Category: Quotes

The 22 Best Yoda Quotes Cover

How To Master the Art of the Perspective Shift

Nik

If you don’t know, Yoda is one of the strongest characters in one of the strongest stories of all time: Star Wars.

Yoda is a tiny, green creature of an unknown species, over 800 years old, and Grand Master of the Jedi Order. The best of the good guys, if you will. He has an incredible ability to wield the Force — the invisible power all Jedi rely on — and is a brilliant fighter with a lightsaber, their weapon of choice. He’s also the head teacher of all young Jedi and the first person everyone turns to when they need advice.

Despite his strength, Yoda’s true power lies in his wisdom. He speaks a little backwards and often in riddles, but every word he chooses is placed exactly where it’s meant to be. He says little, but what he says hits hard.

Yoda is not just a Jedi Master, he’s also a master of the perspective shift.

Most of the time, what he tells us completely flips the angle from which we were trying to approach a problem. Often, he shows us we’ve been focusing on the wrong problem altogether. This is incredibly valuable.

Perspective shifts elevate our thinking. They allow us to overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers, move a lot faster, and see the world more clearly. They also help us lift others by sharing what we’ve learned with them.

Since he’s a quiet character, there aren’t that many Yoda quotes to draw from, but I’ve assembled his best ones to show you how he architects perspective shifts. He frequently talks about teacher-student relationships, fighting, and what it means to be a good person. To give you enough context and get the most out of these quotes, I’ve structured them into one coherent narrative.

May they teach you to change your own mind and that of others.

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The Sentences That Life Is Made Of Cover

The Sentences That Life Is Made Of

Nik

There’s an old, wooden box in our attic. It looks like a treasure chest. What’s actually inside it is not nearly as interesting as what I find when I open it only in my mind. The last time I did, it was full of…sentences.

Not the kind of sentence you hope will have a lot of impact when you say it. Like “I do” when you get married or “I quit” when you resign from a job you hate. The kind of sentence a friend might drop only in passing, but that will mysteriously visit you again at just the right time.

When Einstein said that “two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe,” he wasn’t gunning for a place in the books of history. He was probably making a joke at dinner. It was a line and then we turned it into a quote. All quotes start as sentences, but very few as bold declarations. It is that second kind, the inconspicuous kind, that life is truly made of.

That’s why I find something different each time I open the box. Some are things people have said to me, others have found me along the way, but they all made me think a lot when they did. From third grade until today, here’s my life in 77 quotes.

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Life Is Full of Cosmic Jokes Cover

Life Is Full of Cosmic Jokes

Nik

Someone once asked Neil deGrasse Tyson what the most fascinating thing about the universe was. As if having prepared for the question his entire life, he launched into a full-blown speech:

“The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on Earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy ions in their core. Under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy. Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems. Stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself.”

Wow. That’s quite the image to hold in your head. And how impressive the cocktail of life just one planet, our planet, has mixed from these ingredients:

Source

And while we, the species of humans, have come out on the very top of this tree, we’re still just a branch. A tiny splinter of the universe. The genetic difference between the smartest monkeys, chimps, and humans is 1.2%. That’s why they and our toddlers still share many behaviors. So when asked about the possibility of alien existence, Tyson imagines the same gap:

“If aliens came and they had only that much more intelligence than us — the gap that is between us and chimps, and we have DNA in common — if they were only that, they could enslave the entire earth and we wouldn’t even know it. Maybe that has already happened. And we are living our lives as though we are expressing the free will of the human species, yet we are nothing more than an ant farm. On their shelf. So we are their entertainment. Not even worthy of investigation beyond what we look like in their terrarium.”

It’s funny, isn’t it? This contradiction. We are the pinnacle of evolution, and yet, we know next to nothing about the context we’ve been dropped into.

I may not wear a lab coat at work, but I’m a little bit of a scientist myself. Every day, I try to parse a small fragment of that context and make sense of life. Through writing, especially over the past year, I’ve discovered there are many ways this grand, cosmic contradiction is baked into life itself.

Here are 12 of the biggest jokes the universe plays on us.

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The World Needs You To Love Reading Cover

The World Needs You To Love Reading

Nik

One of the few clear memories I have of my childhood is the moment I learned to read. There were red, plastic letters spread all across the floor. Their backs were magnetic, so you could attach them to a blackboard, order them, and try to make sense of things.

Sitting in the middle of the chaos, suddenly, everything clicked. I felt my heart beating faster. A door to a new world was open. I got up and ran through the house. “Mom! Mom! I can read! I can read!”

I was six years old. Lucky me, I had six months left before I started school.

“So many books, so little time.” ― Frank Zappa

Photo by Maxim Lugina on Unsplash
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How To Be Unconventional Without Doing Unconventional Things Cover

How To Be Unconventional Without Doing Unconventional Things

Nik

One of my favorite quotes is this:

“If you want to be an anomaly, you have to act like one.” — Gary Vaynerchuk

I get it. If you want to live a 1% life, you’ll have to be a 1% person. And that means wherever you go, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb in one way or another.

But recently, I’m trying to argue the opposite side, especially for some of my favorite things. I think for this quote, it means that while the end result is being an anomaly, the way to get there might not be as unconventional as we think.

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Stop Blaming Science for Your Lack of Productivity Cover

Stop Blaming Science for Your Lack of Productivity

Nik

From 1896 to 1899, over 100,000 people sold their belongings, closed up shop and headed to Dawson City. Located in the Yukon in Canada, the hub of the Klondike Gold Rush resembled big dreams and hopes high as the sky.

And you thought queuing for Star Wars was tough.

Of the 30,000 that eventually became habituated in Dawson City, only a handful became rich. Average spend per person to reach the region was $1,000 ($27,000 today), which far exceeded the total gold produce by the time the rush ended.

Most of these people left with their pockets as empty as they were when they got there.

Right now, the same thing is happening again. Only this time, the Klondike is not in Canada and the gold is not buried beneath rocks and sand.

The nuggets we chase are the insights of science and they’re supposed to make us abundant in productivity.

Welcome to the 21st century gold rush of the mind.

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How To Hold Yourself Accountable With a Simple Tool

Nik

Alfred Pennyworth is one of the most important supporting characters of all time. You might not even recognize him by his last name, because usually, he’s just referred to as Alfred.

Michael Caine as Alfred in The Dark Knight Trilogy.

Long-time butler to the Wayne family and surrogate parent to Bruce Wayne aka Batman, his wit and wisdom shine only in brief flashes throughout the comics and movies, but ever so brightly when they do.

One of my favorite moments in the entire franchise is sad, but powerful: Alfred leaves Wayne Manor, as he sees no other way to make Bruce realize he’s on the wrong path.

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