To argue, to complain, or worse, to just give up, these are choices. Choices that more often than not, do nothing to get us across the finish line.

You know what’s better than building things up in your imagination? Building things up in real life.

Certain things in life will cut you open like a knife. When that happens—at that exposing moment—the world gets a glimpse of what’s truly inside you. So what will be revealed when you’re sliced open by tension and pressure? Iron? Or air? Or bullshit?

In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

Take the trouble you’re dealing with and use it as an opportunity to focus on the present moment.

With a business, we take most failures less personally and understand they’re part of the process.

Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

There is always a countermove, always an escape or way through. No one said it would be easy and of course the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it.

I know you had nothing to do with the injustice that brought me to this jail, so I’m willing to stay here until I get out. But I will not, under any circumstances, be treated like a prisoner—because I am not and never will be powerless.

In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer.

Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.

A man’s job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able—always remembering the results will be infinitesimal—and to attend to his own soul.

Focus on the moment, not the monsters that may or may not be up ahead.

The worst is yet to come.

It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head.

Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.

There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

Like any good school, learning from failure isn’t free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over.