"It's not that David Goggins has always been excellent at doing hard things while the rest of us cower before hard things. Goggins' early life was miserable and very hard, he was unskilled, overweight, and life had been slapping the crap out of him. He rose from this to a soldier, a machine that dominates 250-mile ultra-marathons. It is not because nothing is hard to him. It is because he likes rising to meet the challenge."

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"Well said! I find that most of these sellers of "guaranteed-success strategies" do include their early struggles, but somehow they assume in selling their product that the buyer's starting situation is the same, that their progress would be the same, and therefore it would yield the same results. Every choice is a trade-off, and good things in life never come easily and smoothly and with next to no work involved - also the sellers usually sell courses for something that is long gone by the time they get around to offering their course. Just look at the countless blogging courses out there - we are not in 2015 anymore, current online landscape and mindscape are very different than they were a mere year ago, much less a decade ago. Thank you for calling out this practice."

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"It never occurred to me to call it doublethink - it's a very apt name! In my past mega-corp job, my colleagues and I called it "the metagame". The game is the actual work to be done. The metagame is the cheap gilded frame I put my achievements in to get the next promotion, etc. Orwell put it very well. Thank you for this article."

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"In recent years, I started noticing the tides are turning, and the forced politeness is fading in people around me. It scares me how mortified I am when my kid tells their friends they're not in the mood to play right now - to their face! I was taught exactly as you say in the article - smile politely, don't make unnecessary waves, don't ruffle anyone's feathers. As a result, it took me years to assert myself enough to politely decline. Since then, I practice "quiet confrontations", in which I manage to maintain my boundaries without ruffling any said feathers :) Thank you for this very needed article."

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"Ever since I was little, I have wanted to become a writer. Although I am a voracious reader, I have next to no imagination I perceive as required in writers. I like your Third Room Letters, because at the first glance it seems very welcoming and encouraging to people like me, who have dozens of half-finished thoughts and random dialogue excerpts jotted down in a dozen places, none of them ever blossoming into anything more. Thank you - I am looking forward to more of your writing."

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"I like the concept of glimmers. It reminded me of another concept: vignettes. When a situation, no matter how small, occurs to you in a day, write it out as if it was an excerpt from a novel. No context necessary, but capture the situation with all its weather, smells, words, textures and plays of light. I find it an excellent remedy for the people like myself - I love writing and words, but I have no imagination. Vignettes help me keep a kind of journal - sometimes I put them in my diary/calendar, sometimes I collected them from short messages I sent to my friends to tell them about something funny... I find it very helpful."

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