Here are some new angles, forged in the same fire but without the worn-out handles:
Keep the blade sharp.
Clichés are rust.
- Marriage isn’t a comfort-zone destroyer; it’s a mirror that keeps getting closer. One day you realize the person staring back with mild contempt is you, just older and married to someone who now knows all your shortcuts.
- Hindsight is a tax audit. Foresight is placing bets before the rules are written. Most people spend their lives preparing brilliant answers to yesterday’s questions.
- Talent gets you interviewed. Temperament decides whether you get the corner office or the exit interview.
- Passion + Profession = Summit is the fairy tale. Reality: Passion + Profession + Tolerance for 10-15 years of looking slightly ridiculous = Summit. The mountain doesn’t care about your feelings; it only counts footsteps.
- The stronger your TGIF reflex, the louder your Sunday-night dread. That’s not a job; that’s a slow-acting poison with weekends off.
- Small cracks don’t stay small; they become the new normal. First you accept the dripping tap, then the warped floorboard, then the relationship that leaks love in the same spot every month. Civilization is basically people agreeing to ignore bigger and bigger cracks.
- A real professional doesn’t need supervision because the harshest supervisor already lives inside the skull and never clocks out.
- Most people don’t lack ideas. They lack the willingness to be temporarily incompetent long enough for the idea to grow legs.
- Success is just failure that refused to announce itself publicly.
- The box isn’t the problem. The problem is that most people spend their lives decorating the inside of the box and calling it “thinking outside.”
Keep the blade sharp.
Clichés are rust.