The question

What do you need to believe in order to get through the day?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox used this exact prompt throughout its named 9 Questions series on intellectual habits.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Others on this question

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Tony Judt Historian and essayist
During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.
Recorded The New York Review of Books, 14 January 2010 issue, 14 January 2010 source ↗
Bill Clinton 42nd President of the United States, 1993–2001
Yeah, there were a lot of brave people who stood up. Then, you know, it cost Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and the three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Viola Liuzza and a lot of the others their lives, but they were on the right side of history, and they believed if they made this sacrifice that it would work out. And whenever I get discouraged about everything they stood against rising up again, I realize there just are no public, or permanent, victories. You have to keep fighting for freedom.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview source ↗
Henry Marsh Neurosurgeon and writer
For the last few weeks, I've been completely happy. I've got my next PSA in three weeks' time. It may well show my PSA is starting to go up, and the cancer's coming back. Totally to my surprise, I've acquired this sort of Buddhist Zen outlook. Well, the future doesn't exist. I'm well. I'm happy at the moment. I've had a wonderful, exciting life. I've made lots of mistakes. I've trampled on people - yak, yak, yak, as I discuss in my books. But at the moment, today, the sun is shining. I'm very well. It's not that I'm in denial, but I think, well, all right. It may be bad news in three weeks' time, but that's three weeks away. At the moment, I'm well.
Recorded Scott Simon, Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, 21 January 2023 source ↗
Henry R. Kravis Financier; co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
I'm the kind of man who, even if the glass is only half full, doesn't lament but goes to fill up the rest.
Recorded KKR, 2024 source ↗

More from Carlos Slim Helú

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Question Do you rely on inspiration or discipline to make work? Craft & work
It takes a combination of ways to do these things, more than discipline. It’s a way of life. It’s like diet or gymnastics. You can know all the gymnastic things, all the exercises. You can know all the diets, but if you don’t do the diets, if you don’t do the exercise, it won’t work. It’s the same if you have some rules, but you don’t live them. It doesn’t work.
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview, Washington, D.C., 2 December 2007 source ↗

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