Josh Terry

Nature is beautiful because everything that isn’t beautiful died. Accepting a certain brutality of nature is extremely important to making the right choices in life. Because we are nature. We’ve learned how to protect ourselves most of the time. But we still observe and judge everything according to the value system of survival. So if…

If you find yourself wishing you could just have a normal day for once I highly recommend you give up. When someone finds themselves wishing for a normal day that never seems to come it means they have a mistaken picture of what a normal day is. Because here you are, something went wrong again,…

A large portion of our perfectionism is risk management. We don’t want to mess up and be kicked out of our tribe and starve to death. But the reality of that actually happening is very low. And the cost of the perfectionism slowing you down is often higher than the risk of being seen. In…

Failure causes depression and success causes anxiety. You’ve got something difficult to deal with in both directions. It’s just a different flavor. And many people would argue anxiety is worse. Success causes anxiety because it’s new. When things are working, you have less information than when they didn’t work. Because you’re not used to things…

There’s an expression in the Navy Seals, “slow is smooth smooth is fast.” The less experience we have investing the faster we want the growth and the less money we have in the portfolio the faster we believe we need to make it. But that’s the exact opposite of any learning process. A student begins…

Your mind wants everything. Candy, success, money, fame… it doesn’t matter. Whatever you find yourself chasing, you’ll find that a part of you wants as much of it as possible. Because the panic of daily life optimizes for good things. It doesn’t optimize lots of good things over time. You have to choose that. When…

Beauty isn’t shallow. Beauty inspires artwork, starts wars, drives people to madness, and to perform acts of heroism and kindness that are beyond imagination. If you ask anyone the meaning of life for long enough, they’ll eventually answer that maybe it’s to experience the cosmic wonder of the universe. Which happens to be terrifying, exhilarating,…

You have to accept that you might hurt people. Not because you want to. Not because you should. But because, in the process of living your life, you must make decisions. And decisions often have unpredictable collateral damages that hurt people. And living in fear of that damage is paralyzing. It stops you from doing…

If you feel like you’re not living because you’re spending all your time disciplining yourself into a functional schedule of work and rest then I can guarantee you’re not as functional as you could be. Because the best ideas, the best rest, and the best work happens when you feel alive. Life is certainly made…

What do you want to do? If you sit down on the floor and ask yourself what you want. You’ll likely come up with a bunch of things that aren’t true desires. They’re just cravings. And after you’ve run through a mental list of chocolate, drugs, coffee, todo lists, and whatever else you automatically reach…