Mikes Blog

Easy is not worth it
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Easy is overrated. The best option is not usually the easiest option.

It’s easy to complain but much better to solve the problem you’re complaining about. It’s easy to wish for the outcome you desire but better to take action and make it happen.

Doing only what’s easy won’t improve your skills or leave you with any lasting sense of accomplishment. The easy path is not the most interesting or fulfilling one.

The most meaningful times are not the easiest times. Much of what makes life good comes to the forefront when life is difficult.

Easy is a promise that rarely lives up to expectations. What’s easy in the moment often leads to regret over time.

Be wary of giving up time, opportunity, meaning and value in exchange for ease. Usually, easy is not worth the cost, and you have a lot of better options.

— Ralph Marston

Work on it
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How do you transform a pile of rocks into a magnificent castle? You work on it.

How do you transform a rough idea for a story into a blockbuster motion picture? You work on it.

Your life and your world are filled with untapped potential. Turning that potential into value is a matter of time, intention, focus, and effort.

Achievement is relatively rare. Yet the raw materials for it are so abundant you cannot avoid encountering them.

The path from what’s commonly available to what’s highly desirable goes through you and others like you. There’s a whole world of physical reality, ideas, needs, concepts, energy, techniques, and much more to work with.

Value is created by effort. Think of all you can do right here, right now, to make some.

— Ralph Marston

Possible things
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When you take risks you won’t always get positive results. But when you avoid taking risks you’ll never get any results at all.

You can’t be certain about what will happen tomorrow until it happens, tomorrow. Yet the only time you can act is right now, today.

Pretty much never will you get access to a sure thing that has any significant value. However, every moment of every day is filled with possible things.

Life’s most consequential advances are built not on what’s guaranteed, but on what’s possible. What’s possible has been good enough for everyone who has ever lived, and it’s certainly good enough for you.

Get yourself well informed, mix in some diligence and common sense. Then take a chance on what’s possible.

Not every possible thing you attempt will come to fruition. Yet when you persist, enough of them will.

— Ralph Marston

Magical world
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Imagine a world in which everything seems to happen by magic. In this world, your needs and desires are provided to you with little to no effort on your part.

Food of your choosing is magically delivered to your table. Shampoo, toothpaste, clothing, shoes, toys, and anything else you could wish for appear on your doorstep whenever you want.

Garbage and waste are magically whisked away. Limitless hours of entertainment, tailored precisely to your taste, magically and instantly appear at your command.

Such a world is not particularly difficult to imagine. Because with present-day infrastructure and technology, for the most part you are already living in it.

But when desires are automatically satisfied, it leaves you with a gnawing emptiness. And you wonder, when all you ever do is choose from menus, what provides meaning in your life?

What makes anything meaningful is not just having it, but the investment of your time and effort and resourcefulness in it. That, you come to realize, is the real magic.

— Ralph Marston