Words I Needed Last Week 6/12
Action, on your own behalf, is the antidote.
Words I saved, read, wrote down, and savored last week. From making the unconscious conscious to action being the antidote, to the slow killer of convenience, to the ultimate touchstone of friendship.
Happy Monday, friends.
—Nneka
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.”
—Carl Jung
“Perfectionism is not as much the desire for excellence, as it is the fear of failure couched in procrastination.”
—Dan Miller
“Action, on your own behalf, is the antidote to traumatic feelings of helplessness.”
—Lindsay C. Gibson, “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”
“Being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks – the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?
Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place.”
—Tim Wu
“Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.”
—Rollo May
"I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.”
—Charles Bukowski
“Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something. There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.”
—James Clear
**If you’re bored with the current landscape of trending sounds and templated content, I beg you to make something different. there must be a counterweight. your art is worth creating, worth sharing.
“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
—David Whyte
These were all amazing to read. First time in awhile I’ve been compelled to read the entirety of something, but every quote nourished me in some way. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you for sharing these words - such helpful quotes. I took action and signed up for a creative writing class that I’ve been wanting to take for a while.