Atkins For Life Quotes

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

There's no pain in packing up a life you don't remember.

Taking care of yourself means finding a balance that works for you, then having the discipline to maintain that balance.

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die. - Abraham Lincoln

The lesson to me is that you can focus on something going well, or something beautiful, or something interesting -- even amidst terrible times.

When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Though this was all but a fiction of his own, yet it had its desired effect; Atkins fell upon his knees to beg the captain to intercede with the governor for his life; and all the rest begged of him, for God’s sake, that they might not be sent to England.

Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don’t matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions.

Life, at root, is molecular bumbling.

It seemed in life, whenever you were wanted, it was for some discussion or explanation. Silence was just something to be filled.

The trick is people who are most productive tend to say no to things that are unimportant to them and focus on what they believe matters.

Proceeding when there are obvious issues is a dumb thing to do. Even if it’s inconvenient or painful, I’ve learned, I’m better off doing nothing when the only available choice has glaring issues.

I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

In the November 1940 week of nightmares, when mighty German planes bombed London, British bombers retaliated by attacking Berlin, where the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, was pressing Hitler for an answer to just exactly when German forces would invade the British Isles. We had heard of the conference beforehand,' Churchill told Parliament, ' and, although not invited to join in the discussion, did not wish to be entirely left out of the proceedings.

1. Create space. 2. Try not to worry. 3. Don't do really dumb things. 4. Build character and make friends. 5. Care for yourself and others. 6. Laugh. 7. Do what you love. 8. Embrace change. 9. Learn from experience. 10. Have dreams and work towards them. 11. Epilogue. 12. Afterword - the world beyond us. 13. Acknowledgements.

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In other words, just because something happened once doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen again in the same way.

Life, at root, is molecular bumbling.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with. -- Mark Twain

denial – is common. Most of us ignore reality in some facet of our lives. It’s often easier to believe things will somehow solve themselves,

As Winston Churchill said: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

that I wasn’t going crazy. For a long time I thought that this story should begin with what happened to me at the church, when my life

Although I heard From the outset that a meeting Can only mean to part, I gave myself to love for you Unconscious of the coming dawn.

This matters. Real friends - people you trust, respect, laugh with, and can rely on - are a vitally important part of life. No matter how much wealth or fame you accumulate, if you don’t have true friends it’s unlikely you’ll be happy. Sadly I know too many people who have achieved their material goals, but have no friends. As the expression goes: greed is a hole you can never fill

To allow yourself time to think, there are many non- technological tricks to managing information. All of them require you to make choices to focus your energy. I like to set aside blocks of time for specific activities - even to read or chat.

Of course, activity by itself doesn’t equal accomplishment, and certainly not success -- being busy just means being busy. I know many people who work super hard to fill up the spaces in their lives, so they won’t have to think. A wise colleague calls this “numbing out”. They may accomplish their goals, but they’re unlikely to be fulfilled or do truly creative work. I know other people who fill their free time with meaningless activities. They’re also busy, but they neither achieve much, nor are they satisfied.

How many movies have you seen where the hero or heroine quits a job they hate to pursue their life dreams? These movies wouldn’t be made, and they wouldn’t resonate with so many people, if they didn’t contain an important desire that most people deny themselves.

Laugh. We’re all going to be dead anyway some day. So while you should try your hardest to make the most of your life, when something funny happens, when you make a mistake, or even (and perhaps especially) when bad things happen, it’s easier if you can laugh about yourself and the world.

I try to put things into two buckets: one I can do something about and one I can’t. The things I can’t do anything about, I try to ignore. There’s no use, for example, being jealous of other people’s success or good luck; it won’t make me any happier. Nor is there any upside in worrying about a bad situation in which I find myself. There is, however, a lot to be gained from considering how I can move to a better place.

Know yourself. To be happy, you need to pay attention to who you are, what you want, and how you feel, versus staying busy just doing ’stuff,’or doing what other people want or expect you to do. This requires both self awareness and introspection: if you pay attention to how you feel, what you like and what you want (as well as what makes you feel sad, angry, fearful and confused), the world is likely to look quite different. Many people are afraid of being introspective because they feel vulnerable. But without a willingness to open up, you won’t understand yourself and you can’t ultimately be truly happy.

Perhaps nowhere is modern chemistry more important than in the development of new drugs to fight disease, ameliorate pain, and enhance the experience of life. Genomics, the identification of genes and their complex interplay in governing the production of proteins, is central to current and future advances in pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetic information modifies an individual's response to drugs and offering the prospect of personalized medicine, where a cocktail of drugs is tailored to an individual's genetic composition. Even more elaborate than genomics is proteomics, the study of an organism's entire complement of proteins, the entities that lie at the workface of life and where most drugs act. Here computational chemistry is in essential alliance with medical chemistry, for if a protein implicated in a disease can be identified, and it is desired to terminate its action, then computer modelling of possible molecules that can invade and block its active site is the first step in rational drug discovery. This too is another route to the efficiencies and effectiveness of personalized medicine.

This makes a mockery of real science, and its consequences are invariably ridiculous. Quite a few otherwise intelligent men and women take it as an established principle that we can know as true only what can be verified by empirical methods of experimentation and observation. This is, for one thing, a notoriously self-refuting claim, inasmuch as it cannot itself be demonstrated to be true by any application of empirical method. More to the point, though, it is transparent nonsense: most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical. The sciences concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or of what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal world, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their methods give them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science because such truths are not, as those findings must always be, susceptible of later theoretical revision; and then there are truths of mathematics that are subject to proof in the most proper sense and so are more irrefutable still. And there is no one single discourse of truth as such, no single path to the knowledge of reality, no single method that can exhaustively define what knowledge is, no useful answers whose range has not been limited in advance by the kind of questions that prompted them. The failure to realize this can lead only to delusions of the kind expressed in, for example, G. G. Simpson’s self-parodying assertion that all attempts to define the meaning of life or the nature of humanity made before 1859 are now entirely worthless, or in Peter Atkins’s ebulliently absurd claims that modern science can “deal with every aspect of existence” and that it has in fact “never encountered a barrier.” Not only do sentiments of this sort verge upon the deranged, they are nothing less than violent assaults upon the true dignity of science (which lies entirely in its severely self-limiting rigor).

Mama, what kept you moving forward through droughts, wild animals, loneliness? We had no choice. Sadness was as dangerous as panthers and bears. The wilderness needs your whole attention.

You think you’re in control of your life, you think you’re the one making all the decisions and then something like this comes along and you realize you’re just a tiny chess-piece being moved around on the whim of something or someone much larger.

A number of people I know claim to be great multi-taskers. The brain, however, doesn’t work that way; instead it focuses on one activity at a time. If you switch back and forth between multiple tasks, your brain works more slowly than it would if you focused on each activity for a period of time. Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

I once had a smart boss who told me if I wanted to do my best work, I needed to do fewer things, and really focus on what mattered. That was great advice. Many people confuse want to with have to. In other words, just because someone else wants you to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. You can’t get more time, so how you spend the time you have is critical. Focusing on what matters means saying no to things that don’t matter. Otherwise, your life becomes cluttered with distractions.

You need to understand your values and your priorities.

If you can get paid to do what you perceive as play, you have a great job.

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. - Thomas Jefferson

As Benjamin Franklin wrote: “You may delay, but time will not”.

activity by itself doesn’t equal accomplishment, and certainly not success

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. -Dale Carnegie

If you live your life authentically, keep your word, admit mistakes, and admit what you don’t know, you’ll find people will trust you more over time, and you’ll become wiser too.

They’re incredibly well prepared in their fields -- they become masters of their domains by practicing for many years, day after day. They spend time deeply focused on solving a key problem or key set of problems, no matter the obstacles. They allow themselves to step away from the problem(s) on which they’re focused, so that insights can come to them in activities such as walking, or looking out on a beautiful scene. To get great insights absolutely requires hard work, but it also requires space. This is the case because the human mind is not a linear machine. If you don’t put in the required effort, you won’t be capable of generating good ideas; you won’t understand the subject matter. But if you don’t give yourself space from the problems on which you are working, you likely will be so worn

When I was growing up, someone told me to live as if I was going to die in ten years and had no immediate financial needs. That’s great advice. If you can do that, you'll be happier and more successful.

Ideally, you want a job you’d do even if you weren’t paid to do it. That’s not an economic reality for most of us, but it’s the right goal to shoot for. If you can get paid to do what you perceive as play, you have a great job.

If you focus on what other people expect of you, you may impress your friends, family and colleagues, but it’s unlikely you’ll be satisfied with yourself over the long term.

Remember: take small steps. They work. Big steps often don’t. Over time, small steps add up, and you end up in a different place.

Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. Most of us do the opposite -- with predictable results.

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it. - Plato

Without chorophyll, the world would be a damp warm rock instead of the softly green haven of life that we know, for chlorphyll holds its magnesium eye to the sun and captures the energy of sunlight, in the first step of photosynthesis. For reasons we shall explore, magnesium has exactly the right features to make this process possible. Had the kingdom lacked this element, chlorophyll;’s eye would have been blind, phtosynthesis would not take place, and life as we know it would not exist.

A lot of apparently ’successful’ people believe they should delay enjoying life until later. First they work incredibly hard to get into the ’right’ schools; then they work even harder to get a coveted job; and then they work harder still for years to get to a certain position, or make a certain amount of money. The net of this whole adventure is that frequently it’s not until late in life, when a person’s health may be going, and a lot of their life is behind them, that they stop to think about what they want. And, by then, there may not be much they can do about it. They can't recover the time. And many people don’t even stop to think.

Oliver Wendell Holmes noted: Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Warren Buffett refers to Rose Blumkin, a woman who escaped the Nazis before immigrating to America and founding Nebraska Furniture Mart, as having the ultimate standard for friendship. Ms. Blumkin apparently said she had a hard time making friends. She would ask herself: if the Nazis were to return, would a particular person hide her?

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.

have little doubt you’ll feel better if you have chosen to give something back. Our time on earth is limited, but you can extend your influence by helping

We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

so

Further Reading Atwood, Kathryn. Women Heroes of World War II (Chicago Review Press, 2011). Copeland, Jack. Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Code-Breaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2010). Cragon, Harvey. From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park (Cragon Books, 2003). Edsel, Robert. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Hachette Book Group, 2009). Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line (William Morrow, 2004). Helm, Sarah. A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (Hachette UK Book Group, 2005). Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma (Random House UK, 2014). Mazzeo, Tilar. The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris (HarperCollins, 2015). Mulley, Clare. The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville (St. Martin’s Press, 2012). O’Keefe, David. One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe (Knopf Canada, 2013). Pearson, Judith. The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Ronald, Susan. Hitler’s Art Thief (St. Martin’s Press, 2015). Rosbottom, Ronald. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation 1940–1944 (Hachette Book Group, 2014). Sebba, Anne. Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). Stevenson, William. Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II (Arcade Publishing, 2007). Vaughan, Hal. Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (Random House, Inc., 2011). Witherington Cornioley, Pearl; edited by Atwood, Kathryn. Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Chicago Review Press, 2015). From the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee/Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) Archives. NW32823—Demonstration of Kesselring’s “Fish Train” (TICOM/M-5, July 8, 1945).

the biggest mistake women make is they assume they can change men.

Sopilak took his hand and welcomed him to the circle, and picking up the rhythm, Atkins joined the chant, for he too honored the splendid white bear, that creature of the north that had been so majestic in life, so brave in death.

Assuming your basic life needs are being met, you can choose to be happy if you want -- even when you make mistakes, or are in the middle of some pretty awful circumstances. If, however, you’re the sort of person who chooses to be unhappy, or filled with anxiety, chances are you’ll probably succeed with that as well. In thinking about this, I keep Mark Twain in mind: The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

The GTT he administered showed severe reactive hypoglycemia (RHG). At that time, one of the many criticisms of Dr. Atkins was that he diagnosed many with RHG. For this he was called a “quack”. After seeing the lab results, I immediately began the Induction phase of his diet and soon felt better, just as his patients did. As long as I ate correctly and didn’t skip meals I rarely experienced my prior symptoms. That remains true to this day. This was my first lesson in the power of practical nutrition (albeit outside of mainstream medical opinion). I am convinced that if I hadn’t followed Dr. Atkins advice I would have had type 2 diabetes long ago. I can thank him for many things but most especially for that.

White flour is better suited to glue for kindergarten art projects than to nutrition. Refined grains and the insidious sweet “poison” known as sugar fuel the food-processing industry, but such products damage the health and quality of life of people who are struggling with carb overload.

The job of the poet—which is somewhat quixotic or Sisyphean—is to express things that one may have sensed or felt but never put into words, and to show the reader a new way of perceiving the world and our experience living in it.

Other ex-lawyers become advocates in entirely different fields. Jen Atkins went from law to nursing, spending several years at home in between careers. As a cardiology nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital, she now advocates for the youngest patients at a critical time. One of her long-term goals is to become an advocate for improving health care on a national level. Counseling

Oh, and there's something else I'd never thought I'd end up being... and that's so completely in love with you that I can face all the shit life wants to throw at me, because it also gave me you

And, finally, Atkins wrote, “The main reason low-calorie diets fail in the long run is because you go hungry on them…. And while you may tolerate hunger for a short time, you can’t tolerate hunger all your life.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. What else do you really need to know? :)

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. - Abraham Lincoln

Progress depends on action.

I’ve met lots of smart people who work very hard. I’ve met substantially fewer who are also authentic and have integrity. I try to spend my time with the second group. And, generally, I’ve found that those people are happy and have more real friends.

Know yourself. To be happy, you need to pay attention to who you are, what you want, and how you feel, versus staying busy just doing ’stuff,’ or doing what other people want or expect you to do. This requires both self awareness and introspection: if you pay attention to how you feel, what you like and what you want (as well as what makes you feel sad, angry, fearful and confused), the world is likely to look quite different. Many people are afraid of being introspective because they feel vulnerable. But without a willingness to open up, you won’t understand yourself and you can’t ultimately be truly happy.

Observe. It’s incredibly hard to have a dispassionate view of the world, even if you try your hardest. Humans are emotional animals, and we all come at the world with our own point of view based on our experience. It’s impossible in many ways to get outside that frame of reference, although with diverse experience, a lot of reading, honest self-reflection on your failures, and some thinking, it’s possible to stretch our perspective. Data and patterns matter, and you should pay close attention to them. But they’re not enough to deeply understand the world, since history doesn’t repeat itself exactly. Judgment and wisdom matter a great deal. To acquire them, and to be creative, it’s important to slow down enough at times to notice what is going on around you.

More than anything, he wanted to open the window and jump out. He didn't want to hit the ground, he didn't want to roam or walk on those grotty, grimy, secretive streets. Not anymore. He wanted to jump out of the window and fly. It was so unfair. Being chained down here, with all the dustbin lorries and bin bags and dog muck and Costa cups. The birds got to fly away from it all. They came down, hopped about, and then took off when it all got too much. Found a tree. Or a mountain, or a river. Kept going. Higher and higher, further and further away. And singing, all the time, they were singing, and that was because they were free.

One teacher, Susan Atkins evoked the experience of many of her colleagues when she said, "It's not just one classroom. It's every class. There's a core and you never know what they're going to throw at you, and the other kids watch, wondering if the 'core' is going to come after them.

Albert Einstein said: It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

Through chemistry we can unravel and comprehend the once inscrutable mysteries of the natural world. We can understand the green of a leaf and the red of a rose, the fragrance of a herb and new-mown hay. We can understand, in a halting but increasing way, the intricate and complex reticulation of processes in the natural world that constitute the awesome and multifaceted property we know as life. We are beginning, even more haltingly, to understand the chemical processes in our brains that enable us to perceive, wonder, and understand.

Closely allied with the contribution of chemists to the alleviation of disease is their involvement at a molecular level. Biology became chemistry half a century ago when the structure of DNA was discovered (in 1953). Molecular biology, which in large measure has sprung from that discovery, is chemistry applied to the functioning of organisms. Chemists, often disguised as molecular biologists, have opened the door to understanding life and its principal characteristic, inheritance, at a most fundamental level, and have thereby opened up great regions of the molecular world to rational investigation. They have also transformed forensic medicine, brought criminals to justice, and transformed anthropology.

The shift of chemistry’s attention to the processes of life has come at a time when the traditional branches of chemistry—organic, inorganic, and physical—have reached a stage of considerable maturity and are ready to tackle the awesomely complex network of processes going on inside organisms: human bodies in particular. The approach to the treatment, more importantly the prevention, of disease has been put on a rational basis by the discoveries that chemists continue to make. If you plan to enter this field, then genomics and proteomics will turn out to be of crucial importance to your work. This is truly a region of chemistry where you can feel confident about standing on the shoulders of the giants who have preceded you and know that you are attacking disease at its roots.

Then there is the dark side of chemistry. It would be inappropriate in this account of chemistry’s great achievements for no mention to be made of its ability to enhance humanity’s ability to damage and kill, for those achievements have come at a cost, in some cases to human life, in others to the environment.

Ideally, you want a job you’d do even if you weren’t paid to do it. That’s not an economic reality for most of us, but it’s the right goal to shoot for.

To learn from your experience and the experience of others it’s important to try to be dispassionate in looking at the world and analyzing it.

I try not to obsess on the past, but to learn from it. I try not to worry about the future, but to prepare for it. And while it’s difficult sometimes, I try to take pleasure in the moment, even when bad things happen.

I try to put things into two buckets: one I can do something about and one I can’t. The things I can’t do anything about, I try to ignore.

There are many things that are not nearly as dramatic, but can have a similarly negative long-term impact.

Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.

To build trusting friendships, I’ve learned, it’s critical to be true to my passions, and express how I feel and what I want. If I weren’t open and honest, I wonder what sort of friends I’d have?

No matter how much wealth or fame you accumulate, if you don’t have true friends it’s unlikely you’ll be happy. Sadly I know too many people who have achieved their material goals, but have no friends.

I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

You may not have the parents or the siblings you’d have chosen. You may not look the way you’d have picked. The people you love may not always love you back. You may not live where you’d like. You may not have the job you want, or get the promotion you believe you deserve. If you get married, it may not work out the way you thought it would. If you have children, they won’t always do what you’d like, and they may disappoint you sometimes. I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

Although what makes you passionate generally doesn’t change over time, what you want to do sometimes does.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I want to share with you the thought that chemistry provides the infrastructure of the modern world. There is hardly an item of everyday life that is not furnished by it or based on the materials it has created. Take away chemistry and its functional arm the chemical industry and you take away the metals and other materials of construction, the semiconductors of computation and communication, the fuels of heating, power generation, and transport, the fabrics of clothing and furnishings, and the artificial pigments of our blazingly colourful world. Take away its contributions to agriculture and you let people die, for the industry provides the fertilizers and pesticides that enable dwindling lands to support rising populations. Take away its pharmaceutical wing and you allow pain through the elimination of anaesthetics and deny people the prospect of recovery by the elimination of medicines. Imagine a world where there are no products of chemistry (including pure water): you are back before the Bronze Age, into the Stone Age: no metals, no fuels except wood, no fabrics except pelts, no medicines except herbs, no methods of computation except with your fingers, and very little food.

Life is easy to identify but remarkably difficult to define. Too tight a definition excludes what looks like life and too loose captures too much. The capacity to self-replicate is a component of the definition, but not without its problems, as a mule is alive but sterile, and computer software can replicate itself, but we do not, in all honesty, think of it as being alive. It might be tempting to ascribe livingness to an entity that has emerged by evolution, but that would exclude the first living entity and any that we might synthesize from scratch in future. Organisms are organized structures; but so is an integrated circuit. Organisms are organized structures built and sustained by the flux of energy through their interiors and its dissipation into the surroundings; but so are the patterns of convection that can arise in heated liquids and, indeed, the atmosphere, to give rise to the weather: think tornado and hurricane. All known organisms are built from compounds of carbon; but if we succeeded in building a replicating, conscious, self-sustaining, energy-dissipating entity from silicon, would we deny that it was alive? Is a virus alive?

Like greater understanding coming from giants standing on the shoulders of earlier giants, the information in our genes has grown through the ages with information pitted against information, serendipitous junk waking up to discover that it is information, in an ever-changing arena. If you favour deep understanding without relinquishing wonder, or more positively and strongly, favour doubling wonder through deepening understanding, then bask in the illumination of that extraordinarily potent idea, that all living things have merely stumbled into their brief interlude of life. Not only are we stardust, we are the children of chaos.

Character, I’ve found, is one of the most important things in life. Reputations can be manipulated in the short term, but people tend to get the reputations they deserve over time. Reputations are your personal brand. They’re influential in how well you do in both your professional and personal lives.