Giving: A Life Well-Lived

 

Novel: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

If Nature has made you for a giver, your hands are born open and so is your heart. And though there may be times when your hands are empty, your heart is always full, and you can give things out of that—warm things, kind things, sweet things—help and comfort and laughter—and sometimes gay, kind laughter is the best help of all.

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Book: Simple Truths by Kent Nerburn

A fourth guideline to keep in mind is that money comes and goes. You must not be immobilized by the fear of losing it. 

No matter how you choose to deal with money, you need to keep one basic truth before you at all times: Money is nothing more than a commodity, an agreed-upon abstraction of exchange. It is the spirit of that exchange that animates money and gives it meaning. Great givers, rich and poor, use money to bring light into this world. Great hoarders, rich and poor, use money to close doors between us all. Be a giver and a sharer. In some unexpected and unforeseeable fashion, all else will take care of itself.

 Brought to you by Cancelo Alvarez

Excitement and Enthusiasm

"The main thing that’ll get you ahead in life is your level of enthusiasm and excitement." — Robert Greene

The purpose of this record is to reflect on personal experience that may rekindle motivation and clarity for the reader.

In High School, it is some thing to play First Team sports or any competitive game in the first year of arrival, particularly the 8th grade, because you’re up against the 12th grade and/or the best athletes the school has to offer.

There’s a pattern to be studied from those who stand out in such a way and are selected to represent their teams from their initial arrival; it is their excitement for after-school training, and the enthusiasm they have for improving their skill outside of school hours, weekends, and holidays.

Simplified,

"You will be most successful where you are most intensely interested." - Charlie Munger, Businessman and Investor

It is a strong interest towards something that helps you get ahead in life — You are excited every day to practice that something, and you are way too enthusiastic about it to wait for a coach or parent to call you into practice.

You realize you’ve got the willpower to decide how much time, effort, and sacrifice you get to dedicate towards it — and with that realization comes results, and with results, dominance in your field. Because you will be sought after as an expert.

You move from ordinary (unskilled) to extraordinary (skilled).

Cancelo Alvarez

 

Youth, Age, and the Knowledge That Matters Most

 

When you’re young, you win with energy. When you’re older, you win with wisdom.

In youth, we must invest in both our careers and our personal development. Yet, many of us make the mistake of prioritizing only career milestones—degrees, promotions, job changes—while neglecting a deeper form of education: understanding human nature.

This kind of education isn’t found in textbooks on Accounting or Law. It comes from studying:

• Psychology – Mindset, biases, mental models, and self-awareness.
• Philosophy & Spirituality – Willpower, endurance, and the forces that shape our choices.
• Well-being – Physical and mental resilience through movement, rest, and emotional regulation.

Prioritizing this knowledge in youth allows us to thrive in later years. Without it, we risk making costly, sometimes irreversible, mistakes:

• Relationships – Ignoring red flags in partners, mistaking potential for reality.
  • Mindset teaches us to embrace difficult truths.
• Addiction & Dependency – Becoming trapped by harmful habits and those who profit from them.
  • Philosophy helps us distinguish between good and bad moral choices.
• Aging & Purpose – Retiring at 60 only to decline from lack of meaning and connection.
  • Well-being enables us to remain vibrant, active, and engaged in later life.

The biggest mistake is assuming that wisdom comes naturally with age. It doesn’t—it must be built early. A person who neglects self-education in youth may find themselves lost in adulthood, despite career success.

True winning is not just about financial security but about living with clarity, strength, and purpose at every stage of life. Start now.

Cancelo Alvarez 

Fearless Pursuit: The Courage to Rise

“You just need to be smart enough to understand that your success is more about your courage than your intelligence.” — Orange Book

I define success—or greatness—as simply the ability to achieve your medium-to-long-term goals in a decisive, ideal, and sometimes public way. Public because, once achieved, your goals will inevitably attract both admirers and haters. Admirers because these goals are exceedingly difficult to reach. Haters because they will assume you cheated, got lucky, or had an unfair advantage.

How often do we, who were never mentored or groomed in psychology and mindset from a young age, convince ourselves that if we were smarter, faster, or prettier, we would have already attained the success we fantasize about—a happy home in the suburbs, a spot on the national team, a role on TV?

I cannot emphasize enough how detrimental this mindset is, because it blinds us to the most essential traits of success: Courage—self-belief, self-assurance, resilience, tenacity! These are the true cornerstones of achievement—the mental infrastructure required to handle success and the extraordinary responsibility that comes with it.

• With courage, you will show up every day to face your limitations.
• With self-belief, you will not compare yourself to those ahead of you.
• With self-assurance, you will speak your mind and let mistakes and failures pass through you, unshaken.
• With resilience, you will never give in to temporary defeat—you will rise, fiercer every time you fall. In fact, you will laugh at rejection and failure, because you carry seeds of divinity within you. You are one with the stars, and therefore, already successful as you are.
• With tenacity, you will prepare and perform with utmost confidence and aggression, showing no mercy toward internal or external incompetence.

“You don’t need a better computer to become a writer. You don’t need a better guitar to become a musician. You don’t need a better camera to become a photographer. What you need is to get to work.” — James Clear 

— Cancelo Alvarez

Mastering the Mind

“Your choices spark the fires of future circumstances.” — MJ DiMarco

We’ll refer to another paragraph, finely written by Michael Singer, emphasizing the nature of our psyche, to help us better understand why we feel almost overwhelmed with choices and decisions—and why it can be so hard to continually make choices that align with what we want or have planned.

The inside of one’s psyche is a very complex, sophisticated place. It is full of conflicting forces that are constantly changing due to both internal and external stimuli. This results in wide variations of needs, fears, and desires over relatively short periods of time. Because of this, very few people have the clarity to understand what’s going on in there… As a result, we find ourselves struggling just to hold it all together. But everything keeps on changing—moods, desires, likes, dislikes, enthusiasm, lethargy. It’s a full-time task just to maintain the discipline necessary to create even the semblance of control and order in there. — The Untethered Soul

Without spending any more time elaborating on what’s already clear—we are urged to devise safeguards against this constant, incessant change within our minds. Some of the best remain the same as of old:

• Take long walks alone. You will strengthen your body, but you will return home feeling more certain of what you want to do with your life—or even just for the week.
• Write every day. You don’t need to write books or poetry, but simply writing what you are thinking and feeling consistently will naturally build clarity and oneness of thought.
• Meditate / deep breathing. Carve out time each day for 10–40 minutes of deep breathing. This will rebuild the focus muscles being worn away by the daily rush-hour, social media, and external expectations.

“No matter what you do, practice will make you better.” — Ryan Holiday

— Cancelo Alvarez

Ryan Holiday -- Discipline is Destiny -- Part One

 

Practice . . . Then Practice More

It is said that the master swordsman Nakayama Hakudo would practice drawing his sword some two thousand times a day. At the Hayashizaki temple, in one marathon of endurance training, he was recorded drawing his sword ten thousand times in a single twenty-four-hour period. We can imagine the sheer speed required to do this . . . and also the deliberateness to do so many reps in so little time. But why would he do such a thing at all?

Because, as Octavian’s teacher Arius Didymus said,

  “Practice over a long time turns into second nature.”

We don’t rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our training. The samurai Musashi was once challenged by a warrior named Miyake Gunbei, a man who thought himself one of the best in the world. On his third attack, frustrated by his lack of success, Gunbei charged at Musashi in an aggressive lunge. Musashi, having prepared for this exact scenario countless times, replied, “That is not what you should do,” then parried the blow with one sword and watched as the man gashed his own cheek against Musashi’s other sword.

How had he known? Practice.

"Cho tan seki ren" was Musashi’s phrase. Training from morning to night.

Oh, you’ve done that? Okay. Do it some more

And after that?

More. More. More.

“A thousand days of training to develop,” Musashi would write, “ten thousand days of training to polish.” 

For a samurai, there was no such thing as pretty good. If a pretty good swordsman met a better fighter . . . he would die. It’s like the basketball Hall of Famer Bill Bradley’s observation: When you are not practicing, refining, working —somewhere, someone else is . . . and when you meet them, they will beat you. Or kill you.

Look, this is not a drill. There is no greatness without practice.

Lots of practice.

Repetitive practice.

Exhausting, bone-crunching, soul-crushing practice. And yet what emerges from this practice is the opposite of those three feelings. Energy. Strength. Confidence. You deserve that. Yes, your body will burn, but that’s the evidence. From that burning comes real heat, heat you can apply to your craft, to your work, to your life.

No matter what you do, practice will make you better.

Only you know what it will look like to train in your art like a samurai, an Olympic athlete, a master in pursuit of excellence. Only you will know what you need to practice from morning until night, what to repeat ten thousand times.

It won’t be easy, but in that burden is also freedom and confidence.

The pleasure of the flow state. The rhythm of second nature. The quiet calmness of knowing that, from the practice, you’ll know exactly what to do when it counts . . . the pride and the dependability of doing it too.

The Task Must Be Made Difficult

"The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted." — The Journals of Kierkegaard

Challenge, adversity, complexity—even enemies. These things, when viewed in hindsight, serve many purposes. But let’s focus on one: they exist to separate the winners from the losers.

Overcome great difficulty—in war, in sports, in business—and you become a model of resilience, an example of courage, a hero. And what is a hero? Perhaps Andrew Bernstein described it best:

"A hero is someone of high moral stature and great ability who relentlessly pursues their goals despite formidable opposition. True heroism lies not in victory, but in unwavering devotion to the good. No obstacle can deter the great from their chosen path. If one remains true to rational values, never yielding, never betraying one’s soul, and relentlessly pursuing excellence, if one embodies all this and never cries for mercy, then one is a hero, even in failure." 

Waste no more time arguing what a great man or woman should be, echoing Marcus Aurelius, but Be One. Go out there, today, this year and pursue difficulty, embrace challenge, and laugh in the face of your enemies.. If you encourage yourself daily, if you strengthen your mind and body daily, if you educate your heart and soul, you have nothing to fear.

You will win. 

Cancelo Alvarez