Things that can Destroy your Motivation

1. Not having goals. You can’t reach your goals if you don’t know what they are.

2. Choosing goals that don’t inspire you. You won’t be able to keep on going if the prize at the end doesn’t really matter to you.

3. Expecting immediate results. Anything worthwhile is a battle and a struggle. It takes times and effort to bring about a change.

4. Lack of support. We all need someone to believe in us and to be our cheerleader when we start to feel discouraged.

5. Not believing in yourself. As Henry Ford so wisely said: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

6. Feeling bored. Most success involves a lot of humdrum work, and repeatedly doing the same kind of stuff. But each day brings you closer to achieving what you want.

7. Inaction and laziness. You have to work the plan before the plan will work … and dreams are only dream till you turn your thoughts to actions. Also, it’s crucially important that you manage your time well, and you don’t get distracted or procrastinate.

8. Being around negative people. There are plenty of people who only see the flaws, and whose eyes are on the problems, and the absence of solutions. If you hang out with them, you will lose your zest and passion, and your positive outlook will soon be undermined.

9. Comparing yourself to others. We each are individuals, and we start from different places; we all face our challenges, and work at different rates. Remember “it’s your journey”. Be patient with yourself.

10. Encountering setbacks. No matter how great your plans, or your level of commitment, you’re bound to face some setbacks and encounter obstacles. That’s a normal part of growth – just keep going when life’s tough.

virginia woolf's 1931 new years resolutions : "to have none. not to be tied. to be free & kindly with myself. sometimes to read, sometimes not to read. to go out, yes—but stay at home in spite of being asked. as for clothes, i think to buy good ones."

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)

the good news is you can still learn the rules now

English is a phonetic language

there are rules

People learn to read as adults all the time. And if you are reading this now you already have a head start.

_hyemee

Murals and graffiti on the streets of Ireland in solidarity with the Palestinian people agaisnt settler-colonialism

Tips for Self-Acceptance

1. Recognize that there is no-one who is ‘normal’. Love who you are and accept your differences.

2. Don’t think of your differences as inferiorities. They are all part of the package that make you “you”. And the world would be boring if we all were just the same.

3. Refuse to give up on yourself or your dreams. The biggest mistake you could ever make is to not try something in case it goes wrong.

4. Respect your own opinions, your viewpoints and beliefs. If people don’t like then, they can just get over it! Trust your heart and intuition – don’t just listen to others.

5. Don’t be afraid to express, and be, yourself. Develop your own style and your own creative flair.

6. Don’t listen to anyone who puts you down. It’s likely that they’re suffering from low self-esteem – hence they’re trying to feel better by criticising you.

7. Hang out with people who love you just for “you” – and who know that they have failings and hang ups, too.

8. Smile and be happy – you deserve to enjoy life. And remember life’s a journey; it’s not a race.

You live in beautiful circles  your hair is held  by a round pin  so responsibly

A costly chain  submits itself  to your neck

A watch that is never wrong  lies against your wrist

Keep reading

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity (Trinity University Press, October 11, 2016) (via Alive on All Channels)

Art by Alfonso Cuñado

— Marjorie Pay Hinckley

peace be upon those who laugh with years of crying in their hearts, those who chose to live even though life hasn’t agreed with them yet

— Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

tabu in the namesake can stab me and tabu in maqbool would definitely stab me

we have to like. continuously work on ourselves. there’s no plateau or anything. just continuous work.