Paris

“We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“So here are my questions and my appeal to you as we talk about a healthy soul. Are you intentional about your friends? Are they helping you? Do you fit together? Yes, I think we should live big. We should draw big circles, be inclusive, be forgiving, and be kind—but we can’t be intimate friends with all seven billion people on this planet. We can’t be close friends with a few thousand people. Probably not even a few hundred people. Realistically, we might be close, intimate friends with only a dozen people. Maybe a few more or a few less, depending on our individual capacities and personalities. So we had better choose those people intentionally, carefully, and prayerfully.”
― Judah Smith, How's Your Soul?: Why Everything that Matters Starts with the Inside You

“My perception was that either I wasn’t good at it or I wasn’t good enough at it. Maybe I felt that I had to be the best at it or be a genius at it for it to make sense for me to continue. Some people seemed to get it more quickly than I did—and you tend to focus on those people and not the ones who are just as lost as you are. “I was excited by the material,” he continued. “But I was humbled by the experience—humbled as in, you sit in the class and you don’t understand and you feel like, ‘I will never be able to understand this!’ And you do problem sets and you understand a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but you always think that the other people in your class understand it a lot better.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild