100 great speeches—both audio and transcripts—at American Rhetoric as found through lifehack.org. Great stuff at both places.

Here’s a quick and easy way to increase your creativity: once a week go to the book store or magazine stand and skim through a magazine or book on a topic that you are unfamiliar with. Read the table of contents. Read the quotes at the beginning of each section. Just exposing yourself to these new concepts will open you to new ideas.

It is one thing to study war and another to live a warrior’s life.

The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

I just finished Virtues of War. A brilliant book. Whether Pressfield captured the spirit of Alexander, I am not sure, but he did capture the spirit of a great leader—not just a military leader, but a man who understood how to drive people to excel beyond their wildest dreams.

There are so many great passages in this book—so many great lessons. One of my favorites is:

We as officers debate our routes and strategies. What we forget is that the men do the same. They are not stupid. They see the country change; they know what they are marching into. In their tents and around their cook fires, they chew over every fresh piece of intelligence. We in the command post have our source; the corporals and private soldiers have theirs too. Daylong they interrogate the natives tracking the column, the rabble in the towns we pass through, the whores and sutlers of the general crowd, and, of course, one another. A racehorse cannot gallop the column’s length faster than the newest rumor or the freshest fear.

Alexander understood that the only way to combat these rumors was to build trust with your soldiers. You won’t stop the rumors, but if your people trust you, they are less likely to fear the changing landscape.

What’s really interesting about this passage is its applicability to the modern world. With Internet technologies, such as blogs, we can provide greater transparency to our employees, co-workers, and customers. With so many shady business practices, transparency is even more vital to building trusting relationships.

The people who get what they want in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them. —George Bernard Shaw

I stumbled upon Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield today. Don’t quite remember how I found it, but I’m glad I did.

The book is a fictional re-telling of Alexander the Great. I have not yet read through the first fifty pages, but already I find inspiration:

What drives the solder is cardia, “heart”, and dynamis, “the will to fight”. Nothing else matters in war. Not weapons or tactics, philosohpy or patriotism. Only this love of glory, which is the seminal imperative of mortal blood, as ineradicable within man as in a wolf or lion, and without which we are nothing.

In this passage, Alexander is describing the perfect soldier, but his description can—and should—be applied much more broadly. Success, in any endeavor, requires a passionate drive to fight and keep fighting. Weapons, skills, tactics, philosophy: these things do matter, but they matter much less than passionate persistence—for what good are they if they are not put to use.