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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
May 12, 2022
Sometimes it is only when the status quo becomes intolerable that change happens.
The French novelist Marcel Proust once wrote, “The voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new horizons, but in seeing with new eyes.”
The intense, direct experience of my own inner world had fundamentally anchored my sense of identity. I had learned to watch and observe the moment-to-moment parade of impulses, insecurities, memories, plans, fantasies, and fears that made up my mental reality. The “self” inside me that did that observing was something different from—and stronger than—the thoughts, insecurities, and fears themselves. Ironically, a religion that teaches there is no self had helped me to find my identity.
I was capable of living with uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without needing to resolve them into a single truth or ideological belief.
My task was to write a purposeful narrative using the life I had left in front of me.
The poet T. S. Eliot once wrote that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Home
This book will help you do two things that are firmly within your grasp: clarify your goals and understand better how to make progress achieving them.
The First Question: What is success?
5/11/22
To quote Maya Angelou
"Success is liking yourself,
liking what you do, and
liking how you do it."
That's the closest to what resontes in my heart about success. If I can check off all 3 points I should feel successful.
As you will see, success is never simple. It always involves hidden assumptions and trade-offs. Cultural beliefs, amplified by family expectations, can operate like automatic pilots, steering your intuitions, emotions, and actions even when you are only dimly aware of their influence.
Norman Vincent Peale’s classic The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
For this reason, some people end up deciding that success is less about the goals you should strive to achieve and more about the way you should live your life.
