The Pirate Captain Quotes – Adam Albrecht Blog

I am always looking for insights and advice on how to live a great life. I look for wisdom and nuggets everywhere. I expect you share the same interest in life advice since you decided to read this article based on the best-life headline.

When I find golden lessons I like to share them with as many people as possible. In fact, I recently published an entire book full of 80 of the best life lessons I have learned titled What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? The book lets you consume a lot of actionable insight without consuming the 20 calories packed into those delightfully bland non-cookie cookies. And since there are 80 lessons, the book saves you 1600 calories. So it’s kind of a weight loss book too. (But not really.)

Another Book Recommendation

But I am not the only one who writes about the valuable life lessons they have discovered. Ray Dalio’s #1 New York Times bestselling book Principles is full of great lessons on both life and work. Plus, it is the only book I own that comes with two of those built-in bookmark ribbon thingies.

While there are many great lessons in Dalio’s book here is his simple summation of the entire work.

In order to have the best life possible, you have to:

1) know what the best decisions are and

2) have the courage to make them.
-Ray Dalio

The key insight here is that you have to constantly improve your decision-making ability and increase your courage. Which means that we are all on the Yellow Brick Road with the Scarecrow and the Lion.

Key Takeaway

Constantly upgrade your decision-making skills. Know your own guiding principles. Study the outcomes of your decisions to learn what works. And study the principles of others so that you can adopt their best thinking as your own. Then live life according to your own proven principles. They will not only lead to better decisions, but they will also lead to positive outcomes that will increase your courage to make the right difficult decisions in the future.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my new book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

If you want to accomplish great feats it helps to be delusional. Because doing the really hard things in life takes so much work, luck and timing that it is nearly impossible, if not impossible to do. Which means that having a warped sense of reality may be your greatest asset.

Ignoring Stop Signs

When I set out to launch my own advertising agency, there was no reason to believe it would succeed. There was so much I didn’t know. But I just kept ignoring the many signs that told me I should quit. In the process I blew through so many stop signs that I should have had my business driver’s license revoked.

The Little Writer Who Could

I started my career as a copywriter, and suddenly I was taking on all aspects of a business. I was the head of accounting, human resources, operations (though thankfully not the kind with scalpels), account service, and project management. I was also in charge of buying everything from paper clips to health insurance plans.

bert drum — I was like Bert, steppin-in-time, sort of.

I was like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, playing every instrument in a one man band. Beyond tooting my own horn, and marching to the beat of my own drum, while trying to carry a tune, I also had to recruit other good, talented, musicians to join my micro-band. At the same time I had to book paying gigs for us to play. Writing about this now is starting to make me sweat.

Ignorance is key

Only by ignoring how crazy your undertaking really is, and how slim your ultimate chances of long-term success actually are, can you succeed.

Inspirational Movie Quote

One of my favorite movies is the hilarious Aardman claymation film, The Pirates! Band of Misfits. The lovable but bumbling lead character is The Pirate Captain, voiced by Hugh Grant. The movie is so dense with wit that I discover something new every time I watch it.

The Pirate Captain and his luxuriant beard.

Recently a line I hadn’t taken any notice of before jumped off the screen at me. The Pirate Captain was discussing a far-fetched plan with Charles Darwin. Darwin, being no dodo, informed the Pirate Captain that his plan was obviously impossible. Not to be deterred, The Pirate Captain had a wonderfully short, sweet and appropriate response to the doubting Darwin.

‘It’s only impossible if you stop to think about it.’ -The Pirate Captain

The Pirate Captain doesn’t think about the impossible. He just does the impossible.

Of course The Pirate Captain is right. We should not think too much about the difficulties we take on. Your thinking will naturally focus on the reasons to believe you will fail. Stopping to think about your challenges often stops people in their tracks. Too much thinking will cause you to stumble into hoops, instead of jumping through them.