Jigsaw Puzzles With Inspirational Quotes

Every one of us is like the pieces of a puzzle. Each one unique and with our own special place where only we can fit, and without every one of us, the picture wouldn’t be complete.

Blessed with fortune is the only way to describe my life. It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle, and I’m constantly looking for the right pieces to plug into the right spaces. They always seem to be there if I just look hard enough.

Initially, his theory was inspired by the observation that the shapes of continents like South America and Africa could be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift then became more certain as fossils accumulated and paleontologists found that the distribution of ancient species suggested that the continents were once joined. Later, “plate tectonics” was suggested as a mechanism for continental movement, just as natural selection was suggested as the mechanism for evolution:

Each of us is a vital piece of the giant jigsaw puzzle that we call humanity. And our common humanity is never so meaningful and beautiful as when we make space for each of us to bring their most authentic self to life.

Pieces of life are like a jigsaw puzzle. The job you got laid off from—that piece didn’t fit. When you move from your home you thought was a forever home—that piece didn’t fit. The time I bought a fern for the second time and it still died in a new place in my yard—that piece didn’t fit. From big pieces to little pieces, what doesn’t fit God’s plan won’t fit your plans.

Many of the one-liners teach volumes. Some summarize excellence in an entire field in one sentence. As Josh Waitzkin (page 577), chess prodigy and the inspiration behind Searching for Bobby Fischer, might put it, these bite-sized learnings are a way to “learn the macro from the micro.” The process of piecing them together was revelatory. If I thought I saw “the Matrix” before, I was mistaken, or I was only seeing 10% of it. Still, even that 10%—“ islands” of notes on individual mentors—had already changed my life and helped me 10x my results. But after revisiting more than a hundred minds as part of the same fabric, things got very interesting very quickly. For the movie nerds among you, it was like the end of The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects: “The red door knob! The fucking Kobayashi coffee cup! How did I not notice that?! It was right in front of me the whole time!” To help you see the same, I’ve done my best to weave patterns together throughout the book, noting where guests have complementary habits, beliefs, and recommendations. The completed jigsaw puzzle is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Climate change is not a jigsaw puzzle on a coffee table which can be returned to when the schedule allows and the feeling inspires. It is a house on fire. The longer we fail to take care of it, the harder it becomes to take care of.