The Parable of The Angry Villager

The most successful people I know don't "trust life's timing."

They don't accept the standard pace as the pace they have to go at. They don't let life happen to them. They happen to life.

They figure out what they want, and then they stop at nothing until they get it. It's an intense, relentless, all-consuming pursuit until the mission is accomplished.

They accept nothing short of complete success, because why would they have it any other way?

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Pro Tip: If you want things to move faster, give yourself less time.

Parkinson's Law states that says work expands to fill the time allotted to it.

If you give yourself two weeks to finish something, it'll take two weeks. If you give yourself two hours, it’ll take two hours.

And if you're pushing back on that, here's a question for you: does it defy the laws of physics to go faster? No? Then what are you waiting for?

The enemy of great isn't bad. It's good enough.

I had a mentor once tell me there are two ways to cook dinner:

The first way is to open your fridge, look at the ingredients you have, and then make dinner with what you have.

The second approach is to first ask yourself, "What the heck do I want for dinner?" and then go get the ingredients needed to make what you want happen.

“If you know what you want,” he said. “Why are you settling for anything less than that?”

Writer Jo Johnson on focus:

“I want to be so deep inside my own life that the living of it requires my full attention. no room left for the scroll. no room left for the comparison. no room left for the noise. the full attention demanded by the thing worth dying for is the cure for every modern disease I have been diagnosed with. the attention deficit was never a deficit of attention. the attention deficit was a deficit of something worthy of my attention.”

Investor Naval Ravikant on envy:

“Envy says more about the envious than the envied.”

There's an old story about a monk and his young student who were walking along a dusty mountain path when they passed a man on the road who began hurling insults at the monk.

"You monks are all frauds," the man shouted. "Living off the charity of others while pretending to be wise!"

The student's face flushed with anger. He stepped forward to defend his master, but the monk gently raised his hand to stop him. They kept walking in silence.

The insults continued until they were out of earshot. Finally, the student couldn't contain himself. "Master, how could you let him speak to you that way?"

The monk stopped and turned to his student. "If someone offers you a basket of rotting fish, and you refuse to take it, who must carry the stench home?"

"The one who brought it," the student said.

"Just so," the monk replied. "His words were a gift I chose not to accept. Therefore, they remain with him."

No matter what you do, people will always have an opinion. If you succeed, they'll find ways to invalidate your success. If you fail, they'll whisper "I-told-you-sos" behind closed doors. They'll always find a way to judge the decisions that you made, even if they never had to make them themselves.

It's futile to believe that you can be liked and admired by everyone you meet. I mean, do you even like everyone you meet? The harsh truth is that most people's criticisms and judgments have less to do with you and more to do with their own fears, frustrations, and feelings.

True maturity is the ability to tune out their voices and do what's right for you, even if it doesn't make sense to anyone else.

In March 2000, Amazon's stock had fallen 80% from its peak. The media declared Jeff Bezos a failure. Analysts were openly questioning whether the company would survive the year.

But inside Amazon's headquarters, every single internal metric was improving. Customer satisfaction was climbing, selection was expanding, and operational efficiency was increasing. The stock price was telling one story, but reality was telling a completely different one.

There's an old investing principle that says the market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. The crowd votes on emotion and headlines, but eventually, reality catches up and weighs what's actually true.

Bezos understood that. He ignored the votes and focused on what he could control. By 2010, Amazon was one of the most valuable companies in the world, and the newspapers that had declared him a failure were now writing profiles about his genius.

The people who do remarkable things are almost always willing to be misunderstood for long stretches of time. They're willing to have the news headlines be wrong today so that the history books can be right tomorrow.

And honestly, if people are talking about you, criticizing you, or hating on what you're doing, that's actually a sign you're doing something worth paying attention to. As Aristotle once wrote, "The only way to avoid criticism entirely is to do nothing, be nothing, and say nothing."

Criticism is the tax you pay for doing anything that matters.

As for dealing with the critics and haters themselves, I like to keep a simple rule: never wrestle with a pig. You'll both get dirty, and the pig likes it.

Until next week,

Author of You Can Just Do Things

Ps. Roasted

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