By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to think more clearly under pressure. Reading time: 3:22.

The pioneers, circling their horse-drawn wagon trains after riding all day, would beat on pots and pans at night to keep away much more than the wolves.

In the eerie silence, they also had to fight off even more voracious and nefarious wolves. In their minds.

These wolves of the mind, crying in the desolate darkness, gnawed at the hearts and souls of the pioneers with psychological spears more than merely sharp teeth.

These wolves of the mind, moaning and groaning in the vast hinterland, tore at the guts of the pioneers to stomach the overwhelming odds of settling the West.

These wolves of the mind, howling in the isolated blackness and blankness of the night, slashed and scratched at the hopes of the pioneers with a frightening, debilitating vengeance that philosopher Blaise Pascal called a devastating “nothingness.” Pascal observed:

“All the unhappiness of men arises
from one single fact
that they cannot stay quietly
in their own chamber.

‘Nothing is so insufferable
to man as to be
completely at rest
without passions, without business,
without diversions, without study.
He then feels his nothingness, his weakness and his emptiness.”
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