A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.
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The quality of everything we do: our physical actions, our verbal actions, and even our mental actions, depends on our motivation. That's why it's important for us to examine our motivation in our day to day life. If we cultivate respect for others and our motivation is sincere, if we develop a genuine concern for others’ well-being, then all our actions will be positive.
Habit allows us to go from 'before' to 'after,' to make life easier and better. Habit is notorious - and rightly so - for its ability to direct our actions, even against our will; but by mindfully shaping our habits, we can harness the power of mindlessness as a sweeping force for serenity, energy, and growth.
I don't even remember why I called myself an idiot. I can be very harshly critical of myself. It depends on my mood, and obviously it depends on where I am in my life. Yes, embracing myself - I'm working on that.
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.
Even in a given territory what would work in one city in front of one crowd might not work in front of another crowd. Every crowd is different in what they are looking for and what they'll respond to.
I love the idea of the big life - the life that matters, the life that makes a difference. The life where stuff happens, where people take action. The opposite of the life where the girl can't even speak to the boy she likes; the opposite of the life where the friends aren't even good friends, and lots of days are wasted away feeling bored and kind of okay, like nothing matters much.
In a scholarly manner I have made it a habit to collect different crowd-control manuals, and I read them to the police sort of reminding them of basic tenants of crowd control, such as minimum use of force to effect an arrest. I tell... the police that they may have been put in a dangerous situation by their superiors.
Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate. So practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast." ~
So much of our lives are defined by habit or what the guy next to us is doing, never wondering and knowing who and what we support with our actions, from the detergent Mom always used, to my favorite dish I make... A lot of my life is unexamined habit.
In some ways, Valiant Gentlemen grows out of Tales of the New World, my collection of short stories about explorers who lived "great" lives, but whose experience of it was in the same register as all our lives are - we feel the same extent of human emotion regardless of how exceptional our actions are: nothing is more exceptional than one's own life.
I feel like it's harder to perform in front of a smaller crowd sometimes still than it is a larger crowd.
If you wrote a crummy line or maybe didn't sing to the best of your ability, there's layers of 10 different instruments all working to convey something. In writing prose for the memoir, if it's not working, it's just not working. It's harder to figure out how to fix it.
I remember hearing a radio segment, while working in the studio, that detailed how officials were trying to systematically - and quietly - eliminate individual Planned Parenthood centres throughout the country by tweaking state laws so that it'd be harder and harder and harder for them to operate - and it was working. I was incensed.
When the mind has once formed the habit of holding cheerful, happy, prosperous pictures, it will not be easy to form the opposite habit.
I’m “exceptional”- a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of “gifted” and “deprived” (which used to mean “bright” and “retarded”) and as soon as “exceptional” begins to mean anything to anyone they’ll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression as long as it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. “Exceptional” refers to both ends of the spectrum, so all my life I’ve been exceptional.
You're in there, you're having a match, and you're feeding off that crowd. That's the gasoline that fuels the match, and that's how you make your decisions. If you're not listening to that crowd when you're working, you're missing the biggest part of what working is all about.
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