7 Thoughts I Can't Escape

Can't run from 'em. Might as well share 'em.

Every day, I post 100+ comments on the internet.

(Yes, sickening. Yes, I know.)

Most of it is on LinkedIn, the platform responsible for my career, my income, my temporary lapses in sanity. Normal stuff.

When you post 100+ comments a day, you return to the same themes and ideas over and over again. It’s cool. It helps you understand how you view the world and it highlights what’s important to you.

• What are you always saying?

• What are you always sharing?

• What are you always thinking about?

Here are 7 thoughts — some of them mine and some of them others’ — that I find myself commenting every week:

1. “To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.

If you’re stuck between two options, ask yourself this:

“If I fail at both, which failure could I live with?”

It’s better to go down swinging than it is to strike out looking.

Live life on your terms. 

2. “They did it, so why can’t I?”

My mental framework for everything career-related.

They did it. And there’s just no way they’re that much better than me. So why can’t I?

(Kanye rapped about this on Touch the Sky, so you know it’s true.)

3. “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.” – Confucius

As my Great-Uncle Armand was fond of saying, “If you have your health, you have everything”.

4.“Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated." – Paul Graham

If you’re overthinking, write about it. Odds are you’re not even overthinking … You just have no idea what you actually think.

Writing solves that.

5. “We suffer more from imagination than from reality.” – Seneca

Or, as Mark Twain put it, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened”.

If you could truly live in the moment, 99.9% of your worries wouldn’t just disappear — they never would’ve existed to begin with.

6. “We are afforded opportunities, experiences, and lifestyles that most only dream about.” 

I believe this comes from “Brotherhood of the Bag” by Rob Shore, but my brother introduced me to the quote.

Most people would kill for what you have.

7. “Be delusional.”

I’m not someone who attributes everything to your mindset. Life has a lot of components.

Skill. Luck. Risk. 

But if you always think rationally, you create an artificial ceiling for yourself.

Once you achieve something delusional, you realize how vast life’s field of opportunity is.

Embrace a bit of selective recklessness. 

Unzip the seams of the matrix. 

Be delusional.