Simple yet excellent. Lateral Action presents 8 Fight Club quotes everyone (not just ‘creators’) should live by.
At its core, Fight Club is about living the life you truly want to live, and the hard path to getting there. Tyler helps the story’s nameless hero (usually referred to as Jack) down that path to enlightenment, so maybe what Tyler says can help the rest of us as well.
- “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
- Again: “No fear. No distractions. The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.”
- “I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”
- “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
- “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis.”
- “People do it everyday, they talk to themselves… they see themselves as they’d like to be, they don’t have the courage you have, to just run with it.”
- “Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken.”
- “This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.”
By now I’m sure everyone has watched, listened to, or at the very least heard of, Randy Pausch’s lecture Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams which he gave at Carnegie Mellon University a year ago today (the lecture is more commonly referred to as The Last Lecture).
Since then I’ve watched two more speeches by Pausch which I highly recommend everyone watches: Time Management and his 2008 commencement speech at CMU.
For everything else Pausch, Dr. Gabriel Robins’ website should be your first port of call.
I mentioned the Personal MBA Book List last week, and today have come across this interview between Josh Kaufman and Ben Casnocha, author of My Start-Up Life.
Josh runs the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List — a list of the best business books one would need to read for a comprehensive business education. It’s a terrific resource that’s well worth reviewing. In our exchange, we talk about the list of books and whether recently published ones should be excluded, and then meander into the difference between books offering systems / models and practical advice, and conclude on how prominent a role books should play in the self-education process.
Scott Adams—the author famous for his Dilbert comic—has an interesting take on ambition:
I think ambition is a genetic defect. You can’t have ambition unless you think there is something wrong with the way you are. Ambition is a state of feeling perpetually flawed.
Last month an article appeared in The New York Times Magazine praising how-to websites. Now it’s acting as my personal list of how-to websites, helping teach me everything from Chinese dining etiquette to surviving zombie attacks and plating fettuccine Alfredo.
That reminds me, I need to learn how to do the robot.