Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You

The second type is called reactive discipline. It’s the ability to control your reactions to the events that bombard you all day. If you’re a sugar junkie and someone offers you a cookie, you need reactive discipline to refuse. If someone cuts you off in traffic, you need reactive discipline to keep from responding with rage. When you lose control,

nothing new can be brought into the world in a state of complete certainty. Creating requires you to go into the unknown.

We have forgotten that time is sacred.

Being emotionally independent doesn’t mean you don’t care about others or don’t need them, just that you don’t rely on them to give you things you can only give yourself.

Nightly Review Reserve ten minutes before bed to review, in writing, the actions taken during the day and the ones you want to commit to for tomorrow. Anything written down becomes more serious, and you are less likely to lie to yourself about how much you’ve done.

Remember: whatever you are creating, you are not creating alone. Everything new is a co-production between you and the life forces of the universe. A correction means you approached these higher forces in the wrong way. You may discover you are a novelist, not a screenwriter, or that you need to start a different kind of business. Co-creating with

To the ancients, time was a gift of the gods, to be treated with awe and reverence. Elders were respected precisely because they had aged in the stream of time. Time was something higher than the individual, something not to be controlled but to be appreciated. In the sacred view of time, all good things come as part of a rhythmic process, whether

Be honest. Your own life experiences have been far from ideal. But what you have experienced is what is real, not what you would like to experience. In short, the nature of reality is this: Life includes pain and adversity. The future is uncertain. Accomplishment of any kind requires discipline. You are not special. No matter what you do, you canno

Life is a struggle. It’s human nature to want a reward for our pain and effort. Most of the time we are rewarded, but there is no certainty about when the reward will come or what it will be. This is the law of the universe, and it requires us to have faith in the future. But X tells us we’re special, and we needn’t be subject to the law. We have a