"Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live."
- Randy Pang
"There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful."
- Randy Pang
"Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working."
- Randy Pang
"Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the true worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul... You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you."
- Randy Pang
"Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone. You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy."
- Randy Pang
Very entertainingly written and wizened advice that's much more far reaching than I think Bourdain even realizes.
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
"And I’m not going to tell you here how to live your life. I’m just saying, I guess, that I got very lucky. And luck is not a business model."
- Randy Pang
“I tell him you must be always grateful of the life,” Toni Nadal said. “I think one of the most important things I say always to Rafael is to have a good face. Because in this life, the ball going out is not a very big problem.”
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
"“We say to these young people, ‘We’re going to make a deal with you,’ ” he explains. “ ‘We are not going to pay you a lot of money, but we are going to give you a lot of time off. You’ll always get home before dark. You won’t work weekends, and you’ll have every summer off.’ It’s a terrible message we’re sending that these perks come with their job. What kind of people does that attract to the profession?”"
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.”
- Randy Pang
“Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of...
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- Randy Pang
So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about...
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- Randy Pang
"Lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
"Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness." ... obviously.
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
"Use a decent camera. Go easy on the flash. Own the foreground. Take your picture in the afternoon. Then visit the nearest Apple store. Done."
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
If you've worked with the spineless, you know how frustrating it can be to deal with their poisonous helplessness -- something that's only heightened in a startup where the most important thing you can do is not give up. And you'd better fucking believe that when you come home to a mother battling brain cancer and a father spending every waking hour taking care of her and running his own business, you don't complain, you don't cower, and you most certainly don't quit.
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
"The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”"
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
"I took some photos of my kids naked on a camping trip. A drugstore employee called the police -- and my family's life became a living hell."
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet
"These bold colors contain a subtle message: if you're a young guy and don't make much money, cool. If you're 23 or older and don't make much money, go die in a fire."
- Randy Pang
from Bookmarklet