Like the giant nerd I am, I have been trying to find the shared patterns and common principles among the many quotes and excerpts I’ve collected. I’ve managed to create a list of 20 or so, so called wisdom patterns, and I’ll steadily share them here when I’m feeling inspired to write which is not often.
Starting with what I consider the most powerful pattern, which summates to something like “Obsessions win”.
Alternate names I had for this pattern include “Go very deep” and “the power of focus”.
All quotes below are taken verbatim, all mistakes mine.
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Wisdom principle #1 — OBSESSIONS WIN:
One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try. – Paul Graham
Van Gogh didn’t say: Thats just an old chair. He looked, and looked, and looked. He sensed the Beingness of the chair. Then he sat in front of the canvas and took up the brush. – Eckhart Tolle
“It’s tough to be good at something you’re not interested in. It’s nearly impossible to be great at something you’re not obsessed with.” – Shane Parrish
that money and time are the heaviest burthens of life, and that the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use. – Samuel Johnson
For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is a being who is able to completely affirm life: someone who says ‘yes’ to everything that comes their way; a being who is able to be their own determiner of value; sculpt their characteristics and circumstances into a beautiful, empowered, ecstatic whole; and fulfill their ultimate potential to become who they truly are.
“Trust your obsessions. […] You don’t always use your obsessions. Sometimes you stick them onto the compost heap in the back of your head, where the rot down, and attach to other things, and get half-forgotten, and will, one day, turn into something completely usable. Go where your obsessions take you. … Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.” — Neil Gaiman
A single-minded devotion to an idea can spur massive change (but this type of fanatical devotion can also backfire)
TS Eliot observed that “only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
We are strongly biased towards people who are so determined to succeed that they never give up, never quit. — pmarca
The most successful people i know didn’t work the hardest. They took the most risk. – @howard
Here’s how to live: Commit. – Derek Sivers
You can become the world’s best in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else. – Kevin Kelly
Give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky’ is even better advice than it appears on the surface. Luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area—you meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn patterns, etc. – Sam Altman
There are arguments that go in both ways but I’d say yes: it’s beneficial to build an obsession and compulsion with things you want to be better at. Especially if that thing is hard to do because you can overcome the difficulty with brute force
To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, “I am listening to this music,” you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, “I am happy,” or “I am afraid,” you are not being aware of it. – Alan Watts
When you let your mind wander, it wanders to whatever you care about most at that moment. So avoid the kind of distraction that pushes your work out of the top spot, or you’ll waste this valuable type of thinking on the distraction instead. (Exception: Don’t avoid love.) – PG
But when we are at our best, we’re not slogging through. Great people are obsessed and they’re not slogging through either. They are driven. They are motivated. They are deeply, deeply engaged
Once you make a decision, go all in.
Commit fully to your choices. Half-hearted efforts yield half-hearted results.
Indecision only leads to stagnation and missed opportunities.
Stay committed to your goals, even when faced with obstacles and setbacks. Perseverance is single-handedly the most important key to achieving a goals.
-Anil Lulla
“Peter Thiel used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled. You feel like it’s insulting to be asked to do just one thing.
But Peter would enforce this pretty strictly. He’d basically say: ‘I will not talk to you about anything else except for this one thing that I’ve assigned to you. I don’t want to hear about how great you’re doing in this other area. Just focus until you conquer this one problem.’…
The insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve. Roughly speaking, they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high-impact problems for your company but they’re difficult–you don’t wake up in the morning with a solution to them, so you tend to procrastinate…
If you have a company that’s always solving B+ problems, you’ll never create the breakthrough idea because no one is spending 100% of their time banging their head against the wall every day until they solve it” – Keith Rabois
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. – TS Eliot
Seinfeld: I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I’m thinking, could I do something with that?
Howard Stern: That, to me, sounds torturous.
Seinfeld: Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with
“Life punishes a vague wish and rewards a specific ask.” – Tim Ferriss
But the artist cannot look to others to validate his efforts or his calling. If you don’t believe me, ask Van Gogh, who produced masterpiece after masterpiece and never found a buyer in his whole life.
And in that flow, you find yourself doing things not purely for status, but because there’s something in them that’s more meaningful to you. As I’ve written before: “To become truly great at something, you need to be at least a little obsessed with that thing — enough to get lost in the joy of doing it, not the allure of what it could get you.” – Anu Atluru
I see a lot of people with talent but the one thing they don’t have is that just love of doing it for the sake of it. — Rodney Mullen
Since I was 13, there probably hasn’t been a single hour that’s gone by that I’ve been awake where I haven’t thought about YouTube – Mr. Beast
I knew from the age of 13 that this is what I was gonna do until the day I died – Mr. Beast
Obsessions tend to win. Whether sports, a startup, a community, or a movement. Those who are obsessed will almost always, with enough time, beat those who are not
Find what you love and let it kill you – Bukowski
The only thing that will make you happy is to set a goal, then kill yourself to achieve it. I have a theory that the elation you feel is directly proportional to the sacrifices you make. – Dr. Nicholas of Broadcom
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Next wisdom pattern will be “Do it now.”