Now that I’m free from sitting under the Sword of Damocles of ever-eager regulators, there are  lot of thoughts I’ve kept quiet that I now have the freedom to post.

During my career I had so many encounters that left me trying to distill what transpired into a sentence or two. So, I privately started jotting down “nuggets”. Now, this “Diary” is 12 single-spaced pages. Some observations are funny, some seem nihilistic, some might even be offensive, but all are reflections of the beliefs I brought into my professional and personal life.

This, being the first post of such entries from the Diary, I’ll drop 10 nuggets. Every so often moving forward I’ll drop another 10. It’ll be a series.

It’s important to note that not all the entries are original. I don’t often credit the respective authors, because I generally don’t know who they are and I’m far too retired to start looking for proper attribution.

So, here we go…

1. People who value my effort receive more of it; those who waste my effort receive less.
2. Everything you want in life exists on the other side of discomfort.
3. When a man must constantly tell you who he is, it’s usually because results no longer do it for him.
4. Physics will always be there to bite you in the ass if you don’t respect it.
5. To know a man, you have to know what was happening when he was 20.
6. Most people get it completely wrong. They obsess over goals instead of building systems. Goals are the results. Systems create the processes that get you there. You never rise to your goals. You fall to the highest level of your systems.
7. If you constantly go looking for something that frightens you, your efforts will always be rewarded.
8. The weight doesn’t care how you feel. Lift it, or don’t.
9. Normalizing extremes does not make them stable.
10. You don’t have to be brilliant, only a little bit wiser than the other guys, on average, for a long time.

I’d enjoy hearing some feedback, constructive or otherwise, about what you think of this format and the nuggets it contains. So leave your remarks in the comments section. Or don’t.