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

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

 

The Untethered Soul -- Michael Singer - Article

 

Chapter 5

Reading Time: 4 Minutes 

Infinite energy

We study the energy outside, and give great value to energy resources, but we ignore the energy within. People go about their lives thinking, feeling, and acting, without the understanding of what makes these activities take place. The truth is, every movement of your body, every emotion you have, and every thought that passes through your mind is an expenditure of energy. Just as everything that happens outside in the physical world requires energy, everything that happens inside requires an expenditure of energy.

For example, if you concentrate on a thought and another thought interferes, you will have to assert an opposing force to fight the interfering thought. That requires energy, and it can wear you out. Likewise, if you have a thought that you’re trying to hold in your mind but it keeps drifting off, you have to willfully concentrate to bring it back. When you do this, you are actually sending more energy to the thought in order to hold it in a given place. You also assert energy to deal with your emotions. If you have an emotion you don’t like and it’s interfering with what you’re doing, you just push it aside. You do this almost instinctively so that the unwanted emotion doesn’t come up and disturb you. Every one of these acts is an expenditure of energy.

Creating thoughts, holding onto thoughts, recalling thoughts, generating emotions, controlling emotions, and disciplining powerful inner drives, all require a tremendous expenditure of energy

What you’ll see, if you watch carefully, is that you have a phenomenal amount of energy inside of you. It doesn’t come from food and it doesn’t come from sleep. This energy is always available to you. At any moment you can draw upon it. It just wells up and fills you from inside. When you’re filled with this energy, you feel like you could take on the world. When it is flowing strongly, you can actually feel it coursing through you in waves. It gushes up spontaneously from deep inside and restores, replenishes, and recharges you.

The only reason you don’t feel this energy all the time is because you block it. You block it by closing your heart, by closing your mind, and by pulling yourself into a restrictive space inside. This closes you off from all the energy. When you close your heart or close your mind, you hide in the darkness within you. There is no light. There is no energy. There is nothing flowing. The energy is still there but it can’t get in.

The heart is an energy center, and it can open or close. The yogis call energy centers chakras. When you close your heart center, energy can’t flow in. When energy can’t flow in, there’s darkness. Depending upon how closed you are, you either feel tremendous disturbance or overwhelming lethargy. Often people fluctuate between these two states. If you then find out that your loved one didn’t do anything wrong, or if they apologize to your satisfaction, your heart opens again. With this opening you get filled with energy, and the love starts flowing again.

How many times have you experienced these dynamics in your life? You have a wellspring of beautiful energy inside of you. When you are open you feel it; when you are closed you don’t. This flow of energy comes from the depth of your being. It’s been called by many names. In ancient Chinese medicine, it is called Chi. In yoga, it is called Shakti. In the West, it is called Spirit. Call it anything you want. All the great spiritual traditions talk about your spiritual energy; they just give it different names. That spiritual energy is what you’re experiencing when love rushes up into your heart. That is what you’re experiencing when you’re enthused by something and all this high energy comes up inside of you.

The problem is, we don’t exercise that control. Under normal circumstances, our state of openness is left to psychological factors. Basically, we are programmed to open or close based upon our past experiences. Impressions from the past are still inside of us, and they get stimulated by different events. If they were negative impressions, we tend to close. If they were positive impressions, we tend to open. Let’s say you smell a certain scent that reminds you of what it was like when you were young and somebody was cooking dinner. How you react to this scent depends upon the impressions left by your past experiences. Did you enjoy having dinner with the family? Was the food good? If so, then the smell of that scent warms you and opens you. If it wasn’t so much fun eating together, or if you had to eat food you didn’t like, then you tighten up and close. It really is that sensitive. A smell can make you open or close, and so can seeing a car of a certain color, or even the type of shoes a person is wearing. We are programmed based upon our past impressions such that all kinds of things can cause us to open and close.

If you pay attention, you will see it happen regularly throughout each day.

How you learn to stay open is up to you. The ultimate trick is to not close. If you don’t close, you will have learned to stay open. Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it. When your heart starts to close, just say, “No. I’m not going to close. I’m going to relax. I’m going to let this situation take place and be there with it.” Honor and respect the situation, and deal with it. By all means deal with it. Do the best you can. But deal with it with openness. Deal with it with excitement and enthusiasm. No matter what it is, just let it be the sport of the day. In time, you will find that you forget how to close. No matter what anyone does, no matter what situation takes place, you won’t even feel the tendency to close. You will just embrace life with all your heart and soul. Once you’ve attained this very high state, your energy level will be phenomenal. You will have all the energy you need at all times. Just relax and open, and tremendous energy will rush up inside of you. You are only limited by your ability to stay open.

The most important thing in life is your inner energy. If you’re always tired and never enthused, then life is no fun. But if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience. Learn to work with these things. Through meditation, through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open. You do this by just relaxing and releasing. You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over. Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over. Nothing, ever, is worth closing your heart over. ⭐

On Quiet Weeks, On Accepting Reality

 "I am writing this, not for the eyes of the many, but for yours alone: for each of us is audience enough for the other."

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Philosopher and Statesman (4 BCE – 65 CE)

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This newsletters offers thoughtful reflections to encourage preparation, mental strength, and clear thinking as we navigate life -- drawing on timeless writings and personal insights. 

On Quiet Weeks

Episcopal bishop and clergyman Phillips Brooks reminds us of the power of quiet weeks:

"Someday, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer."

Note: Do you suppose soldiers only train when they expect war? No, a true soldier and commander trains during quiet, peaceful times, because that’s what determines victory in battle.

We, too, have wars awaiting us—emotional, financial, and psychological wars. It could mean losing your child or mother, enduring a divorce and being left with no money, or finding yourself in a wheelchair after a car accident.

Now is the time to prepare your mind for strength and resilience. Facebook memes or TikTok celebrities have nothing to offer of true value or durability.

Like Brooks, Seneca also emphasizes preparation in quiet times, reminding us that life’s cycles—whether joy or sorrow—are inevitable, but resilience begins now.

"We would bear our own end and that of our loved ones with greater courage if we perceived that life and death, like everything else, come and go by turns." 

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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On Accepting Reality

Shane Parrish, author and businessman, shares wisdom about facing uncomfortable truths:

“I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn’t like it; indeed, especially when one doesn’t like it.”

His book: Clear Thinking (New York Times Bestseller)

The truth I’ve had to face is that it takes about R100,000 or more to travel to places like America, Switzerland, or Singapore. Instead of wishing for luck, I’ve started saving and investing 50% of my income.

What truth are you avoiding by wishing for luck or divine intervention? The facts may already be clear: maybe you need to exercise for better health, earn an online certificate to improve your CV, or apologize to your mother.

Whatever it is, luck is not the solution. Facing the pain of truth is.

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The End

Written by: Cancelo Alvarez