Author Angelos Michalopoulos

1

At the end of every day the truth of who we are brings us the bill to pay for every word we said and every action we did during it. When we pay it in full, we see dreams at night and when we don’t, we see nightmares....

2

Why be like lions living the life of cockroaches? We fail because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none. We are sad because the demands of happiness are great and of misery, none.

If we can become lions once in a while, why do we choose to live most of our lives like cockroaches? If we know what to do to be happier, why not do it more often? Why be like lions who choose to live like cockroaches? We live by throwing our strengths in the trash so that we won't feel compelled to give sweat, our sense of security and truth to become the person they can make us be. We are in danger. We are in danger of our mediocrity. We live by donating our strengths to our weaknesses. We donate them to the fear that comes with doing something intense that will result in a mistake, a defeat, and those weaknesses of ours that caused it. We praise what we want to avoid using, but often use heavily, what we don't particularly respect. We glorify light because we know how much more convenient and effortless it is to spend large parts of our lives hiding in the dark. If we can be happy, kind and creative people once in a while, why don’t we be so more often? If we can be, once in a while, as true as our truth and as strong as our strength, why don’t we do so more often? Why are we so willing to surrender to the horrible grey, the appalling fog of our handmade apathy, cowardice and mediocrity, waiting for life to come and show us how kind, humane, strong and capable we could be? If we know how to feel intensely, why do we choose to spend big parts of our lives immersed in apathy and its best friend, boredom? If we can be as kind as we need to feel happy once in a while, why do we choose to be so mean that we end up being miserable? If we know how happy we become by living to the max, why do we choose to spend most of our time hiding in the minimal? If we can do it occasionally, why not do it more often? We trust what we know, fear what we don’t and dread what we have intentionally left unknown. Self-knowledge is the mother of success and happiness. If we knew our weaknesses well enough to disarm them, we wouldn’t be afraid of them. We wouldn’t be afraid of doing something new, intense or extreme that would forcibly toss us onto our mistakes and defeats, that is, onto the truth of who we are, which our weaknesses are a great part of. Instead, we choose to spend a large part of our life hidden in the lies we use to convince ourselves that we have twice as many strengths and half as many weaknesses. When we get to discover our weaknesses, we will defeat the “once in a while" label we’ve installed in front of our brain and we will be able to be our best selves more often than we become our worst. So, let's stop covering up our weaknesses with the lies that we tell ourselves and let's start learning them. Let’s live our life exposing, as often as we can, the lies we’ve been telling ourselves for years, until we unmask those weaknesses of ours that produced them. When we get to know our weaknesses, we will stop being afraid of them, and will free ourselves enough to live our life to the max. We are lions that choose to live the biggest portion of our lives as cockroaches because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

3

Thankfully, there will never be a shortage of people who want to build a world where a smile defeats a swearword, where the truth of a “yes” defeats the hypocrisy and dishonesty of a “maybe”, and where the compassion...

4

I will live by doing my best to be as honest as my soul, because every time I stood to be as real as my truth, as emotionally solid as my soul and as pure as my beliefs, I realised what it meant to be so in love with...

5

Beauty is born to defeat the sadness that ugliness produces.

6

Life is the celebration of beauty, but even more so, the celebration of an ugliness that was never born because it was explained. Every time we manage to explain to ourselves what makes us feel ugly, a celebration o...

7

The more we love, the less we fear. When we’re not afraid to love, we fear nothing.

8

Liars have all it takes to be sad because, by fearing the truth, they end up fearing their own soul that produces it.

Consequently, they choose to keep as far away from their soul as needed to never find their happiness that lives within her. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness. People who become happy are those who, having told the truth to themselves, know their weaknesses as well as needed to disarm them before they block the road that leads to their happiness. There’s nothing our weaknesses want less than for us to be happy because this way, they keep us as weak as they need to defeat us. Self-knowledge is the mother of happiness because we trust what we know and fear what we don’t. Our choice is to either get to know our weaknesses better or forget about our happiness. Our biggest fear, our alpha fear, is the unknown we create out of everything we choose to never learn. It’s the fear that gives birth to all other fears and the source of our most undefinable sadness. We fear the unknown every time it dresses up as the darkness around us, or the future ahead of us, tearing into our lives to show and prove to us how much stronger and more determined than us it is. The one unknown we are most terrified of is the part of our character we have intentionally left unknown. We fear what we don’t know and that’s why we haven't stopped learning, ever since childhood, to overcome our fears, the ones anything unknown around us engender. The less we know about something, the more we fear it. We trust what we know, fear what we don’t, and dread what we’ve intentionally left unknown. The less we know about our weaknesses, the more we fear them, and the less confident we feel when dealing with any problem we face, which they create or magnify. As long as we choose to keep our weaknesses unknown, we live locked in a fortress contained by the fears of the unknown, blocked even from our own dreams and potential. We live in the fortress we’ve built from our knowledge, from all we have learned so far, seeing from afar the person we could become hugging our dreams and living freer and happier than us outside of it. Thankfully, we are much better than we think at defeating the things that want to make us miserable. We have many mental and emotional weapons and allies to defeat our weaknesses at our disposal and, by extension, defeat the misery they cause or magnify for us. To manage to do that, we should not be afraid to learn them as well as we need to disarm them before they lead us to the wrong decisions and the defeats that will fill us with sorrow, pain, disillusionment and low self-esteem. Max most apogee. If only we knew our weaknesses better, we would enjoy life more - since we wouldn’t be afraid that, by showing who we truly are, by feeling or doing something as intense as the truth we are made of, we might produce a defeat that would throw us against those weaknesses of ours that spawned it. If we knew our weaknesses better, we wouldn't be so afraid to get close to ourselves, close to our truth, by feeling more and thinking less. The power of our soul will become our power, only when we believe in her. The more we believe in our soul, the stronger we become. Happiness will go where truth already is.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

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To protect ourselves from what we shouldn’t know, we live by learning a lot and forgetting even more.

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We live surrendering our happiness to the unknown. To protect our delusions from the truth, and our ego from its next rendezvous with defeat, we continuously get better at producing the unknown by forgetting what we ...

11

We've made ignorance our favourite excuse for not living.

45

Life doesn’t come with a manual. We have to write it ourselves, one mistake at a time.

46

It’s easier to go around the world than around our souls.

47

As long as we don’t learn our weaknesses, we will be the faithful employees of our sadness.

As long as we adore anything that keeps us at a safe distance from our weaknesses, especially those lies of ours with which we hide them, we will be working for our sadness. Let’s not capitulate, but let’s resist and not allow those weaknesses of ours, that give birth to and enlarge any problem and difficulty we face, to steal time from our own lives or a smile from our face. Let’s stop hiding behind the excuses and the lies we tell ourselves regarding the real reason we are miserable, and let’s understand why we are so keen on wasting large parts of our lives. Often, we decide to do the least possible and end up wasting our life, refusing to touch the joy, creativity, and happiness that its moments may have in them. We also avoid doing something that might throw us onto our weaknesses and the truth of who we are, of which they are its most painful part. Thus, we choose to waste our lives by refusing to live large parts of it. When we get to learn our weaknesses well enough to disarm them, we will not be afraid of doing something that might toss us onto them, for we are already aware of them. Thus, we will feel liberated to do anything we want instead of living imprisoned in the routine, repetition, of whatever feels safe for us. Learning our weaknesses will make us so self-confident that we will stop fearing to live our lives to the max. Thus, we will be able to enjoy our life and not spend large parts of it watching it disappear under our feet, unable to hold its moments in our hands, and try to turn it to happiness. We will manage to stop wasting our life and start enjoying ourselves to the max only when we stop fearing to do something new, different and intense that might possibly push us to the mistake, defeat, shame of who we are, and sadness our weakness produce for us. Let’s create a life out of smiles we’ve just discovered and not out of opportunities we’ve just missed. Let's create a life out of smiles we've found in places we never had the courage to look and not out of opportunities we’ve lost because we never found the courage to hope.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

48

Knowledge is the defeat of the unknown and self-knowledge, the defeat of sadness.

50

People who hate the reality they live in, because it has more truth in it than they would like, tell lies to escape from it and often end up becoming as fake as they need to feel unsuccessful and sad.

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As long as we choose not to learn our weaknesses, we will never discover all we can accomplish with our strengths.

58

Every time we tell the truth to ourselves, we honor the person we have the ability to be and every time we lie to ourselves we spit in their face.

86

Afraid are the people who can’t love.
As long as I love someone, I fear nobody.
I will live by fearing nothing,
not because I’m brave,
but because, by letting my soul free to love everything, I won’t feel th...

87

Happiness will go where truth already is.

I will live and feel as intensely as I can because only then will I be able to find in my words and deeds the truth of who I am, and with it, my happiness. Only then I will feel as strong as needed to liberate myself from the part of my character that wants to make me as mediocre, scared, pessimistic and cowardly as I need to feel sad. Why live just by trying a couple of bites of life, letting them just touch my palate and then spit them out? I want to drink in one gulp every moment I live and let it pierce me from end to end until it is grounded in the most sensitive, the most benevolent part of my soul, to make me feel it so strongly that I persuade it to forever become a part of who I am. I want to live a life during which I will keep on inviting every beautiful moment I find in front of me to dive into me and be grounded forever in my soul to become a permanent part of who I am, a part of my truth. I will not be disappointed every time reality, disguised as misfortune, defeat, difficulty, negativity or problems, tosses my weaknesses in my face to make me feel ashamed of who I am. I will look at them straight in the eyes and, I will not fight to avenge them for all the pain they have filled me with, but embrace them tightly until I get to know them as well as I can. I want to get to know them so well that I manage to disarm them, make them lose the authority they have over me and allow me to live freely, away from their enslaving shadow. I’ll never find again, I’ll never be able to reproduce or re-live, those moments I surrendered to negativity without a fight. I will live a life where, as often as I can, I will go where my soul and her truth already are.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

100

Let us live producing beauty or celebrating the beauty others have produced.

I will ask the hearts of the people close to me to give me all the warm embraces they have hidden in their most beautiful emotions, before my logic lays its hands on them and turns them into cold, uninterested, stiff handshakes. I will also ask them to share with me all the joyful moments of their past which they chose to forget to avoid comparing them with their present and realize how much happier they were then. I will live by asking my logic to give back to the people close to me all the happiness and emotional sunshine I stole from their souls and any part of their beauty they didn’t manage to hide in time to save it from the attacks of my ugliness. Moreover, I will ask my logic to give back to me all the carefreeness my fear of living my life to the max convinced me to turn into cowardly apathy rather than courageous enthusiasm. I will live a life during which, whenever I can’t find enough emotional honesty in me to construct words with my lips and deeds with my fingertips that make me proud of who I am, I will celebrate the beauty created by the words and deeds of the people around me. I want to feel so emotionally honest that I find the courage to let my words and actions seek in the souls of the people around me that part of their beauty which will help me explain my ugliness to myself. Every moment we explain to ourselves what makes us feel ugly, we realize how much undiscovered beauty we still have in us.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

101

Every moment we enjoy life, we defeat the ugliness our weaknesses produce, without even having to fight them.

102

When logic hits the brakes, pleasure accelerates.

103

The most beautiful moments of our life are those when we feel so content and proud of the truth of who we are, that we no longer feel the slightest need to lie to ourselves.

106

It’s often more profitable to become someone else, if you don’t mind the misery that comes from deserting who you are.

The real cost of truth is that we can’t become someone else without disowning who we are. My truth is my private Ithaca. No matter how far away I might temporarily wander from the truth of who I really am by lying to myself, my truth will be the private Ithaca that will always wait for me to return to it. The happiest moments of my life are those during which all my lies and delusions, seeing me feel as serene and as true as my truth, rush away from me in a panic, realizing that I will no longer be their favorite firing range where they can practice their ugliness whenever they feel like it. My life sees this and is moved to tears, because it realizes the value of these moments, and sets me free to fall in love with it. It sets me free to fall in love with any of its moments where I believed in my beliefs so much that I became so real that I couldn't be anything else but happy. I will believe in my beliefs until I feel so solid and so pure that I ask the people I love to allow their emotions to dive deep inside me to catch and take out all the beautiful words or deeds of mine that my lies never allowed me to even see, let alone touch. I will then ask the people I love to start painting the world around me with them, until I realize how much more I believe in beauty than in ugliness. CALILO. I will create a life I will fall in love with. Every person on Earth has their private Ithaca. We all have an Ithaca to return to because we need the truth of who we are to make us feel happy, more than we need our lies to make us feel successful. Happiness is the realization of how much more we believe in the kindness of beauty than in the malice of ugliness.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

127

If we don’t know who we are, we will find it under the lies we’ve told ourselves to hide it. That's why the lies we tell ourselves know better than anyone the truth about who we are.

128

Let us stop making excuses that we can’t find out who we are. We will find out who we are, when we begin telling ourselves the truth so we can uncover all the lies we’ve been telling ourselves for years, under which we’v...

129

After years of lying to ourselves, we have become so fake and artificial that we've ended up knowing ourselves as little as needed to feel miserable.

130

Extreme self–confidence breeds either gigantic triumphs or shocking disasters, but nothing in between.

270

When we create a life we can fall in love with, the sadness anything negative creates will be cut in half and the happiness that anything positive creates will be doubled.

271

Love makes life easy, indifference makes it difficult, and hatred unbearable.

When we love what we do, our effort to achieve it becomes simpler, easier, and any negativity it causes becomes less stressful and painful. Every moment, our happiness is shaped by the relationship between the cost we have to pay and the physical as well as emotional benefit we receive for anything we do or say. Life often becomes the invisible relationship between the cost and benefit of everything we say and do. It becomes a miserable fight when the cost is greater than the benefit and a dance of pleasure when the opposite happens. When we love what we do, our life becomes effortless and more optimistic, while our future becomes more attractive because the benefits, positives and pleasure we receive are significantly bigger than the cost, negativity and discomfort of the effort we put in. The way to minimize the discomfort and pain of doing something is to do things we enjoy. How much we enjoy every moment of our life is determined by the emotional benefits, such as joy, pleasure, pride, and self-confidence, we receive from what we do in relation to the physical and emotional costs. These can be the discomfort, pain, obstacles, difficulty, negativity, and sorrow that we have to overcome to make it happen. So, rather than just blindly doing what others push us to do, even if it is considered socially acceptable, let's give our beliefs and the truth of who we really are the opportunity to create a life so beautiful that we fall in love with it. Needless to say, we must live within the rules and laws of society, but by no means should we let what is widely considered conventional and normal cut off our wings and steal our dreams. Everything becomes easier when the benefit of what we do is greater than its cost. Everything we do includes beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow, the excitement of possible victory and the crash landing of possible failure. Nothing will be given to us for free, except everything we do not want to have anyway. We must give sweat, security, and truth to achieve success, especially happiness, the greatest success of all. For almost everything we want to achieve in life, we have to give sweat, security, and truth to make the effort, take risks, and tell ourselves the truth about those weaknesses of ours that need to be disarmed to prevent them from pushing us towards failure and those strengths of ours that must be used to achieve success. There are no free victories in life, except fake ones. Life does not give away free victories, and it certainly does not give away the greatest victory of all, happiness. Defeats are as cheap as victories are expensive. Since stupidity is free and wisdom is expensive, losing is extremely easy; we just let our weaknesses defeat us. On the contrary, winning is difficult, as we must first defeat our weaknesses to get a chance to defeat our opponent. The more we love what we do, the easier it becomes to be good at it, as we are not too intimidated by the cost we pay to achieve it. The more we love something, the less difficult and painful is its achievement because the benefits, that is, the enjoyment we get from it, is so much greater than the cost, that is, the pain and discomfort we suffer to achieve it.

TELL US YOUR THOUGHTS

272

Happy are those who have created a life they love so much that they make it seem easy, even if it is not. Miserable are those who hate their lives so much that everything seems difficult, even if it is not.

276

We wear high heels on our self-worth before we parade it to the people around us, so we can seduce them enough to dissuade them from trying to discover our real value.

ANGELOS

About

Podcast

Quotes

Books

Author Angelos Michalopoulos

Books by Angelos Michalopoulos

1. CALILO CHES

2. CALILO MAX - MAX MOST APOGEE

3. Where words go to become silences

4. The obscure zero, the vacant one and the man in between

5. CALILO (Create A Life you can fall In LOve with)

6. Would you be happy if you lived a floor below paradise?

7. April fifth (Why sorrow is the poorest poverty)

8. Bewitching sofa triumphs

PODCASTS

THE BILL OF THE LAST TRUTH 2

MEDIOCRITY: LIONS AND COCKROACHES

CALILO

CALILO: EMOTIONAL HONESTY: AS HONEST AS MY SOUL

Quotes

1

At the end of every day the truth of who we are brings us the bill to pay for every word we said and every action we did during it. When we pay it in full, we see dreams at night and when we don’t, we see nightmares.

2

Why be like lions living the life of cockroaches? We fail because the demands of greatness are huge and of failure, none. We are sad because the demands of happiness are great and of misery, none.

3

4

5

Beauty is born to defeat the sadness that ugliness produces.

6

Life is the celebration of beauty, but even more so, the celebration of an ugliness that was never born because it was explained. Every time we manage to explain to ourselves what makes us feel ugly, a celebration of beauty begins.

7

The more we love, the less we fear. When we’re not afraid to love, we fear nothing.

8

Liars have all it takes to be sad because, by fearing the truth, they end up fearing their own soul that produces it.

9

To protect ourselves from what we shouldn’t know, we live by learning a lot and forgetting even more.

10

11

We've made ignorance our favourite excuse for not living.

12

Nobody becomes happy accidentally. Happy are the people who don’t believe in their sadness.

13

We either create happiness out of truth, or sadness out of lies.

14

True people deserve the beauty of their soul and fake people - the ugliness of their sadness.

15

Our happiness is the cost of lying to ourselves and our loneliness - the cost of lying to others.

16

When we lie to ourselves, we invite other people to lie to us.

17

The huge, indecipherable cost of lying to ourselves is that we end up attracting those people we should keep away.

18

Every moment we live we either tell ourselves the truth and become as real as we need to be happy, or tell ourselves lies and become as fake as we need to be miserable.

19

Since happiness often has more truth in it that we can bear, we often choose, by not choosing, to be sad.

20

There is no lie that ultimately won’t cost more than the truth it was born to hide.

21

Life loves to remind us what we try the hardest to forget.

22

Life is a vast plain which, in seconds, can transform itself into an excruciatingly small cell.

23

The faster we run to escape the person we are, the harder we stumble on it.

24

Our sadness is the truth we never told ourselves.

25

We become as fake as we need to be to feel unhappy.

26

Life often likes to become an impossible choice between success and happiness which most often is won by the people who choose to defend their beliefs from the attacks of the next applause.

27

Silence is the hideout we use when we don’t know how else to avoid realising how much more truthful than us our words can be.

28

When we stop lying, we will become as strong as our truth.

29

We have more power than we know, as long as we can bear to live with the part of our truth it is made from.

30

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Truth is the only thing in the world that humans will never defeat.

32