Work hard in silence. Let success be your noise.

You cannot live alone on the fantasies you feed to your mind, eventually you have to touch your life for real, assess and analyze your habits, understand your character, try not to hate yourself for your character as it was shaped when you were very young by circumstances outside of you, and begin learning how to cope with your character, how to build habits that work for you, finish small projects, finish big projects, expose yourself to more uncomfortable situations, assess why you want to leave that friendship before you leave it, raise your anxiety levels on purpose, so that you can grow, raise your work load on purpose, so that you can grow, so that you can build resilience, so that your life expands, and can be experienced by you in full and in reality.

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it. — Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1964

“Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims

Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” — Joan Didion, on self respect