Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

...

Sun Tzu: Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
(...)
The alternative to hard work is hard decisions.

Hard work is absence of strategy. Or rather, it is an avoidance of strategy. I am working hard because I am avoiding hard decisions. Instead of making decisions — about what is important and what isn’t, about what needs to be done now and what can be done later, what is and isn’t working — I am choosing to do everything.

I had a self-destructive pattern in college that illuminates this principle. At the start of every semester, I would look at the courses on offer, get interested in too many, and take more than I should. A month or two later, an oppressive load of assignments would prompt a crisis, in which I had to finally confront the decision I had put off in the first place: which courses mattered?

I could either drop no classes, suffer the oppressive load of assignments, compromise on quality, get worse grades, and put my GPA in jeopardy, or I could drop classes, enjoy myself more, produce higher quality work, get better grades, and maintain my GPA.
In other words, I could either keep working hard or make hard decisions.

Freeway Rick Ross

George Hotz / geohot

His online presence

...