Apart from a number of states and territories, across the continent there is a huge gulf between the rule of law rhetoric and reality. In Thailand, the police force is an organized crime gang. In Cambodia, judges are proxies for the ruling political party … that a judge may harbor political prejudice or apply the law unevenly are the smallest worries for an ordinary criminal defendant in Asia. More likely ones are: Will the police fabricate the evidence? Will the prosecutor bother to show up? Will the judge fall asleep? Will my case be completed within a decade?


I’ve always thought that people get more honest when they drink, so if that nice new friend of yours get weirdly mean and creepy when he’s drunk, you might want to think twice about inviting him to your wedding. Most men are disguised by sobriety; and it is when they are drinking that men display themselves in their true complexion of character.


I cannot properly describe the depth of emotional difficulty I experienced during these moments. I experienced the deepest parts of the human soul, psyche, or mind: existential meaninglessness and hopelessness, unrelieved terror, ultimate entrapment, complete paranoia, infinite despair, grotesque and twisted visions, some somatic discomfort, in communicable levels of fear, dread, grief and at some points, total loss of self-identity, or self-knowledge.


And then somehow my (relative) peace was interrupted by the thought that all of society and culture was really just a built up game to trick citizens into being work machines and contributing to the government and its twisted actions.

Many powerful and influential people I looked up to back then were a part of it.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jean Paul Sartre, Lao Tsu, they were all a part of it. I was devastated. It was the world’s biggest conspiracy, against me.

I was in a massive delusion and it felt terrible.

I hallucinated that I found a knife in front of me and took ahold of it, and this urge to stab myself took over, but something held it back.

I think that thing was love.

I had visions of my mother and farther, my best friends, my siblings, people I know and appreciate.

Love saved me from stabbing myself with an imaginary knife.

This is where the trip turned around, for the better.

Seeing the sun in its magnificent beauty reminded me I was going to be okay, I was going to be fine.

Life is a gift, cherish it with all your heart.

The experience taught me to be more grateful for the wonderful life I am currently living. This trip happened 5 years ago now, and I am more grateful for it than ever.

The only true difficulty now is that I have opened my doors of perception wide open, and they will most definitely stay that way. There is no turning back. I cannot unsee what I have seen or unexperience what I experienced.

I cannot turn a blind eye on my thoughts and behaviour. I know where they come from, and I know what I am, and there is no escape, there is only acceptance.


I’ll go a step further and say that there are many resemblances between the design of a photograph and all those other design experiences. Design is iterative; almost never does a complete fully-fleshed out design pop into the designer’s head. Instead, design is a series of inspirations, tests, failures, analyses, recombinations, reinventions, retries, more failures, and finally success. In software design, all that is usually explicit. In the design of a photograph, it may take place entirely in the mind of the photographer, be highly nonlinear and rapid, and not be consciously comprehended by the photographer herself. But, at least for me, it is exceedingly pleasurable for its own sake. That’s one of the reasons I like the iteration and continuous refinement of working in series.


Speak slowly, clearly, and thoughtfully.

A hallmark of charismatic individuals is that other people listen when they speak.

However, you can’t expect people to listen when you speak if you are constantly blurting out random crap and speaking faster than a radio ad.

When you talk in social settings speak clearly, slowly, and with deep vocal tonality.

Think before you speak and make sure that every word coming out of your mouth is meaningful.

If you are the type of person who only speaks when they have something important to say, people will naturally shut up and listen when you open your mouth.


America’s primary interest in NATO is preventing a European hegemon like Germany, or France from taking over and acting like a peer to the US.

“The purpose of NATO is to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”


What’s a simple thing someone can do to better their life?

Compliment people behind their backs. It seriously reduces the drama you have to deal with in your day to day life. Especially do it to co-workers.


Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”


There’s a common safe place: Being busy.

We’re supposed to give you a pass because you were full on, all day. Frantically moving from one thing to the other, never pausing to catch your breath, and now you’re exhausted.

No points for busy.

Points for successful prioritization. Points for efficiency and productivity. Points for doing work that matters.

No points for busy.


Everybody thinks managers make decisions, but that decision-making is important. The bigger and more painful the decision, the bigger the manager must be to make it. That’s very deep and obvious, but it’s not actually true.

The name of the game is to avoid having to make a decision. In particular, if somebody tells you “choose (a) or (b), we really need your to decide on this”, you’re in trouble as a manager. The people you manage had better know the details better than you, so if they come to you for a technical decision, you’re screwed. You’re clearly not competent to make that decision for them.

So the name of the game is to avoid decisions, at least the big and painful ones. Making small and non-consequential decisions is fine, and make you look like you know what you’re doing, so what a kernel manager needs to do is to turn the big and painful ones into small things where nobody really cares.


So when you find somebody smarter than you are, just coast along. Your management responsibilities largely become ones of saying “Sounds like a good idea - go wild”, or “That sounds good, but what about xxx?”. The second version in particular is a great way to either learn something new about “xxx” or seem extra managerial by pointing out something the smarter person hadn’t thought about. In either case, you win. One thing to look out for is to realize that greatness in one area does not necessarily translate to other areas. So you might prod people in specific directions, but let’s face it, they might be good at what they do, and suck at everything else. The good news is that people tend to naturally gravitate back to what they are good at, so it’s not like you are doing something irreversible when you do prod them in some direction, just don’t push too hard.


Things will go wrong, and people want somebody to blame. Tag, you’re it. It’s not actually that hard to accept the blame, especially if people kind of realize that it wasn’t all your fault. Which brings us to the best way of taking the blame: do it for another guy. You’ll feel good for taking the fall, he’ll feel good about not getting blamed, and the guy who lost his whole 36GB porn collection because of your incompetence will grudgingly admit that you at least didn’t try to weasel out of it. Then make the developer who really screwed up know in private that he screwed up. Not just so he can avoid it in the future, but so that he knows he owes you one. And, perhaps even more importantly, he’s also likely the person who can fix it. Because, let’s face it, it sure ain’t you.

Taking the blame is also why you get to be manager in the first place. It’s part of what makes people trust you, and allow you the potential glory, because you’re the one who gets to say “I screwed up”. And if you’ve followed the previous rules, you’ll be pretty good at saying that by now.


The other day, out of the blue, my girlfriend said to me “I really hit the jackpot. You’re kind to everyone you meet, selfless, modest and you make the people around you better. I love you.”

I can’t say I agree with her. I tend to get told stuff like that a fair bit but I don’t think I do much that’s special. It was just so unexpected and she said it with such conviction that it made me feel like one day maybe I can live up to that.


Because people don’t make buying decisions based on what’s good for you - they act based on what they see, need and believe.

Yes, we frequently sell ourselves too short. We don’t ask for compensation commensurate with the value we create. It’s a form of hiding. But the most common form of this hiding is not merely lowering the price. No, the mistake we make is in not telling stories that create more value, in not doing the hard work of building something unique and worth seeking out.

This is another way to talk about marketing. And modern marketing is done with the people we seek to serve, not at them. It’s based on the idea that if the customer knew what you know, and they believed what you believe, they’d want to work with you. On the principle that long-term trust is worth far more than any single transaction ever could be.


The short answer, and in my view the most intuitive, is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light, because nothing can travel at any other speed. There is only one speed in the whole Universe, and that’s the speed of light.

The only thing that changes about an object’s motion as it (apparently, from a three-dimensional perspective) “speeds up” or “slows down” is its direction of travel through four dimensional spacetime. When an object appears stationary (to some observer) it is moving entirely in the time direction of spacetime, at a rate of one second per second.


It is in fact misleading to call it “speed of light”, because the maximum speed in the universe actually has nothing to do with light. It just so happened that light was the first thing we humans discovered to travel at this cosmic maximum speed. We now know that gravity and strong nuclear force also propagate at the same speed. A better name for it would be “speed of causality”. This is the maximum speed at which an effect can be generated from its cause. All events in the universe are governed by the fundamental forces of nature. Photons, gravitons and gluons, being the respective massless force carriers of light, gravity and strong nuclear force, all travel at the speed of causality. The weak nuclear force, having two massive force carriers the W and Z bosons, actually propagates below the speed of light.


Just like a lawyer represents my interests without also following my level of knowledge of the law, a politician should be able to represent my interests with a higher level of understanding of how to achieve the best results than I have.

Quite frankly I vote for a representative because I do not devote my life to the intricacies of everything a government handles, and I shouldn’t have to. There’s a reason politicians campaigns don’t go into the finite details of everything. We have to able to trust politicians to represent our interests at a higher level than “do what I tell you to”, because it can’t work that way. They’re the people you hired to do the things you don’t have the time to do or know how to do.


Any attempt to identify particular architectural structures is doomed to fail. Monet’s views present nothing of a factual nature; instead, the depicted objects ignite sensual “sparks” when they are condensed, with their surroundings and mood, into apparitions.


Monet himself said, oddly, that he wished he had been born blind, so as to regain what John Ruskin called the “innocence of the eye,” a perception without an awareness of what things are and what their substance consists of.


I’m living in a wonderland. I don’t know which way to turn: everything is superb and I want to do everything. So I’m using and wasting lots of paint doing tryouts… It’s terribly difficult, you need a palette made of diamonds and precious stones. As for blue and pink, there’s no shortage here.


Over the course of the semester, however, we began to see that all of science, and much of mathematics, was determined by consensus; proof verification in maths is often only doable by a small group of specialist mathematicians. When Perelman proved the Poincare conjecture, for example, three separate teams of mathematicians raced to verify the proof. Professor Tay pointed out that the mathematics was so difficult that only a few people in the world could verify it; the rest of the mathematical community had to trust in the word of those teams.


We are all poets now.

Poets use words (and silence) to change things. They care about form and function and most of all, about making an impact on those that they connect with.

Every word counts. Every breath as well.

In a world filled with empty noise, the most important slots are reserved for the poets we seek to listen to, and the poet we seek to become.


Sid Meier likes to talk about the “valley of despair” - the moment in which a game designer, crushed by the weight of failed ideas and discarded prototypes, just feels like giving up. Playing games is a series of interesting decisions, but making games is a series of heartbreaking disappointments.


How do you carve a statue of an elephant? Get a block of marble and remove anything that doesn’t look like an elephant. How do you make a good game? Get a game and remove all the parts that aren’t fun.


If you are making a video game, and you’re having trouble with a number - say, the number of damage points a unit can do - either double it or cut it in half.


When we made Civilization, it was not with the idea that this was gonna be the greatest game that we’re gonna be remembered by. It was the best game to make at the time and we thought it was a lot of fun. Each game we make, we kinda go into it with the idea: this is gonna be the best game we can make on that topic. Some of them resonate stronger with game players; maybe some not as much. I don’t have a formula for making a super-memorable game. It’s just that we keep making the best games that we can.


This story is not about the one, but the one you learn from.


What I was never sure of with you.


If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.


Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.


Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.


Any obstruction of the natural processes of development… or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one’s age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to an illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety - a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced “guilty”. His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it.


Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.


Is the conclusion that the desire to move forward effectively does lead us to a harder life?

If we replace harder with unsatisfying, it will be easier for us to agree on that. The more people attain, the greater their inclination not to be satisfied, but to find more and more problems in the new situation and try to solve them, too. We see it, for example, in the area of health and beauty. People are healthier and better looking than ever before. Objectively. But despite this, the system has not achieved a state of balance. There is no satiation. In the field of improving human capabilities, the ambition to create a superhuman, it is very clear that it has no end. There is no point we will reach and say that this is it. That is humankind’s basic nature. And of the universe in general. The absence of satisfaction.


Try to think of God dissatisfied, suffering, obsessively focused on himself and lacking compassion for all creatures.


Picasso invented a new style each time he fell in love with a new woman.


Có lẽ vì đã viết được một vài quyển sách, thảo được một vài bài báo… mà có một vài bạn trẻ gán cho mình danh hiệu “nhà văn”, và đòi hỏi mách cho những bí quyết để trở thành “nhà văn”… Ôi, kinh nghiệm của đôi ba mươi năm cầm bút, lại cũng không do trường chuyên môn văn chương nào đào tạo cả, thì biết gì mà chỉ dẫn! Sự thực là thế. Lời nói đây là lời nói chân thành. Tôi chỉ viết khi nào tôi cảm thấy cần phải nói lên một điều gì thôi.


Thôi chấp làm gì các phố lớn cuồn cuộn sát khí mưu sinh.


Ngồi ở đấy mà cầm cuốn tiểu thuyết thì phi là thằng đang cưa cẩm gái thì cũng là thứ dở hơi dở hồn thích làm trò.


Who are we? Who is not part of our We?

Who do We most want to be?

Taking the time to slow down from our usual pace in parliament to dwell on questions of purpose and identity may seem frivolous.

But I suggest to you, they are the most crucial questions.

Because they bring us back into a space of choosing from what matters most to us.

I have found that whether we are debating about how we should spend our own personal dollars or our nation, the core question to keep returning to is, “Well, what is the Meaning we care to make with all our Money in the first place?”

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of success at things in life that didn’t really matter to us.


Every tilt towards the side of pragmatism is simultaneously a tilt away from the side of our ideals. I do not presume pragmatism to be bad and idealism to be good. Every healthy individual learns to hold both options in tension within their mental construct and make their choices.

But I believe our idealistic young professionals and students who make up both our current and future tax base have the right to question us: when will it ever be the right time to tilt our balance just a little more towards our ideals rather than always toward what’s pragmatic?

If not now, with our substantial surpluses and reserves, then when?

If not later, then are we saying never?


Our youths need to hear the greater story of all the things we want to do for love - not just fear. A story straight from the heart of every leader in the land without all the meaning that money can buy - not just for ourselves but for each other.

At some point, we need to discern when to stop operating in fear that the bottom will fall out of Our Singapore Story.

There is a time for fear. And there is also a time for courage - courage born from the fire of fighting for our ideals - to simply say in the face of fear:

That’s enough.

We have enough.

We are enough.

It’s time to let more of us have enough too.


You can dislike the one or the other, but you have to respect them, not because they are so successful, but because they care. Ronaldo cried after he lost a game and Messi didn’t talk to anyone after a defeat. That’s the kind of behavior I like to see.


We must remind ourselves again that the historian, like the journalist, is forever tempted to sacrifice the normal to the dramatic, and never quite conveys an adequate picture of any age. I would note that while the historian can write enormously lengthy monographs in which some of that normal can be restored and that picture made more adequate, the journalist just doesn’t have that leisure, and his sacrifice of the normal is more forgivable.


Its analysts were only too aware that no one has ever been penalized for not having foreseen an opportunity, but that many careers have been blighted for not predicting a risk. Therefore the intelligence community has always been tempted for forecast dire consequences for any conceivable course of action, an attitude that encourages paralysis rather than adventurism. After every crisis there surfaces in the press some obscure intelligence report or analyst purporting to have predicted it, only to have been foolishly ignored by the policymakers. What these claims omit to mention is that when warnings become too routine they lose all significance; when reports are not called specifically to the attention of the top leadership they are lost in bureaucratic background noise, particularly since for every admonitory report one can probably find also its opposite in the files.


A President’s schedule is so hectic that he has little time for abstract reflection. As a result, one of the President’s most difficult tasks is to choose among endless arguments that sound equally convincing.


To laugh is to risk appearing a fool To weep is to risk appearing sentimental To reach out for another is to risk involvement To expose feelings is to risk rejection To place your dreams before the crowd is to risk ridicule To love is to risk not being loved in return To go forward in the face of overwhelming odds is to risk failure

But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing

He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love Chained by his certitudes, he is a slave. He has forfeited his freedom

Only a person who dares to risk is free


Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.


It is sometimes difficult for none-American observers to believe that over 80 percent of American citizens do not possess a passport.


Acceptance.

When you lust someone, you obsess over their positive, and mostly physical, features. You like their body, their face, their smile, and all the good things that they do. Really, the part of them you enjoy is the good side.

Then, you eventually see their bad side. You see their weaknesses, their shortfalls, and the things they hate about themselves. They might have a feature that’s not perfectly symmetrical. They might have a short temper. They might be bad at certain things. They might not handle stress well.

The key thing that defines love is your reaction to those negative. If you lust for them, the minute you see their bad side, you will try to walk away. However, if you can look at their bad side, and still see the person that you inside there, it’s love.


For what is a man, what has he got If not himself, then he has naught To say the things he truly feels And not the words of one who kneels


Tập quán vẽ trong tưởng tượng, đấy là những việc các bạn cần phải luyện tập thường xuyên.


Famous people are not all that great, spend a lot of their time sustaining their fame vs being curious and learning/growing.


But by your thirties, you’re pretty solidified in who you are. You know what you want and what you want to spend your time doing. You’re not so reliant on the people around you to decide what you’re doing with your life or find meaning. Therefore, you end up in this kind of double-whammy period of life where friends are harder to meet than they were before and you don’t feel like you need to hang out with as many people as you used to. The result, for a lot of people, is a slowly atrophying social life.

I think your 30s is the first decade in life where you have to start making a conscious effort to build and maintain friendships. It’s something you have to invest time and effort in, much like your career or your family. And that’s kind of a bummer. Because gone are the days when you were younger where friendships were so spontaneous and exciting and purposeless. As you get older, you have to get more strategic about them.


  • Never show people that you are upset, for it makes you appear weak.
  • If someone makes a joke at your expenses, pretend that you didn’t hear it, while looking straight into his eyes. A joke that has to be explained or repeated loses its power.
  • If you are in an argument with someone, sit next to them. You will seem less of a threat.
  • People love people who like them. Likewise, people hate individuals who hate them.
  • Like always, try to look your best. People respond positively to the clean cut.
  • Hard chairs make for a hard negotiation. People sitting on them are less likely to cooperate.
  • Win through your actions, never through arguments
  • You want someone you just met to like you? Ask them open-ended questions about themselves.

Dr Strangelove explains to the president the logic of the machine: by making it automatic and irreversible the machine creates a believable threat and so should deter your enemy from attacking it. The film’s grim joke is that this works only if everyone knows about it.

The doomsday machine illustrates a basic lesson of game theory: influencing what you opponent thinks about you is critical.


For Hayek, it wasn’t enough for Britain to fight the Nazis with tanks and planes. It had to fight them with ideas too. The idea that had to win was that of economic freedom - for the government to let people decide what to do themselves. Without economic freedom, political freedom was impossible. Without political freedom, people can’t think for themselves anymore. The government tells you what to do, what to think, how to live. Modern Western civilization itself was based on the freedom of the individual, said Hayek. If we forget that, then civilization might collapse.


What all politicians want, above all else, is to stay in office. To hold on to power they create “rents” and then give them to their supporters. Rents are revenues over and above what it’s possible to earn in a competitive market. For example, if the government puts a tax on foreign cars then domestic car producers, protected from oversea competition, make big profits. By giving privileges to special groups of people, politicians hope to gain political support, perhaps even money.

The prospect of earning extra profits for doing very little encourages “rent-seeking”. Business spend money trying to persuade the government to give them privileges. They might take government officials out for expensive lunches to try to get them to do what they want.


It’s women who bear most of the costs of raising the future labour force. Standard economics ignores the costs because mothers looking after their children aren’t paid in money. Calculations by the UN show that unpaid work could be equivalent to 70 percent of the world’s economic production.


Economists sometimes say that inequality encourages people to work in the hope of getting rich. But the hope becomes unrealistic when inequality is extreme. In that case, inequality doesn’t make people work hard; instead they might despair of ever catching up.


But Jiang’s power is held in place by a fragile web of alliances and compromises. The reality is that China has never had a system for orderly succession.

Faced with a looming inner-Party power struggle and an overall situation of increasingly uneven economic development, both Chinese and foreign experts have begun to voice concerns that China might break up.


Art is the only salvation from the horror of existence.


An artist must suffer for his art.


With great wisdom comes great sorrow.


No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.


Anguish is the price you pay for love.


What is the biggest force that prevents us from all living slower lives?

Fear: fear of failure, of scorn, of missing out and the fear of being alone with ourselves.


People worry about missing out on life if they slow down, but life is what’s happening right here, right now.


When we’re standing at the fork in the road, what’s important to grasp is that the road doesn’t matter. Whether the one less traveled or the one well-trodden, there’s no way to really know what kind of journey we’re choosing. Since we’ll never be able to walk that second road and know where it led, we may as well enjoy the one we’re on.


What do I want to do given that life is only 500,000 hours long?


I’ve worked at a club where many wealthy people like to frequent.

What I’ve noticed about the wealthy (although not always their wives) is that nothing seems to really bother most of them.

Some would wear no socks with their tennis shoes and not care what anyone thinks (because they have billions?). Some would wear the same shirt everyday. Some would be told no, and they wouldn’t flinch.


In every job I’ve taken and every city in which I’ve lived, I have known that it’s time to move on when I’ve grown as much as I can. Sometimes moving on terrified me. But always it taught me that the true meaning of courage is to be afraid, and then, with your knees knocking, to step out anyway. Making a bold move is the only way to advance toward the grandest vision the universe has for you. If you allow it, fear will completely immobilize you.


The prime virtue of cynicism is shamelessness.


Yet change is usually stressful, and after a certain age, most people don’t like to change. When you are 16, your entire life is change, whether you like it or not. Your body is changing, your mind is changing, your relationships are changing - everything is in flux. You are busy inventing yourself. By the time you are 40, you don’t want change. You want stability. But in the 21st century, you won’t be able to enjoy that luxury. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, some stable job, some stable worldview, you will be left behind, and the world will fly by you. So people will need to be extremely resilient and emotionally balanced to sail through this never-ending storm, and to deal with very high levels of stress.

The problem is that it is very hard to teach emotional intelligence and resilience. It is not something you can learn by reading a book or listening to a lecture.

Don’t trust the adults too much. Don’t trust technology too much.

So you have no choice but to really get to know yourself better. Know who you are and what you really want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself.


Money in a business is like gas in your car. You need to pay attention so you don’t end up on the side of the road. But your trip is not a tour of gas stations.


I think we need to teach kids two things:

  1. How to lead
  2. How to solve interesting problems

Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead and out-solve the other people.

The way you teach kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then, don’t criticize them when they fail. Because kids aren’t stupid. If they get in trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they’ll just go back to getting an A by memorizing what’s in the textbook. I don’t care how you did on your vocabulary test. I care about whether you have something to say.


Wasn’t much glory in the hit bottom moment. I was in a prison cell watching 7 guys share the same syringe that has been cut down and stored inside a convict’s ass, shooting up suboxone that also came out of someone’s ass, using water form a prison toilet. Looked wonderful at the time, and it was the first time I though “if you think this looks good you have a real problem mate”


The most important relationship that you have in life is the one that you have with yourself. Voices of other people will come and go, but the voice in your head is never going away. If you have an unpleasant relationship with the voice in your head, you’re probably going to have unpleasant life.


Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met in my life. And the thing with focus is, it’s not this thing you aspire to, or you decide on Monday, “You know, I’m going to be focused.” It’s a every minute, “Why are we talking about this? This is what we’re working on.” You can achieve so much when you truly focus.

What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you end up saying no to it because you’re focusing on something else.


No woman is going to save you. You have to save yourself. Once you are in a good place mentally, emotionally, physically and financially dating becomes 100x easier.


The future has many names. For the weak, it’s unattainable. For the fearful, it’s unknown. For the bold, it’s ideal.


However, if I were ever to go back, I would choose not to. It was that difficult. As much as we accomplished, we worked just as much. Every movement and CS I would take gave me immense stress. But at the same time, due to everything we put in, I knew victory was ours. Right before the World Finals, we ate with Coach Kkoma. We were so certain we were going to win and I said, “It wouldn’t make sense if we lost. If we lose, it means God has abandoned us.”

After 2016, a very daunting thought came to mind. “If I keep living like this, I am going to die.” I even thought to myself “How long will I have to live like a machine for?”


Trước hết ta phải hiểu tính tôn kính đức hạnh trong quan niệm chính trị của con người Trung Quốc. Đối với một nhà chính trị, người Trung Quốc thường đặt câu hỏi: Người ấy đức hạnh ra sao trước hết? Những thắc mắc về lý luận tư tưởng đều chỉ là phụ.

Đức là gì? Các cổ thư giảng rằng: Đức, đắc dã (Đức là cái điều mình được) nhưng được cái gì? Cái nghĩa “được” trong chữ Đức của người phương Đông hiểu với một tính cách tuyệt đối lý tưởng hoá. Đời sống chẳng có cái gì gọi là “Được” cả bởi vì rồi cũng dẫn đến cái chết. Tiền tài hay hết thảy mọi thứ làm thoả mãn cho dục vọng của ngũ quan, khi đã tới gần sự chết thì cũng chỉ là không.

Vậy thì ở đời thế nào gọi là mình đã được? Hãy nghe Mạnh Tử nói: “Con người đến với thế giới, mở mắt ra nhìn năm màu bảy sắc, mê loạn nên trước cần phải biết ta sẽ được cái gì mà không được cái gì? Nhiều kẻ cứ lầm tưởng rằng phải lấy ở bên ngoài mới gọi là được, và vì thế kẻ ấy sinh ra không chịu cho bao giờ. Thiên hướng về dục vọng ngũ quan nên ham lấy, càng lấy thì càng làm hẹp cái vòng sống của mình để rồi tiêu tan vào sự chết. Chỉ có những người biết “cho” nhiều, mở rộng vòng sống của mình ra vô tận thì mới mong bất diệt được.”

Quan niệm ấy đi vào chính trị, người Trung Quốc liền phân ra hai loại chính trị tiểu nhân và đại nhân. Chính trị của đại nhân là đem thân mình ra cung hiến cho xã hội. Phát huy cái chính trị của đại nhân lên cao hơn gọi là Thánh nhân. Như vậy mới thật là Đức.

Cổ nhân nhận rằng Đức có tám thể:

  1. Nhân
  2. Nghĩa
  3. Lễ
  4. Tín
  5. Thứ
  6. Nhẫn
  7. Trung
  8. Dũng

Người xưa chủ trương “Mười năm đèn sách, mười năm nuôi khí chất.” Mười năm đèn sách đem lại Trí, mười năm nuôi khí chất tạo thành đức nhẫn. Đức nhẫn quan hệ vô cùng đối với chính trị.


Độc Cô Cầu Bại thì ngửa mặt lên trời thấy mình vô đối, lên núi tập luyện và đã đạt tới mức “kiếm khí giết người”, võ công có thể rất cao nhưng vẫn còn tính ganh đua, vẫn nghĩ võ thuật là để xưng bá thiên hạ, vẫn còn “sát khí” trong khi giao tranh.

Chỉ có Trương Tam Phong là thực sự không còn coi võ học là thứ để ganh đua, để tranh giành “thiên hạ đệ nhất”, và ông còn sáng tạo ra những môn võ công của riêng mình. Môn võ công lấy nhu thắng cương có lẽ là điều độc nhất vô nhị trong võ học.

Thừa nhận Trương Tam Phong là mạnh nhất, Kim Dung có lẽ muốn nhắn nhủ cho các fan của ông rằng, võ học tinh hoa nhất là lấy tĩnh chế động, lấy nhu chế cương, và những người giỏi nhất là những người không quan trọng rằng… ai là người giỏi nhất.


What are some of the best ways to become an interesting person?

Keep learning, keep seeking out new experiences.

Big picture: engage in the world with a mindset of curiosity, rather than judgment.


Don’t take it personally. How people treat you has less to do with your actual mistakes, and almost all to do with how they treat themselves. I’ve found that the harshest criticizers are people who are constantly criticizing themselves, and often in complete denial of it, too. Imagine that they are yelling those things at themselves, not at you.

Take a deep breath. Take a step back, zoom out from the situation. The more caught up in the heat of the moment you are, the more emotional you’re going to get. The more you can “zoom out” and look at the big picture, the calmer you’ll be.

Work on your own confidence, and don’t criticize yourself so much. If you have a strong confidence with yourself, any mistake you make doesn’t seem so bad. But if you have low confidence in yourself, every mistake you make feels like proof that you are a total mess-up.


Something I learned in private school is that everyone knows everyone else and, for the most part most jobs, acceptances, scholarships, etc… were done behind the scenes through connections.


The young man knows all the rules; the old man knows all the exceptions.


The only sin she’s committed is being familiar.


Don asserts that the guy is cheating because he’s lacking something and is desperate to find it, a belief he has because that’s what he is the entire show: a depressed and scared person constantly running away from what he has, looking to find something new to fill the hole inside of him over and over. That’s why he’s such a good ad man, because he understands how people crave a fix to their sorrows, and his brand of emotionally connected ads promise a cure. But Joan asserts that the man who cheats isn’t cheating to fill a temporary want of his, but that his behavior and state is just part of who the person is. You can see how this affects Don and why he leaves abruptly after this, because what Joan is saying is that despite the happy face he puts on for his new marriage to Megan and the happiness that they discuss earlier in the scene, Don can’t change the person he is deep down.


There is no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible). If you are unlucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. While I do not recommend the latter experience, it does increase one’s respect for the tenuous condition of sanity, as well as one’s compassion for people who suffer from mental illness.


However, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering consciousness. Teach a person to meditate, pray, chant, or do yoga, and there is no guarantee that anything will happen. Depending upon his aptitude or interest, the only reward for his efforts may be boredom and a sore back. If, however, a person ingest 100 micrograms of LSD, what happens next will depend on a variety of factors, but there is no question that something will happen. And boredom is simply not in the cards. Within the hour, the significance of his existence will bear down upon him like an avalanche. This guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry.


Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying, and some people probably shouldn’t spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one’s own skin and suffering less there.


The fact that both the Mayans and the Aztecs used psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice, makes any idealistic connection between plant-based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naive.


If you operate on the assumption that people will benefit from using your products and services, then sales is entirely about helping others. Done well, selling today is helping people identify and address their needs in order to achieve their goals: to improve efficiency in a business, to make something easier, to live a better life in retirement, to be safer, live longer, and so forth. In this way, sales is not simply an appendage of the organization responsible for distribution, but the conduit for showing how your clients benefit from your products or services.


How you sell is a vital part of the value you create for the customer. While conducting research and observing my own sales teams, I’ve sat in over 1,000 meetings between sellers and buyers, and one of the things I’ve observed is that successful salespeople don’t “pitch” and they don’t “close.” That is, they don’t prattle on about how great their offerings are, and they’re not pushy (what some have called the “spray and pray” method).

What they do instead is engage in a mutual dialogue about what a client is trying to accomplish, and then apply the solutions offered through their products or services to the client’s needs. The very best ask smart questions, helping clients to see problems they didn’t even know they had or opportunities around the corner.


“I can’t afford it.”

“I don’t have the time.”

… almost always means, “this is not a priority.”

When we care, it’s amazing how much we can get done. One way to choose to care is to be clear about your priorities, which means being clear in your language.


To really drive the point about how many digits of Pi are useful, NASA only uses 15 for calculating interplanetary travel. At 40 digits, you could calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe with an accuracy that would be off by less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom.


It’s interesting that Earth always has been and always will be stuck between Love (Venus) and War (Mars).


A bar of iron costs $5, made into horseshoes its worth is $12, made into needles its worth is $3,500, made into balance springs for watches, its worth is $300,000. Your own value is determined also by what you are able to make of yourself.


All the benefits in life come from compound interest - money, relationships, habits - anything of importance.

If you don’t see going with someone for 10 years, don’t even work with them for a day. Think long-term goal with long-term people.


  • You are terrible at this
  • That’s why I keep practicing
  • Others are much more successful than you
  • Those guys work hard. They inspire me
  • But you want to throw it all away and give up, right?
  • Oh, several times a day! But then I push on
  • I’m… trying to discourage you
  • Ha! My own brain says much worse stuff to me

The movie is about a man who finds himself living the same day over and over again. He is the only person in this world who knows this is happening, and after going through periods of dismay and bitterness, revolt and despair, suicidal self-destruction and cynical recklessness, he begins to do something that is alien to his nature. He begins to learn.


We see that life is like that. Tomorrow will come, all we can do about it is be the best person we know how to be. The good news is that we can learn to be better people. There is a moment when Phil tells Rita, “When you stand in the snow, you look like an angel.” The point is not that he has come to love Rita. It is that he has learned to see the angel.


An international order accepted by all of the major powers is “legitimate” whereas an international order not accepted by one or more of the great powers is “revolutionary” and hence dangerous.


Steph Curry, the highest paid NBA player, makes $37M a year. That’s a lot of money. But Joe Lacob, the majority owner of Golden State, is worth $1.5B. He could pay Steph Curry to play for 30 years if he never made another dollar. And Lacob isn’t even in the top 10 wealthiest NBA team owners. Stanley Kroenke, owner of the Nuggets, could pay the entire salary of two Golden State, indefinitely, just off the interest from his wealth.


Super rich people get even richer, while making talented poor people rich, by paying the talented people to fight in arenas and selling tickets to poor people.


GPA does not equal intelligence.

It’s a measure of your ability to “play the game” of school via things like weighted courses. It measures obedience, not intelligence.


If you want to make long-term impact, build the roads.

Stewart Brand points out that if you compare two maps of downtown Boston - from 1860 and 1960, for example - virtually every single building has been replaced. Gone.

But the roads? They haven’t changed a bit.

That’s because systems built around communication, transportation and connection need near-unanimous approval to change. Buildings, on the other hand, begin to morph as soon as the owner or tenant decides they need to.

When creating an organization, a technology of any kind of culture, the roads are worth far more than the buildings.


I constantly get out of my comfort zone. Looking cool is the easiest way to mediocrity. The coolest guy in my high school ended up working at a car wash. Once you push yourself into something new, and whole new world of opportunities opens up. But you might get hurt, in fact, you will get hurt. But amazingly when you heal - you are somewhere you’ve never been.


As an adult, validation is more like a drug we use to distract ourselves away from our own underlying state. It’s why emotionally unavailable people can be so attractive.


If things but make impression enough on you, you will not forget them; and thus, as you go through life, your store of experiences becomes greater, richer, more and more available. But to this end you must cultivate attention - the art of seeing, the art of listening. You needn’t trouble about memory, that will take care of itself; but you must learn to live in the true sense. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention; and, bear in mind most of all, that your spiritual nature is but a higher faculty of seeing and listening - a finer, nobler way of paying attention. Thus must you learn to live in the fullest sense.


I think in situations like these, the question is: do you actually like this person, that you only hung out with once for a few hours and never saw again? Or do you like the concept of this person that you’ve built up in your head since?

Sometimes without the person actually around, being a human with all their quirks, it’s really easy to build them up into a great “what if?” But the charm of the magic “what if?” is that there’s no answer, and with no answer, there’s only possibilities, and with only possibilities, you pick the ones you like the best. Until finally they’re not a person–just a fantasy you made for yourself.


Người vá trời lấp bể Kẻ đắp luỹ xây thành Ta chỉ là chiếc lá Việc của mình là xanh


The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.


It fell to Tywin to restore House Lannister to its proper place. Just as it fell to him to rule this realm, when he was no more than twenty. He bore that heavy burden for twenty years and all it earned him was a mad king’s envy. Instead of the honor he deserved, he was made to suffer slights beyond count, yet he gave the Seven Kingdoms peace, plenty and justice. He is a just man.


Why you shouldn’t stay in 5-star hotels:

Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world.


But the grander claims made on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses or hears about in graduation ceremonies, tend to imply that colleges and universities are more than mere factories for turning out technocrats and industrialists. The suggestion is that they have a yet higher task to fulfil: they may turn us into better, wiser and happier people.

As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ’The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’ Or, to go back to Matthew Arnold, a proper cultural education should inspire in us ‘a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery’. At its most ambitious, he added, it should engender nothing less than the ‘noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it.’


If you’re in a relationship and you believe that the grass is greener on the other side, that you need a new partner to make you happy, you’re wrong.

The grass is greenest where it’s watered.

Yes, you need to make sure you selected the right partner.

But oftentimes, people will leave relationships because they think their partner is the problem even though they are the ones who aren’t investing in a relationship.

The grass is never greener on the other side of the fence, it’s greener where you water it.

If you’re in a toxic relationship right now, you don’t need another relationship. You need to work on yourself so that you can attract the right partner.


My best investment is the investment I made in myself.

My teacher taught me that the greatest investment you can ever make is in your own growth because from that, everything else expands. I always tell people to work harder on yourself and at your job. Invest in yourself.


The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated: In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.


This breaks down to the power of belief. When you believe in yourself, you will have to confidence to do things that you would normally shy away from. When you believe in yourself, you become a different being entirely.

With that being said, it is important for you to recognize the difference between exuding confidence and arrogance. Arrogance comes when you overly push your ideals and force your personality onto others. Confidence comes when you are sure of who you are and you no longer need the validation from others to enforce that.


Do you envy someone who is popular at work, invited to parties, and spoken of in social circles? If they attract love because of positive character qualities, be glad for them. If they attract attention because of negative character qualities, be glad you don’t share them.

Do not expect to equal anyone in effect without putting forth a similar effort. A person who rarely leaves home, who doesn’t converse with, praise, and encourage others, will not attract friends.

Everything has its price. How much does lettuce cost? If you are unwilling to pay a dollar for lettuce, yet you envy the man who has a bagful of lettuce because he paid five dollars, you are a fool. Do not imagine he has gained an advantage over you — he has his lettuce, you have your coins.

So, if you have not been invited to a party, it is because you haven’t paid the price of the invitation. It costs social engagement, conversation, encouragement, and praise. If you are not willing to pay this price, do not be upset when you don’t receive an invitation.

Do you have anything good in practice of the invitations? Yes — you have the pleasure of not making small talk with people you don’t really like, not praising someone you don’t admire, and not mingling with lackeys.


In 1999, Iran mooted pricing its oil in euros, and in late 2000 Saddam made the switch for Iraqi oil. In early 2002 Bush placed Iran and Iraq in the axis of evil. If the other OPEC countries had followed Saddam’s move to euros, the consequences for Bush could have been huge. Worldwide switches out of the dollar, on top of the already huge deficit, would have led to a plummeting dollar, a runaway from US markets and dramatic upheavals in the US.


All serious mountaineers have big egos. You cannot take on the risks and constant suffering of big mountains without one. We may talk like Buddhists, but don’t be fooled, we’re actually hard-driving narcissists.


In 2010, half the world’s mismanaged plastic waste was generated by just five Asian countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.

Let’s say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe. You would still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans. If you want to do something about this, you have to go there, to these countries, and deal with the mismanaged waste.


Are there other, wholly different solutions to such challenges that ingenious scientists will devise or, as is even more likely, stumble across? That possibility keeps scientists and engineers laboring in their laboratories day and night, seven days a week. Perhaps Adam Smith was right: those driven purely by curiosity and by a willingness to ask seemingly irrelevant questions will discover the substances that shape the course of history. We saw how the printing process benefited from capabilities developed by Flemish artists; perhaps new visions will emerge from a union of art, engineering, and science, all of which, as the American sculptor David Smith reminds us, share common goals. Whoever it is must have the ability to combine, as Adam Smith put it, “the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.” Upon that ability human civilization has always depended.


When you read accounts of Greek military campaigns, and accounts of Greek generals debating strategy and tactics, you’ll never find a single reference to a map. Instead, space is conceptualized as a number of known routes from one location to another; as a succession of conjoined territories occupied by different peoples; as a number of days’ marching or sailing; as the area around notable features, like mountains, rivers, cities or sanctuaries; and as ground where an army can or cannot pass or deploy for battle. In other words, space is not defined in terms of abstract schematics, but in terms of observed reality and relevant knowledge. If a Greek general needed information about terrain, he would seek out a local guide. If he needed to plan a campaign, he would rely on common knowledge about the distance to the target and the roads one took to get there.


Happiness is just having something to look toward to.


The other night, a friend tells me he just doesn’t understand poetry, which is something I hear all the time when I tell people I am a poet. Which is a thing I get in that we are taught to strive for understanding when it comes to art. But it is also a thing I don’t get. You don’t listen to music or look at a painting and demand to understand it. You feel something or you don’t. I could work to understand something, but that’s not the only point or the point at all.


When he talks to Ned about Lyanna, he has this idealized image of her but that was truly not Lyanna’s personality. Even Ned says that Robert does not see the wolf blood that she has. In the end, Robert truly does not know who Lyanna really was. He loved her beauty and this image he had of her but didn’t love the real person.

Robert puts Lyanna up on a pedestal because she was the only thing Robert could not have. He won the seven kingdoms, he gets drop dead gorgeous Cersei, but he still fantasizes about a woman he never really knew.


Robert understood one important thing: loyalties are fluid. An enemy is only an enemy right now. Change the political situation — which Robert was doing — and he won’t be your enemy anymore. The Kingsguard’s job was to guard the king; Barristan wasn’t about to slice Robert’s throat as soon as he got better, because Robert wasn’t his enemy, just his opponent. Same thing with all the other lords. Robert couldn’t possibly blame them for siding with their king over an usurper. Robert’s beef was not with the Reach or the Tyrells but with Rhaegar Targaryen. If the Tyrells were defeated and could be talked into changing their support, that’s much better than finishing them for really no reason.


I read somewhere that GRRM intended the story to be effectively the aftermath of the typical fantasy story. If you look at Robert’s Rebellion, it has all the hallmarks of a typical story of some heroes on a righteous mission fighting an obviously bad guy. There are some down turns, but in the end pretty much everything works out and they have an ending that could easily be summed up with “and they lived happily ever after.” They avenged their fallen loved ones and dethroned the tyrant with the main hero ending up as king in his place with a beautiful bride and the adoration of the kingdom. There is even a sequel of them getting the band back together to fight pirates.