Michael Smoak

“I think people that have high standards assume that they should always win. They should always succeed. And that turns success from a cause for celebration into the minimum level of acceptable performance. Like, success simply becomes what's expected of you, and anything less than success would be a failure.”

“As you raise the bar, that means that you will always feel like you suck because your standards continually outstrip your ability to deliver them. And that's good in some ways because it keeps forcing you to progress, but it does mean that you live in this gap. You don't live in the gain, the comparison between where you are and where you are.”

“There will never come a day where you have completed all of your tasks. I think about the fact that one day I'll die, and my email inbox will continue to accumulate messages. People will get pissed that I'm not replying to their emails, not knowing that I'm dead. It should feel liberating which is you're never going to get on top of it all.”

“Tony Robbins says material success without spiritual fulfillment can feel like the ultimate failure. And that's why you get people at the top with all the money and the cars and the women and the success, and they feel empty inside, and they take their own life because they're depressed.”

“For me, I feel fulfilled if I'm serving others, and that's a really broad mission that can look a lot of different ways. It can be saying hello to Gerard, the guy I crossed the crosswalk with today outside of my building. It can be asking the barista how their day is going. It can be putting on a podcast with the intent of delivering a message that might make one of their lives better.”