What would it take for you to willingly fight in a battle you expected to die in?

If you were a soldier being told to fight a battle you knew you would lose, what would you have to hear in order to have a willingness to walk to your death anyways.

Influences: Napoleon, Veterans, Russia, Dragons, and Spartans

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Let's assume you have had your fill of luxury. What next?

If you had all the money and the time in the world, how would you use it? Are we waiting until we have all the time and the money before we consider what is truly meaningful to us, and if we already know what is meaningful to us, is there anything we could be doing now?

Influences: Video Games, The Olympics, and Distractions

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Do you have something you like so much that it compels you to it? If not, it may be within reach.

Are the distractions in your life keeping you from finding out what you actually like? You need to do things in order to find things that you like. Eventually, those things you like can become the tools whereby you can forward a purpose.

Influences: Netflix, College, Boredom, and Karate

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Sometimes following a passion means doing things that are not our passion for a while.

Sometimes, we need to give up what we are passionate about in order to pursue our passion at a later point in time. A starving man will be too distracted to focus on his passions until he has had a chance to eat.

Influences: Retirement, My Mother, Corporate America, and Famous People

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How much of what we think is fed to us by only a few people?

We may not be living in a computer program, but the world we interact with has been largely curated for us. How can we live outside of the algorithms that have been made to influence us? We are given to think there are only ever one or two ways to think about things when there are an infinite number of ways to think about something.

Influences: The Matrix, The Media, A Brave New World, Robinson Crusoe, and Polybius

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Why do we make such efforts to see the other side of the world when we barely know the side we reside in?

Too many of us will spend our life savings going to some obscure place on the other side of the world before we have even gotten to know the place we live. Travel is often just a novelty that people dress up as a life-altering experience to justify it.

Influences: My Grandfather, Rome, and The Middle East

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Sometimes we force oursleves to keep certain beliefs. There is a better way.

Sometimes we come at our beliefs from a place of obligation or fear. What if what we believed could be motivated by what we love? Few things in the Universe we inhabit are actually known to us, which means it is up to us to decide what we think is true. Truth is not always as self-evident as some people would have you think.

Influences: Relationships, Religion, Fear, and Love

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We don't need to trap ourselves into the way we describe ourselves to others.

It is easy to define ourselves and others by the things we like to do or even just the things we do for work. Sometimes these externally given as well as self-given labels can be confining for us because nobody can really be defined by something as simple as what they do in life or what they like.

Influences: Classic Cars, True Grit, and Gone with the Wind

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Hard times are often an opportunity if we choose to embrace them.

When your world is falling apart you may be unhappy, but that crisis can be an opportunity for you to prioritize what actually matters to you. Anything we have attained in life is something we didn’t have at some point in time. As painful as loss can be, we can turn it into wisdom and start over with a better perspective.

Influences: My Father, My Business, Corporate America, Marie Kondo, and Cool Hand Luke

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What menu did life hand you and should you be asking for another?

Sometimes when you are told to choose between A and B, the right answer is actually C. We don’t need to be fooled into thinking that our options in life are so limited.

Influences: Chinese Restaurants, Prisons, Homeless People, and News Organizations

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