12 Rules for Life

3.You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).

4.Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

5.In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.

6.The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.

7.listen to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.

8.Always place your becoming above your current being.

9.People organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves.

10.It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself.

11. What you aim at determines what you see.

12. If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.