It's Reality, Bro

I just finished reading a great book, The Big Short, by Michael Lewis. I read a lot of non-fiction. I enjoy it.

This particular piece of prose was about the collapse of the US sub-prime housing market.

One of the take home themes was something that has emerged in my life before, in other books and on more personal levels. In this tale of Wall Street mishap, it goes to show that the whole world, minus a handful of astute individuals, can be completely oblivious to tragedy and even go as far as to delude themselves into thinking that everything is great. But if the numbers underneath don’t support your belief, it’s only a matter of time until your house of cards comes tumbling down.

Embrace your reality, no matter how ugly.

Numbers don’t lie. And they don’t care if you like it or not.

Accept Reality

I awoke an hour before my alarm again. I think my sleep cycle is well on the way to resetting itself though. But that's not what I'm here to talk about today. I'm here to talk about the way things are.

I'm obsessed with success. I think it's the effect of listening to so much rap music. Anyways, in pursuit of success, I read a lot. I read a lot about how to be successful and how the world works. I believe there are fundamental things we can do to increase our chances of winning. And life is all about chances and odds, if you ask me. When I find overlap in these "success fundamentals" from different authors that I respect I generally get pretty excited. I can't help but feel that I'm on to something big.

I stumbled across one such overlap yesterday. It was especially surprising because it was overlap between two of my favourite, but very juxtaposed people. The first, Iceberg Slim says:

'"Chumps prefer a beautiful lie to an ugly truth."The sucker wants to believe certain things about life and so projects these wishes on to the real world, seeing what he wants to see, not what is. A hustler thrives on reality, ugly or unpleasant - finds his poetry in the real. He sees the whole table and plays it as it lays.'

And secondly, Gary Johnson says:

"Become reality Driven, Don't kid yourself or others. Find out what's what and base your decisions and actions on that.'

ASIDE: For the full list of Johnsons 7 principles of good government, which I'm trying my best to live by click here.

So I think it's obvious. Critically and objectively evaluate your situation or you will continue to delude yourself about who you are and what you are capable of.


And that was my 200th Blog post. I'm glad I've kept with this. Thanks for reading along