Ryder Carroll Quotes

Inevitably we find ourselves tackling too many things at the same time, spreading our focus so thin that nothing gets the attention it deserves. This is commonly referred to as "being busy." Being busy, however, is not the same thing as being productive.

In the most connected time in history, we're quickly losing touch with ourselves.

Each Bullet Journal becomes another volume in the story of your life. Does it represent the life you want to live? If not, then leverage the lessons you've learned to change the narrative in the next volume.

Like building muscle, we need to train our intentions to make them resilient and strong.

Cultivating this self-awareness is a lifelong process, but it starts by simply checking in with yourself.

It's part organization, part soul-searching, part dream-weaving.

I was so caught up in my own misery that I forgot a simple truth: As long as our hearts are beating, there is always opportunity.

The more content you try to capture during a lecture or a meeting, the less you're thinking about what's being said. You burn through most of your attention parroting the source.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of “you can’t” once and for all. —VINCENT VAN GOGH

For most of us, “being busy” is code for being functionally overwhelmed.

We burn through a lot of resources obsessing over possible outcomes and forming contingency plans, but in reality we’re just fueling our anxiety.

No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not enitrely own us. It can't take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action.

We rewrite things until we get them done or they become irrelevant.

Worry baits us with the promise of a solution but usually offers none.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR

Prioritize the items you feel strongest about or are the most time sensitive, and strike off the items you feel “meh” about. We’re not here to design a lukewarm life.

If happiness is the result of our actions, then we need to stop asking ourselves how to be happy. Rather, we should be asking ourselves how to be.

Though it can be helpful to set an intention for the day, like Today I will not complain, it's important to remember not to set an expectation for your day, because that's out of your control.

Mark Twain once wrote, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”49 Worry has a way of holding our attention hostage. This is especially true for things we can’t control due to the elevated level of uncertainty. We burn through a lot of resources obsessing over possible outcomes and forming contingency plans, but in reality we’re just fueling our anxiety. Trying to think our way out of situations beyond our control may feel productive, but it’s nothing more than a powerful distraction. Worry baits us with the promise of a solution but usually offers none.

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert likens our memories to painted portraits instead of photographs, where our mind artistically interprets memory.20

Robert Bresson once said, “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. —PETER DRUCKER

Transform any guilt into curiosity by asking yourself why each Task might still be incomplete. Does it matter? Is it vital? What would happen if you didn’t do it?

I’m not suggesting that you force yourself to become a chirpy Disney character with rainbows of perpetual optimism blasting out your nose.

In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them.

Overwhelmed by a never-ending flood of information, we’re left feeling overstimulated yet restless, overworked yet discontented, tuned in yet burned out.

Big goals therefore must be fueled by an authentic need that will help you weather the days, months, or even years it takes to fulfill them.

We need to reduce the number of decisions we burden ourselves with so we can focus on what matters.

Productivity is about getting more done by working on fewer things.

Writing down Tasks serves a dual purpose. First, having a record of an open task makes it easier to remember even when you’re away from your journal, partly due to a phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik effect.

Productivity is in large part a matter of consistency. Once you get it out of your head that you have to work at breakneck speed, you can focus on the process. Short of superhuman willpower, that’s the only way you’ll keep at it.

If the journey is the destination, then we must learn how to become better travelers. To become better travelers, we must first learn to orient ourselves. Where are you now? Do you want to be here? If not, why do you want to move

We must take it upon ourselves to grow. We grow by learning, and we learn by daring to take action. There will always be risk, because we can’t control the outcome. This is the way of life, and it’s unavoidable. What is avoidable, however, is being perpetually haunted by all the things that could have been if you had only dared. Begin by giving yourself permission to believe you’re worth the risk.

Of all the challenges you’ll face along the way, endurance often proves to be the most cunning and lethal adversary. Big goals therefore must be fueled by an authentic need that will help you weather the days, months, or even years it takes to fulfill them. That need must be strong enough to fortify you against the siren songs of distraction, excuses, and doubt that will beckon you toward the rocks.

It's not about living a perfect life, an easy life, or getting things right all the time. It's not even about being happy, though joy often greets you along this path. Leading an intentional life is about keeping your actions aligned with your beliefs. It's about penning a story that you believe in and that you can be proud of.

There never has been, nor will there ever be, another like you. Your singular perspective may patch some small hole in the vast tattered fabric of humanity. Uniqueness alone, however, does not make you valuable. If you don’t do, if you don’t dare, then you rob the world—and yourself—of the chance to contribute something meaningful.

use your Daily Reflection as your daily digital detox window. After your PM Reflection, implement a “screens off” policy that lasts until you’ve completed your AM Reflection the following morning. It’s a simple way to get yourself into the habit of unplugging.

we’re pretty lousy at guessing how something will make us feel, thanks to a phenomenon known as impact bias: “the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.”28 In essence, we chronically underestimate our ability to adapt.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

The palest ink is better than the best memory. —CHINESE PROVERB

If you know the why, you can live any how. —FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The act of writing by hand draws our mind into the present moment on a neurological level unlike any other capturing mechanism.

Few things are more distracting than the cruel stories we tell ourselves.

Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. —WILLIAM MORRIS

Knowing where you are begins with knowing who you are.

Mindfulness is the process of waking up to see what’s right in front of us. It helps you become more aware of where you are, who you are, and what you want.

The rush of our busy lives can quietly carve out a gulf separating our actions from our beliefs.

By externalizing our thoughts, we begin to declutter our minds.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. . . . It is a good idea, then, to keep

[B]e mindful about the people you surround yourself with, because they will shape you. Their strengths and weaknesses can have a tremendous influence on your own trajectory. ... Ask yourself: What can I learn from them? Is the world a bit of a better place because they’re in my life? Do they make me want to be a better person?

Our lives are lived in season of more, seasons of less, seasons of triumph, seasons of loss. Each season sees our needs change. We live, learn, and adapt. So, too, must our definition of meaning. Things that grow in one season rot in another. If we blindly hold on to the past, we'll be forced to sustain ourselves with the expiring beliefs from seasons gone by. No wonder we're often left feeling unsatisfied, empty, starving for substance. In order to live fulfilling lives, we have to embrace the shifting nature of our experience by making our search for meaning an ongoing practice.

Don’t let fear, pride, or impatience deprive you of the opportunity to ask. As Carl Sagan once said, “There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

The complex tactile movement of writing by hand stimulates our mind more effectively than typing. It activates multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, thereby imprinting what we learn on a deeper level. As a result, we retain information longer than we would by tapping it into an app.18 In one study, college students who were asked to take lecture notes by hand tested better on average than those who had typed out their notes. They were also able to better retain this information long after the exam.

How do we best harness our curiosity while reducing the risk of failure? We set goals. When set with intention, goals can provide structure, direction, focus, and purpose.

If intentionality means acting according to your beliefs, then the opposite would be operating on autopilot. In other words, do you know why you’re doing what you’re doing?

Often all it takes to live intentionally is to pause before you proceed.

Intentionality is the power of the mind to direct itself toward that which it finds meaningful and take action toward that end.

Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others’ choices make us. —RICHIE NORTON

The Bullet Journal is designed to be your "source of truth.

If the journey is the destination, then we must learn how to become better travelers.

Eyes see only light, ears hear only sound, but a listening heart perceives meaning. —DAVID STEINDL-RAST

To dare in life is to make yourself vulnerable to the possibility of failure.

Reflection helps identify what nourishes you so you can make better decisions as you seed the next season of your life.

this feeling is the result of the mind being so consumed with a task that it cannot consciously process the experience of self.44 We enter flow when we’re fully engaged.

Embracing our imperfection puts the emphasis back where it should be: continual improvement.

Your ikigai is at the intersection of what you are good at and what you love doing,

Perfection is an unnatural and damaging concept.

As Daniel Levitin writes in The Organized Mind, information overload is worse for our focus than exhaustion or smoking marijuana.3

That’s right: The fact that it takes longer to write things out by hand gives handwriting its cognitive edge.

you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue

It is in the present moment that we begin to know ourselves

unchecked, decision fatigue can lead to decision avoidance.

By weaving together productivity, mindfulness, and intentionality into a framework that is flexible, forgiving, and, most importantly, practical.

Rather than being proactive about setting priorities, a lot of us simply let the flood of external demands set them for us.

What do I mean by that? We don’t have time because we’re working on a lot of things, yet things aren’t working out a lot of the time.

The Bullet Journal method will help you accomplish more by working on less. It helps you identify and focus on what is meaningful by stripping away what is meaningless.

The Bullet Journal will help you declutter your packed mind so you can finally examine your thoughts from an objective distance.

When we put pen to paper, we're not just turning on the lights; we're also turning up the heat. Writing by hand helps us think and feel simultaneously.

The power of the bullet journal is that it becomes whatever you want it to be or need it to be regardless of what season you are in.

If we live passive lives, ones where we don’t pursue what shines forth, we remain in the dark, largely ignorant as to our place in the world.

a common malady of the digital age: the lack of self-awareness.

for everything you say yes to, you’re also saying no to something else. Yes means work, it means sacrifice, it means investing time into one thing that you can no longer invest into another.

An easy place to start with any endeavor is simply taking your thoughts out of your head and organizing them on paper. In so doing, you’ve already crossed the starting line to realize that it’s just another moment.

To understand the big intimidating whys (What is the meaning of life? Why am I here?), we start by asking the small whys: Why am I working on this project? Why is my partner irritating me? Why am I feeling stressed?

Should we type, text, call, email, swipe, pin, tweet, Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, Message, or yell at our digital assistant to get it done, whatever it is? And in what order should all of that happen? (Oh, and before we can get started, we’ll have to upgrade, update, reboot, log in, authenticate, reset our password, clear cookies, empty our cache, and sacrifice our firstborn before we can get where we’re going . . . where was that again?)

Topic and page number, you capture your thoughts as short, objective sentences known as Bullets. Each Bullet is paired with a specific symbol to categorize your entry. We use Bullets not only because it takes less time,

You can track the decisions you've made, and the actions you've taken that led you to where you are. It encourages you to learn from your experiences. What worked, what did not, how did it make you feel, what's the next move?

No longer satisfied with what we already have, we treat our withdrawal pains by incrementally upping the dosage. More shoes, more booze, more sex, more food, more "likes," just more. This phenomenon is known as hedonic adaptation>

If the journey is the destination, then we must learn how to become better travelers. To become better travelers, we must first learn to orient ourselves. Where are you now? Do you want to be here? If not, why do you want to move on?

As Carl Sagan once said, “There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse and author who spent several years working in palliative care with patients in the last weeks of their lives, recorded her patients’ top five regrets. The number one regret was that people wished they had stayed true to themselves.

Writing down this mission statement is also a great way to "wake the page". That's the term I use to describe the act of marking the page for the first time. It's the moment when thought transcends the distance between our inner and outer world, and we breathe life into our ideas.

There will always be risk, because we can’t control the outcome. This is the way of life, and it’s unavoidable. What is avoidable, however, is being perpetually haunted by all the things that could have been if you had only dared. Begin by giving yourself permission to believe you’re worth the risk.

live on a spectrum. In an “all-or-nothing” world, we tend to forget the power of something. The mightiest tree sprouts from a vulnerable seed. The seed of passion is curiosity. The seed of perseverance is patience. By designing your goals strategically, you can begin to cultivate your opportunities by seeding both your patience and curiosity.

Change is critical to productivity and growth—personal, professional, or otherwise. It can be a powerful way to alter our circumstances, but it can backfire. Large changes trigger our fear response. The more afraid we are, the more we need to calm ourselves. Many a great productive gesture or action has resulted in an equal or greater measure of inactivity. Peaks where we believe anything is possible are followed by shadowed valleys where we think maybe nothing is.

Let’s step back. Every year between 1950 and 2000, Americans increased their productivity about 1 to 4 percent.1 Since 2005, however, this growth has slowed in advanced economies, with a productivity decrease recorded in the United States in 2016.2 Maybe our rapidly evolving technology that promises us near-limitless options to keep us busy is not, in fact, making us more productive? One possible explanation for our productivity slowdown is that we’re paralyzed by information overload. As Daniel Levitin writes in The Organized Mind, information overload is worse for our focus than exhaustion or smoking marijuana.3 It stands to reason, then, that to be more productive we need a way to stem the tide of digital distractions. Enter the Bullet Journal, an analog solution that provides the offline space needed to process, to think, and to focus. When you open your notebook, you automatically unplug. It momentarily pauses the influx of information so your mind can catch up. Things become less of a blur, and you can finally examine your life with greater clarity.

Software tends to be either so powerful that its wealth of features is buried to all but the most intrepid explorers (think Excel) or so specific that it sacrifices features for increased usability, essentially doing few things very well (think mobile apps). In both cases, they force you to operate within a framework of their choosing. This is the main challenge with many productivity systems: They struggle to address the limitless variability and evolutionary nature of our individual needs. Notebooks, in contrast, are beholden to their authors. Their function is limited only by the imagination of their owner.

Choices come in all flavors: the good, the bad, the big, the small, the happy, and the hard choices to name but a few. We can make these choices carelessly, or we can make them with intention. But what does that mean? What does it mean to live an intentional life? The philosopher David Bentley Hart defines intentionality as “the fundamental power of the mind to direct itself toward something . . . a specific object, purpose, or end.”7 The term hails from medieval scholastic philosophy, so I’d like to adapt and update it a bit for our purposes: Intentionality is the power of the mind to direct itself toward that which it finds meaningful and take action toward that end.

Writing down Tasks serves a dual purpose. First, having a record of an open task makes it easier to remember even when you’re away from your journal, partly due to a phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik effect. Russian psychiatrist and psychologist Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik observed that the staff at her local restaurant was able to remember complex unfilled orders until they were filled, at which point they forgot the details. The friction of an unfinished Task actively engages your mind. Second, by logging Tasks and their state, you’ll also automatically create an archive of your actions. This becomes immensely valuable during Reflection (this page), or when you review your notebook days, months, or years from now. You’ll always know what you were working toward.

Our memories are unreliable. We often trick ourselves into believing things about our experiences that are biased and inaccurate. Studies suggest that our recollection of how we felt can greatly differ from the way an experience actually made us feel. We can remember wonderful events in a negative way, and negative events in a positive way. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert likens our memories to painted portraits instead of photographs, where our mind artistically interprets memory. 20 It’s important to keep an accurate record of how things actually happened, because we often make decisions based on our past experiences. If we operate entirely on memory, we’re apt to repeat our mistakes by fooling ourselves into believing that something had an effect it actually did not. Good or bad, big or small, jot it down. Over the days, months, and years, they will form a pretty accurate roadmap of your life. Understanding how we got to where we are today will allow us to make more informed decisions as we plot our course forward.