My dear, Failure is potential without any more time. And the opposite is true too, “Success is potential given just the right amount of time.” So, yes, I know you’re suffering, I know you’re going unrewarded, but just give it time. …But, the moment you see no potential whatsoever – quit. Falsely yours, Alain de...

My dear, When one is finally feeling lucid, clear-eyed and rational, people always ask if one’s drunk. Or high. Isn’t that just totally mind-boggling? That when you reach a state of pure sanity, you’re called anything but. Anyways, I have a theory – my theory goes that when people see someone who’s completely lucid, clear-eyed, rational, and awake they turn their heads as if they’re looking at some...

My dear, You deserve nothing. Seriously, nothing. The proper schooling you got (if that), is all thanks to your parents and teachers who cared (few do). The fact that you lived past the age of three, you don’t even actually deserve that, your caretakers could have looked at you like a business proposition and after realizing that you brought nothing to the table, dumped you in a garbage bin (sadly, some caretakers do this). So be...

My dear, Everything has consequences, and if you look far down enough you’ll realize that the consequences for most things out-weight the benefits. But screw consequences. I say if you want it badly enough, then you’ve just got to close your eyes to it all and move forward. Sometimes the only way to act is not to think all the consequences through. If we thought everything all the way through we’d come up for air and...

My dear, Love your children wholeheartedly. Give your children nothing less than all of you. In time, they will outgrow you, they will rebel, and they will leave the nest. But if you loved them with your all, they will find someone who’s outgrown you too, they will rebel against the world to stick by your side in the hard times, and they will leave the nest to build a bigger and better one with the wisdom you’ve imparted upon...

My dear, Happiness is really just the 15 minutes after you’ve completed one challenge – and before you’ve identified a new one. The thing being happy is that only that which we love doing actually challenges us – everything else breaks us. Happiness is really just that small fleeting moment where you’ve conquered hard work that you’re proud of… before you start on even harder work that you’ll...

My dear, Bitterness is anger that forgot where it came from. Think of it as anger with an existential crisis, it doesn’t know why it exists, it just knows that it does. The problem being that it targets everything just because… targeting everything because the owner of it doesn’t want to go through the strenuous philosophical process of finding out why it exists in the first place. If someone bitter, someone’s in...

My dear, Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. We would not see ourselves in the characters if we did not resemble the characters, we would not be so interwoven with the plot if we did not see our every day circumstances thrown back at us, and we would not care whether or not the hero died in the end if we ourselves did not feel as if our lives were at stake. The story gives the...

My dear, Nothing’s more natural than that kids should care about celebrity. It’s not ‘growing up too fast’, it’s proof of immaturity. It’s proof that they don’t have to experience the realms of suffering or of discipline – which are strictly adult experiences. The problem is that we live in a culture that celebrates the celebrity, the forever-child; the problem is that we live in a culture...

My dear, What does life teach you? That every day is a new day. Filled with new scenarios. Filled with new problems. And the probability of things going wrong is stupendous. It’s like realizing that every time you eat hundreds of people can’t… Every time something goes right, somewhere out there hundreds of things are going wrong. More aware of just how much can go wrong, every day that goes by without a crisis feels like...