8 Simple Rules to Live by From World's Greatest Deep Sea Diver

• If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.
• If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.
• Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.
• Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever.
• Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.
• It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.
• The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world.
• The worst possible decision is to give up.
• These are literally battle hardened principles. They are rules for how to live not from some university professor but from someone who saw what life truly is—both good and bad, violent and peaceful, beautiful and terrifying.

- More Here, an adaptation from the classic book Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson