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There are many things I wish someone would’ve told me before I started my career and emerged into adulthood. I wish someone who have told me that it’s impossible to separate your life from your career, no matter how much you try.
I wish someone would have told me that there will be soul-crushing frustrations and soul-smashingly beautiful moments, and sometimes they will occur all at once. I wish someone would’ve told me that you will have to figure out your career, your finances, your current experiences, your childhood traumas, your relationships and your friendships all at once, there’s no one by one.
I wish someone would have told me that professionals, colleagues, senior executives, managers, and bosses are all just people, often still trying to figure out, dissect and overcome the very things I just mentioned.
That’s why stumbling upon Tiny Beautiful Things by bestselling author Cheryl Strayed, the inspirational voice behind Dear Sugar, was life-changing. Here are 45 riveting quotes from Tiny Beautiful Things that will inspire you to do the work, and keep pushing even on your worst days.
Motivational Quotes For Every Millennial
“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith.”
“You cannot convince people to love you.”
“Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering.”
“Be brave enough to break your own heart.”
“We must help ourselves. After destiny has delivered what it delivers, we are responsible for our lives.”
“The thing about rising is we have to continue upward; the thing about going beyond is we have to keep going.”
“If you are to succeed in fulfilling your meaning, everything that happens in your life must flow from this truth.”
“We are here to build the house.”
“It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.”
“Desperation is unsustainable.”
“The people who don’t give up are the people who find a way to believe in abundance rather than scarcity.”
“Most of the people who didn’t give up realized that in order to thrive they had to dismantle the ugly jealous god in their heads so they could instead serve something greater: their own work.”
“If you let it, your jealousy will devour you.”
“When you feel terrible because someone else has gotten something you want, you force yourself to remember how very much you have been given.”
“Boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgements, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceful thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.”
“What I know for sure is that freaking out about your student loan debt is useless. You’ll be okay. It’s only money. And it was money well spent.”
“You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.”
“Self-pity is a dead-end road.”
“Nobody’s going to do your life for you.”
“No is golden.”
“Forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again.”
“There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay.”
“Trust the inner voice that speaks with love and shut out the inner voice that speaks with hate.”
“We have to reach hard in the direction of the lives we want, even if it’s difficult to do so.”
“Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay. Go, because you want to. Because wanting to leave is enough.”
“Walk without a stick into the darkest woods.”
“Believe that the fairy tale is true.”
“To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion.”
“We act as if we don’t know that awful things happen to all sorts of people every second of every day and the only thing that’s changed about the world or the existence or nonexistence of God or the color of the sky is that the awful thing is happening to us.”
“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards.”
“You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”
“The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right, and it’s almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.”
“You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.”
“Accounting for what happened in our childhoods and why and who our parents are and how they succeeded and failed us is the work we do when we do the work of becoming whole grown-up people.”
“Though we live in a time and a place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us…Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desires to heal.”
“Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.”
“The useless days will add up to something.”
“The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do.”
“We’re all just walking and walking and walking, and trying to find our way.”
“Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far, guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.”
“Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.”
“Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go.”
“Acceptance is a quiet small room.”
“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”
“Every last one of us can do better than give up.”
Sources: Adunola Adeshola via Forbes.com