Hello Friend!
Today I picked an insight from Robert Greene and Naval Ravikant.
It teaches us about the power of Reality, what happens when we ignore it, and how to leverage its power.
👤 Authors
💡Nugget
✦ Robert Greene:
Reality has its own power—you can turn your back on it, but it will find you in the end, and your inability to cope with it will be your ruin.
✦ Naval Ravikant:
One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.” This whole time, you’ve been convinced your business is doing great, and really, you’ve ignored the signs it’s not doing well. Then, your business fails, and you suffer because you’ve been putting off reality. You’ve been hiding it from yourself.
“The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
- Richard Feynman
The good news is, the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.
Don’t wait for reality to hit you. Embrace it now and become a “realist”…
✦ Robert Greene:
It is in fact a function of character and fearlessness. Simply put, realists are not afraid to look at the harsh circumstances of life. They sharpen their eye by paying keen attention to details, to people’s intentions, to the dark realities hiding behind any glamorous surface. Like any muscle that is trained, they develop the capacity to see with more intensity.
Your eyes are fixed in the world, not on yourself or your ego. What you see determines what you think and how you act. The moment you believe in some cherished idea that you will hold on to no matter what your eyes and ears reveal to you, you are no longer a realist.
…
Now is the time to stop drifting and wake up—to assess yourself, the people around you, and the direction in which you are headed in as cold and brutal a light as possible. Without fear.
"Reality is my drug. The more I have of it, the more power I get and the higher I feel."
- 50 Cent
💭 Reflections
When reflecting on this, a few things came to mind:
Paragraph from the poem “If”, by Rudyard Kipling:
“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”
“Instead of wondering when our next vacation is, we should set up a life we don’t need to escape from.”
- Seth Godin
"Objective judgement, unselfish action and willing acceptance now at this very moment."
- Marcus Aurelius
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Wishing you a lovely weekend!