Alexi Pappas Quotes

Imagine that all of a sudden, pursuing your goal is not an option at all for you anymore. It has been magically taken away. How do you feel? If you feel relief, then you know it wasn't right for you. But if you feel heartbroken imagining a world where you can't chase your goal, then the decision to commit is clear.

Being committed isn't about the end result; it's about giving yourself the very best chance to get there.

The only way to not be forever sad is to admit that we are, for the moment, sad.

A life can’t be replicated and it doesn’t need to be.

Nerves are cousin to excitement, and excitement is cousin to gratitude. Pay attention to your nerves: If you feel nervous, it’s a sign that a Very Big Thing is unfolding. Be nervous for how good that thing can be.

Like losing your virginity, you can talk about the marathon all you want but it’s impossible to really know what it’s like until you actually do the thing.

"I was no longer down to "meet at 3-ish for a run somewhere", because I understood that the back-and-forth texting leading up to the run would cost me some willpower."

"That's what being a Bravey is - you are making a conscious choice to tell yourself what you'd like to be until it becomes a part of you. You choose to replace "can't" with "maybe" by acknowledging your feelings, but focusing on your actions. Your actions encompass everything from what you do with your time, to who you surround yourself with, to the words you feed your mind. To know you can do this for yourself is the most powerful thing in the world."

If you don't have a goal, the world might give you one. You will be like a leaf, blowing with every breeze and wholly affected by the world around you. You don't want to be a rock, either, unaffected by the world and inflexible in your thoughts. Rather, be a tree: keeping your roots firm but also being able to sense and adapt to the world around you.

Robbie could never be still. She had boundless energy and endurance. She sang in the temple choir and the San Francisco Symphony choir. She would come back from a hike and go bicycling. She would get off the airplane in New York to visit her brother and immediately go jogging. Nevermind it was dark and she didn’t know the neighborhood and there were no streetlights. There was no deterring Robbie…she brought her knitting when she went sailing. But for all her extroversion, for all her overwhelming friendliness, her welcoming of strangers into her house, her fearlessness in tackling the world, Robbie rarely let her friends scratch the surface. She maintained that things were always wonderful, and, even when others knew they weren’t, she protected herself so valiantly from letting them see deep inside. Robbie was alone with her torment.

No single race, test, meeting, or project exists in a vacuum, because everything that happens to us is part of a larger narrative, and we can choose what that narrative is.

Chasing a dream isn't a right, it's a privilege - and it's more likely than not that, at first, it won't be financially sustainable on its own.

The brain behaves similarly with emotional trauma: When we create a personal law in response to trauma, the law can become hardwired into your brain so strongly that when you encounter even vaguely similar situations much later, your mind reacts with irrational intensity.

When you're depressed, it is very hard to love yourself. When you don't love yourself, it's hard to have a healthy relationship with someone else.

I used to think that my Always Try Hard Rule was the only way to avoid becoming like my mom, but now I saw that blindly obeying this rule had in fact made me more like her than I ever wanted to be.