"If wolverines have a strategy, it’s this: Go hard, and high, and steep, and never back down, not even from the biggest grizzly, and least of all from a mountain. Climb everything: trees, cliffs, avalanche chutes, summits. Eat everybody: alive, dead, long-dead, moose, mouse, fox, frog, its still warm heart or frozen bones. Whatever wolverines do, they do undaunted. They live life as fiercely and relentlessly as it has ever been lived."

Douglas H. Chadwick, author of The Wolverine Way, quoted in the Globe and Mail.

Sunday Links & Letters (Self-Help Edition)

Welcome to Sunday.

I took a bit of a vacation this week from my usual reading load. In lieu of the heavy-duty reads, here are a few links to change your life and change your mind:

1. Can you change your luck? Eric Barker and James Altucher offer some suggestions. Here is a fascinating blog post on what “lucky” people do differently.

2. Can you change your behavior? Here’s what not to do.

3. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes: That’s the lesson of Tim Harford’s TED talk, Trial, Error, and the God Complex. At the end of his talk, Harford cites the Japanese mathematician, Goro Shimura, on the art of making useful mistakes. You can find that interview with Shimura in one of my favorite documentaries of all-time, Fermat’s Last Theorem, which is probably the most moving and inspirational film about thinking that I’ve ever seen. 

4. Check out the Holstee Manifesto: As credos go, there are far worse that you could live by.

Recommended daily reading:

Eric Barker’s blog, Barking Up the Wrong Tree

The wisdom of the Dhammapada:

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.” 

[Update Sunday afternoon: Holstee link added]