Life, As It Is (Reflections) - Sep 2026 and onwards
Hi everyone, I hope you’ve been well.
Life, however you look at it, is not easy. It’s demanding, unpredictable, and often doesn’t go the way we plan. It can also feel isolating at times, like you’re the only one dealing with certain challenges, or like you’re stuck in patterns of thinking that don’t really help.
But if you look into philosophy, psychology, or even religious and spiritual traditions, you’ll notice something consistent. People have been dealing with the same kinds of struggles for a very long time. And over time, they’ve developed different ways of understanding and handling those realities.
Just adding a bit of context to this thread. I usually share a reflection every Monday and Friday with the admin team. There’s no fixed theme. The idea is simply to revisit useful ways of thinking about life, often drawn from people who have spent time studying it deeply or have navigated it well.
Most of these lean optimistic, but not in a surface-level way. More in the sense of helping make peace with challenges, uncertainty, and the limits of our control, and finding ways to think about them that are a bit more steady.
I’ll try to post these here as well. You can subscribe to the thread if you’d like to get notified when I add a new reflection. Expect about one or two posts per week.
Feel free to respond, add your own thoughts, or just read quietly. And you can ignore it entirely too. Just putting it out there in case it’s useful to anyone.
Monday September 14, 2026
“Everyone has a mass of bad work in him which he will have to work off and get rid of before he can do better.” — Samuel Butler
It reminded me of the photography story from the book Mindset, where one group of students was asked to spend the semester trying to produce one perfect photograph, while the other was asked to take as many photos as possible. Interestingly, the group that took hundreds of photos ended up producing the better work. They had experimented more, made more mistakes, learned more, and eventually developed a better eye.
It also made me think about how we tend to look at people who are exceptional and assume they’re just extraordinarily talented, or that they were gifted something the rest of us don’t have. But when you actually look at the stories of many great artists, athletes, writers, etc., there’s often an enormous volume of work behind what we see as their “greatness.” Van Gogh made thousands of paintings. Great athletes take and miss thousands of shots. We just tend to see the handful of extraordinary ones.
There’s something really interesting about the probability of it. If you take 100 shots at something, you’re giving yourself 100 chances to get it right. Maybe 90 are bad, 5 are okay, and 5 are really good. But if you only give yourself 5 chances because you’re waiting for the perfect idea or trying to make every attempt exceptional, you’ve dramatically reduced the possibility of stumbling into something extraordinary.
I think that’s the part I find most freeing: maybe exceptional people aren’t always exceptional because they started with something the rest of us don’t have. Maybe they just kept producing, experimenting, failing, and trying again until the volume of work eventually made something exceptional almost inevitable.
This reflection inspired the post 'Rethinking Success: The Good News, the Bad News, and the Hidden Cost of Getting Good'
Friday, September 18. 2026
“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.” — Stephen McCranie
Continuing the same idea shared on Monday.
Monday, September 21, 2026
“We are what we repeatedly do.” — Aristotle
“Don’t practice what you don’t wish to become.” — Jordan Peterson
There’s a quiet truth about how life changes: it rarely happens in big moments. It happens in ordinary ones. The choice to show up when you don’t feel like it. The decision to respond calmly instead of reacting. The effort to do something properly even when no one’s watching.
Each one feels small. But they accumulate. And over time, they build a direction. If you look at where you’re heading, you can usually trace it back to what you’ve been repeating.
These two quotes, reminded me of something I read previously somewhere. It was about kindness, and especially those that do something for others without expecting anything in return. Whether people notice your acts of kindness, whether or not they acknowledge/recognize your kindness; acting kind is a reflection of who you are.
@Hope
Friday, September 25, 2026
“The first step to achieving a massive dream is conquering tiny impulses.” — Chris Williamson
Building on the same idea as Monday's quote.
Monday, September 28, 2026
“Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate linked your existence and the occurrence together from the start.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
A similar idea is captured in:
“It is so for it can’t be otherwise.”
— Alberto Barajas (How to Stop Worrying and Start Living)
What both point to is a difficult but stabilising idea. Once something has happened, it could not have unfolded in any other way given the exact chain of causes that led there. Not in a comforting sense, but in a structural sense of cause and effect. A lot of human suffering comes from rewriting the past in the mind. “If I had done X differently, this wouldn’t have happened.” That creates the illusion that the outcome was optional and therefore should have been preventable. But the past is not a set of open possibilities anymore. It is a fixed sequence that has already played out.
There is also a sense in which this aligns with the Islamic understanding of Qadr (Divine decree). Whatever has occurred was decreed in accordance with divine wisdom. Different language, same underlying idea that reality unfolds as it is meant to within its system. The practical takeaway is not passivity. It discourages us from spending energy on blame or on what is already outside our control, and instead brings focus back to how we can move forward in the present.
This post inspired the reflection - The Trap of "What If"
You know, this took me a long time to understand and realize. I'll be 40 by next January, and for the past two-thirds of my life, I have had mental health problems. Depression for the longest time. Although I have been free of medication for the past 12-13 years, I think of it as it will forever be a part of my life. To this day, I still get triggered, with flashbacks. For the longest time, I always thought of my childhood as unfortunate, all the traumas, and everything that has started back in the day. It wasn't until in the past 5-8 years, that I've come to realize that, as much as I don't like what I had to go through in my childhood; I wouldn't have wanted a change. As for what I had gone through, has resulted with whom I've become today. I've see my life, other's life, in different perspectives. People I once was close with, had all told me that I'm insightful, and it's all thanks to what I had to go through in my past. If it weren't for the things that have happened, those insights would've never formed or came to mind.
@Hope
@Hope
@Hope
Thank you for those🤍
How do I learn deep optimism?
How do I learn deep optimism?
@amusingSpruce5363
It can be helpful to read books surrounding the topic. You can also look up ted talks and podcasts that cover it.
@ Hope, Really grateful for those words !