Quote from Ralph Charell:
Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.
Simimal Quotes:
Think of what you speak, but speak not all that you think.
I was thinking to myself, "If the world were just perfect and you didn't have to ask for anything, if people were just sensitive to all of our needs, that would be much easier."
Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.
In reality, there is no such thing as a “should” or a “shouldn’t.” These are only thoughts that we impose onto reality. The mind is like a carpenter’s level. When the bubble is off to one side—“It shouldn’t be raining”—we can know that the mind is caught in its thinking. When the bubble is right in the middle—“It’s raining”—we can know that the surface level and the mind is accepting reality as it is. Without the “should” and “shouldn’t,” we can see reality as it is, and this leaves us free to act efficiently, clearly, and sanely. Asking “What’s the reality of it?” can help bring the mind out of its story, back into the real world.
People always say what we are looking for is a meaning for life…I don't think that's what we're looking for. I think what we're looking for is the experience of being alive.
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
When getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say.
…we aren’t responsibility for creating all the bad things that happen to us. But we can claim responsibility for the bad things that happen and learn a lot about ourselves by doing so. It all depends on whether you think of responsibility as something you are or as something you do. For us, the onlyuseful way of thinking about responsibility is as something we do. We use an operational definition of responsibility, not a theoretical one: Responsibility is an action you take, not a quality that can be assigned. A judge and jury can assign responsibility to a criminal for an act, but that criminal’s life will not begin to change until he or she makes a conscious choice to take responsibility…
The key point is this: There is tremendous healing power in taking responsibility for something right now in the present, but no healing value in looking back to the past to blame yourself or anyone else.
Thinking well is wise; planning well, wiser; but doing well is the wisest and best of all.
You can actually shift your thinking in such a way as to make a wrong decision or mistake an impossibility.
Thinking is the very essence of, and the most difficult thing to do in, business and in life. Empire builders spend hour-after-hour on mental work… while others party. If you're not consciously aware of putting forth the effort to exert self-guided integrated thinking...then you're giving in to laziness and no longer control your life.
