Self-pity

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Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us. Self-pity goes with selfishness, and there is nothing more to be deplored in a leader than that. A great leader puts others before himself. You would be surprised how acting so makes it easier to bear one’s own troubles. In order to act like a king, one need only treat everyone else like one.

Before They Are Hanged, Book Two of the First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

F.lux’s New ‘Backwards Alarm Clock’ Is The Sleep Angel On Your Shoulder

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A lot of good product ideas come from listening to those small annoyances. It’s not the big stuff. Everybody knows the big stuff. You listen to the little things – I have a friend who says, “You pick one thing at random and say, ‘What if this were 100 times more important? What would the product look like?’” That’s a fun exercise to do.

F.lux’s New ‘Backwards Alarm Clock’ Is The Sleep Angel On Your Shoulder

Make the political personal

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The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally.

Get angry.

The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them.

Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across.

That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference – the only difference in their eyes – between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate.

And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal.

Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
– Quellcrist Falconer
“Things I Should Have Learned by Now, Volume II”

From Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan.

Timelines

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Whenever anyone tells you a specific, very detailed timeline – he did this, so I did this, then he did this – that almost always means that they want you to know JUST HOW MANY TIMES they were innocent and the other person was guilty and bad, and that means that they suspect that THEY CAUSED EVERY FUCKING THING on that timeline.

Ask Polly: I Was Dumped After a Freak Accident and I Can’t Move On