Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.
Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations
We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. What is wrong with me?
Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered.
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires
- It doesn't mean being indifferent. It means being comfortable with being different
- To not care about adversity, you must first care about something more than adversity
- You are always chasing what to care about
Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and, as we’ll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.
Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we’re young or careless. It helps show us what’s good for us versus what’s bad for us.
Happiness comes from solving problems.
People who don't want to deal with their problems will:
- Have denial about their problems and pretend they don't exist
- Have a victim mentality and choose to believe that they can't solve their problems
Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something.
Most people want to get the corner office and make a boatload of money—but not many people want to suffer through sixty-hour workweeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, and arbitrary corporate hierarchies to escape the confines of an infinite cubicle hell.
People don't like to climb much. They just like to imagine the summit.
Merely feeling good about yourself doesn’t really mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself.
Entitled people, because they are incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly and honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way.
Construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as the opposite. It takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all.
The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average.
Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems.
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter.
Humans often choose to dedicate large portions of their lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes. On the surface, these causes make no sense. The question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times.
Our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Bad values to have:
- Pleasure
- Material success
- Always being right
- Staying positive
Good values are:
- Reality-based
- Socially constructive
- Immediate and controllable
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.
Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you.
This may be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously.
We should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more.
When we learn something new, we don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong.
Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to them and we justify them and maintain them.
There is little that is unique or special about your problems.
How to be less certain of yourself:
- What if I'm wrong?
- What would it mean if I were wrong?
- Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
Bad values involve tangible external goals outside of our control.
It’s growth that generates happiness, not a long list of arbitrary achievements.
Our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity
We sit and stare and shake our heads and say, “But how?” When really, it’s as simple as just doing it.
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
Many of us have been “indoctrinated” with the belief that we should try to be as inherently accepting and affirmative as possible
Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.
Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits.
More is not always better. In fact, the opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less
Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly.
All the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.
While death is bad, it is inevitable. Therefore, we should not avoid this realization, but rather come to terms with it as best we can.
We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways.
While most people whittle their days chasing another buck, or a little bit more fame and attention, or a little bit more assurance that they’re right or loved, death confronts all of us with a far more painful and important question: What is your legacy?