Imagine going straight from being on vacation to starting up a complex refugee rescue mission under the nose of the Nazis – with no prior experience and no preparation. That was 29 year-old stock broker Nicholas Winton’s entrepreneurial story.
Author: James Walpole
James Walpole is a writer, startup marketer, intellectual explorer, and perpetual apprentice. He opted out of college to join the Praxis startup apprenticeship program and currently manages marketing and communications at bitcoin payment technology company BitPay. He writes daily at jameswalpole.com.
You Will Never Succeed If You Can’t Forgive Yourself
“Forgive yourself.” I used to think that this was advice for the weak. Even now it seems like an easy way out from guilt or failure. But I’m learning something about growth and improvement: getting back on the horse after failure is half the battle. And for any person trying to mount back up after a failure, the greatest obstacles are usually just guilt or shame.
What If I Become Evil?
Many people (enough to leave an impression) have worked hard for the good – and then fallen. They become jaded, power-hungry, cruel, hateful, spiteful. They become bitter at the things they work so hard for, and so they turn to destroying those things. We all know there’s a chance of that for any of us.
Getting Back on the Horse: The Habit That Makes All Habits Possible
All the worry, fear, and anxiety about the all other habits you are aiming for? Direct it on to getting back on the horse. If you can climb back in the saddle again and again and again and again, none of the habit-killers can stop you.
Quarter-Life Crises Are Good For You
We need a good hard slap in this day and age to remind ourselves that life is short. We need a good reminder that life is passing us by and life will pass us by – comfortably – if we don’t do anything about it.
How Hard Would It Be To Enslave You?
Do you believe you’re free? Ask yourself how hard it would be for someone to enslave you – politically, emotionally, financially, physically, relationally, mentally.
Why Be Good? One (Self-Interested) Reason
Remember when you helped that poor person, visited that sick person, comforted that lonely person? I doubt you went out afterwards seeing more of the badness in humanity and the world. We control our experience of life and program it with our actions, so we benefit by choosing to cast clear light.
Your Past Should Look Worse in Hindsight
I’ve been spending too much time lately worried about my narrative of the past. When things have been hard, it can be especially tempting to want to hold on to a rosy vision of the past. You want to be able to pat yourself on the back for some things, after all. It can be…
You Probably Don’t Know Your Greatest Fears
Maybe the things we fear most are not the things that scare us, but the tasks which we do not imagine to be possible. And it’s only when we push the limits of the possible that we can learn more about these deeper fears.
A Tip of the Hat to the Forgotten Defenders of 1939-40
War is an evil, but it takes some virtue to put up resistance to tyranny. So there is some virtue to remembering the people who resisted Germany on April 9th, 1940, and on all of the ill-fated defensive fronts of 1939-40.