Colin Wright > Quotes

“You sell off the kingdom piece by piece and trade it for a horse that will take you anywhere.”
― Colin Wright, My Exile Lifestyle

“You have exactly one life in which to do everything you will ever do. Act accordingly.”
― Colin Wright, Act Accordingly

“Travel can be even better than what you see on TV, but that sense of awe doesn’t stem from being on the biggest yacht or staying in the nicest hotel or finding the perfect, most picturesque cabin. It comes from discovering a part of yourself you didn’t know was there. It comes from seeing the world from a new angle. It comes from meeting new people, experiencing new things, and gasping at the knowledge that you could have gone your whole life never having seen or tried or done any of it.”
― Colin Wright, How to Travel Full Time

“Set deadlines, and make them short. Parkinson’s Law states that your tasks will expand to take up the amount of time allotted for them. Shorten your personal deadlines and be amazed at how you complete all your tasks, regardless!”
― Colin Wright, Start a Freedom Business

“Other people have the right to disagree with you about anything they like. It’s up to you to be mature enough to respect those differences.”
― Colin Wright, How to Be Remarkable

“You have exactly one life in which to do everything you’ll ever do. Act accordingly.”
― Colin Wright

“A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.” -Lee Segall”
― Colin Wright, How to Be Remarkable

“YOU FIRST When entering into relationships, we have a tendency to bend. We bend closer to one another, because regardless of what type of relationship it might be — romantic, business, friendship — there’s a reason you’re bringing that other person into your life, and that means the load is easier to carry if you carry it together, both bending toward the center. I picture people in relationships as two trees, leaning toward one another. Over time, as the relationship solidifies, you both become more comfortable bending, and as such bend farther, eventually resting trunk to trunk. You support each other and are stronger because of the shared strength of your root system and entwined branches. Double-tree power! But there’s a flaw in this mode of operation. Once you’ve spent some time leaning on someone else, if they disappear — because of a breakup, a business upset, a death, a move, an argument — you’re all that’s left, and far weaker than when you started. You’re a tree leaning sideways; the second foundation that once supported you is…gone. This is a big part of why the ending of particularly strong relationships can be so disruptive. When your support system presupposes two trunks — two people bearing the load, and divvying up the responsibilities; coping with the strong winds and hailstorms of life — it can be shocking and uncomfortable and incredibly difficult to function as an individual again; to be just a solitary tree, alone in the world, dealing with it all on your own. A lone tree needn’t be lonely, though. It’s most ideal, in fact, to grow tall and strong, straight up, with many branches. The strength of your trunk — your character, your professional life, your health, your sense of self — will help you cope with anything the world can throw at you, while your branches — your myriad interests, relationships, and experiences — will allow you to reach out to other trees who are likewise growing up toward the sky, rather than leaning and becoming co-dependent. Relationships of this sort, between two equally strong, independent people, tend to outlast even the most intertwined co-dependencies. Why? Because neither person worries that their world will collapse if the other disappears. It’s a relationship based on the connections between two people, not co-dependence. Being a strong individual first alleviates a great deal of jealousy, suspicion, and our innate desire to capture or cage someone else for our own benefit. Rather than worrying that our lives will end if that other person disappears, we know that they’re in our lives because they want to be; their lives won’t end if we’re not there, either. Two trees growing tall and strong, their branches intertwined, is a far sturdier image than two trees bent and twisted, tying themselves into uncomfortable knots to wrap around one another, desperately trying to prevent the other from leaving. You can choose which type of tree to be, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with either model; we all have different wants, needs, and priorities. But if you’re aiming for sturdier, more resilient relationships, it’s a safe bet that you’ll have better options and less drama if you focus on yourself and your own growth, first. Then reach out and connect with others who are doing the same.”
― Colin Wright, Considerations

“Most people who run Freedom Businesses do so in order to achieve (or get closer to achieving) their ideal lifestyle, myself included. I wanted to be financially secure, location independent, well-connected, and in a position to be constantly trying and learning new things.”
― Colin Wright, Start a Freedom Business

“Also: keep in mind, if someone if pirating your ebook, that means they think it’s worth pirating.”
― Colin Wright, Start a Freedom Business

“the process of making things ordinary that truly shakes the world, even if we don’t feel such movements as they happen.”
― Colin Wright, Come Back Frayed

“You can’t make a computer do stuff faster, but you can make it do less work”
― Colin Wright

“Relationships needn’t be irrational to be valuable, romantic, and fulfilling.”
― Colin Wright, Some Thoughts About Relationships

“Male and female are not social constructs, but are real biological categories that do not fall on a spectrum. Humans are sexually dimorphic, and this matters in certain contexts, such as sports.”
― Colin Wright, Panics and Persecutions: 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age

“If you want to find fulfillment with another person, an ideal first step is to become personally, independently fulfilled. Depending on someone else to bring happiness to your life, zest to your day-to-day, and inspiration to your work, is handing off a lot of responsibility; it’s depending on your partner to make you complete.”
― Colin Wright, Some Thoughts About Relationships

“People are very open-minded about new things - as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.” -Charles F. Kettering”
― Colin Wright, How to Be Remarkable

“If the tech-philosophers who write think-pieces about their lifestyle and productivity hacks were ever forced to really consider how they live, why they do the things they do, why they’re trying to achieve ‘passive incomes,’ I bet we’d have a lot of twenty-somethings running around, confused, their startups abandoned, their half-finished apps in programming purgatory. Millions of logo t-shirts would go unprinted, thousands of launch parties would remain unthrown.”
― Colin Wright, Come Back Frayed

“Most Freedom Entrepreneurs eliminate the need for a balance altogether, however, by integrating their work into their life. Rather than doing their best to segregate the disparate aspects of their life, they aim to unify them.”
― Colin Wright, Start a Freedom Business

“Exemplify the ‘right’ you want to see, and allow others to follow. Expecting others to live according to your standards can be just as wrong as the ‘wrong’ things they do.”
― Colin Wright, Act Accordingly

“multitasking reduces the quality of everything you do while also increasing the amount of time it takes to do each task (even if you think you’re good at it, which everyone seems to). The superior alternative is to focus on one task at at time, finish that task, then move on to the next.”
― Colin Wright, Start a Freedom Business

“Travel is unexpected and uncomfortable and often the opposite of what you were expecting. On every level it’s imperfect. And that’s the point. If you want ‘perfect,’ as in a situation that gives you what you’re expecting to get, stay at home.”
― Colin Wright, How to Travel Full Time

“I ache sometimes. I ache with the need for human connection. Contact. Physical contact, mental contact. The desire to touch and be touched, but also to touch someone in a less adjacent way. To touch someone’s life. To be a part of it. To be pulled in and accepted and a part of something. A tile in a mosaic that everyone agrees is stunning to behold. But then I find myself becoming part of such an ecosystem — an integral thread in a tightly-woven tapestry — and cringe with the responsibility. Their woes are my woes. Their tension is my tension. As soon as I have the thing I want so much from afar, I shrink away from the whole ordeal; happy to have been a part of something, but even happier to go and be my own entity again. A table for one. A queen-sized bed pulling half duty.”
― Colin Wright, Coffee with the Other Man

“Confidence is a good start to a good life. Once you have it, you're far more capable of following any path you chose to walk.”
― Colin Wright, Act Accordingly

“All rights reserved, of course, though if you really can’t afford the few dollars to pay for the book, go ahead and read it anyway; life’s too short for DRM. It would be rad if you’d tell other people about this work if you enjoy the stories, though, whether you paid or not. Let it be known that all profits from this book allow me to party like a rockstar, and if you paid for it (despite the overwhelming desire to find a torrent for it somewhere) you’re my fave. Muchas gracias.”
― Colin Wright, How to Be Remarkable

“Perhaps we can allow ourselves to shift toward ‘better for all,’ rather than continuing to fixate on the idea that anyone who doesn’t adhere to our standards of productivity are trash who deserve whatever fate becomes them, even if that fate is made worse by the dogma of more that we’ve forced upon the world.”
― Colin Wright, Come Back Frayed

“Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don’t try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.” -Anthony Robbins”
― Colin Wright, How to Be Remarkable

“Ignorance is a temporary affliction remedied only by asking the right questions.”
― Colin Wright, Act Accordingly

“Let's fail until we don't.”
― Colin Wright, Act Accordingly

“If you want to find fulfillment with another person, an ideal first step is to become personally, independently fulfilled.”
― Colin Wright, Some Thoughts About Relationships

“Everything you do should be purpose-driven, because that means you're choosing each step intentionally.”
― Colin Wright, Act Accordingly