Prob. the best advice my father ever gave me: You don’t have to win them all. The true sigh of a winner isn’t necessarily aggressiveness or intensity at every moment. Too much Alpha for the sake of proving (mostly TO yourself or invisible beings like the ghosts that inhabit your imagination) Alphaness is a ruinous waste of energy. Winners are VERY careful with how they budget their time and energy. About 80% of the human species are total time wasters… they drone on and on and on, mesmerized by the sound of their own voices… Winners instinctively know the power of keeping it short and sweet… Winners know that about 1% of the battles in life are worth the effort and 99% ties you down, burns through your resources, and gets you trapped in strange loops with people who drain you dry.
Pick your battles, pick the people you surround yourself with, pick the ideas you engage you mind with, pick the people you listen to, and pick the people you lavish time, energy, and concern on extremely carefully…
What might appear to be a charming, amusing, titillating character flaw in a drinking buddy might turn out to be a catastrophic misjudgment in a spouse or business partner. Never, never, ever get seriously involved with anyone who is adept at making excuses, rationalizing questionable conduct, or a little too practiced at throwing up shit storms and acting hurt or offended when you confront them on something that needs confronting. A real deal person will 101% own up to their errors and will get busy making things right… they WON’T tell you how much they MEAN to make things right, or how much they didn’t MEAN to do what they did, or how much they can’t understand “what came over them”, or how the “couldn’t help themselves”… they will immediately set to work MAKING things right and let their actions speak for themselves.
People who can’t face facts or don’t think other peoples rules apply to them or run on about how they’re “only human” after ripping you off or misrepresenting their knowledge or abilities or fucking up a project that they were sure they could learn as they went (on your dime, not theirs, it will mysteriously turn out) or stamp their feet and throw tantrums… etc… only go from bad to worse to total and utter rot…
Eliminate them as ruthlessly as you would surgically remove a potentially metastasizing cancerous tumor on the brain…
Learn to read people as carefully as a jeweler weighs and grades a stone.
Always remember that talk is cheap unless spoken by someone whose words consistently align with their actions. The real words are spoken with money and actions.