings are normal and inevitable because maybe you’ve been working too hard recently. Or perhaps it’s just one of those days. Compassion with yourself is very important.
But then you remember that normal and inevitable isn’t always right. It’s good to rest, but there are limits to it. There’s work waiting for you. You have to take care of your loved ones.
What’s right is practicing wisdom and helping others despite or because of those feelings.
Wisdom is knowing you don’t control the feelings that pop up. What’s always within your control is exercising courage and discipline to follow your routine, work on your purpose, destroy your to-do-list, or do whatever you’re supposed to to reach the goal you want.
That’s what nature made you for and the best thing you can do for your well-being and happiness is live in accordance with this destiny. Just as Cleanthes, a Stoic philosopher, said, “I’ll follow (this destiny) readily but if my will prove weak; Wretched as I am, I must follow still. Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.”
At the end of the day, you can then reflect on your journal about how you overcame that hurdle by simply choosing to be the great man nature made you to be. You’ll find it ecstatic to look back and see the weakness you overcame.
You can also find inspiration, hope and energy from this reflection knowing that yes, you were in a funk—but you practiced your agency in the situation, which will then contribute to the momentum of doing it again the next day. And the next.
Good feelings, or feeling motivated ought to and will meet you well along the path you’ve created for yourself for they always follow good actions.
You were born an aristocrat—to rule and direct your mind to what you desire because you can think. And it’s to your advantage to act like it.
But, as Abraham Maslow observed, “If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.”
The world is yours. Good luck.