For nights since my return I’ve been glancing at the time while in bed – 4am and I’m drifting in and out of sleep. Jetlagged and fraklagged – poo has its ways of catching up. After going through the 900 or so unread work-related emails that didn’t make it through the forwarder, sure enough, the [...]
Posts under ‘Personal Development’
Building trust
The most mistrustful of our kings made himself secure mainly by voluntarily surrendering his life and entrusting his liberty to the hands of his foes, showing complete trust in them so that they might learn trust from him… It is an excellent way to win the heart and mind of another man to go and [...]
On experience (VI)
A man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship; for ’tis to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for our [...]
Being true to oneself
I am not so much worried about how I am in the minds of other men as how I am to myself. I want to be enriched by me not by borrowings from others. Those outside us only see events and external appearances… They do not see my mind: they only see the looks on [...]
Kairos, VII
The realisation that I have been becoming a less confident person, in some aspects, is not entirely new. It is more evidently felt when I am engaging people, or set myself on some new task – assignments that may not be altogether alien to my experience. It is an unpleasant realisation, made worse knowing that [...]
On educating children
Frequent commerce with the world can be an astonishing source of light for a man’s judgement. We are all cramped and confined inside ourselves: we can see no further than the end of our noses. When they asked Socrates where he came from he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world’. He, whose [...]
On experience (IV)
When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner [...]
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And [...]
Conversation as an exercise of minds
I embark upon discussion and argument with great ease and liberty. Since opinions do not find me in a ready soil to thrust and spread their roots into, no premise shocks me, no belief turns me, no matter how opposite to my own they may be. There is no idea so frivolous or odd which [...]
On vanity II: Progress
I fear that I will personally lose by the change. My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too. I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first. We are often as stupid when correcting ourselves as others… … I [...]
