Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

Power is competence.

If you fulfill your obligations every day you don’t need to worry about the future.

It’s better to do something badly than to not do it at all.

Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.

You’re not everything you could be, and you know it.

The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.

Face the demands of life voluntarily. Respond to  a challenge, instead of bracing for catastrophe.

The way that you make people resilient is by voluntarily exposing them to things that they are afraid of and that makes them uncomfortable.

Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, ‘He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.‘

If you’re going to be successful you need to be smart, conscientious, and tough.

The successful among us delay gratification and bargain with the future.

Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn.

Be grateful in spite of your suffering.

The truth is something that burns, it burns off deadwood and people don’t like having their deadwood burnt off often because they’re 95% deadwood.

You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it.

It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

Chris George is an Ottawa-based government affairs advisor and wordsmith, president of CG&A COMMUNICATIONS. Contact: ChrisG.George@gmail.com.