101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

by Brianna Wiest

Fulfillment is a product of knowing what “enough” is—otherwise you will be constantly seeking more.

People very often focus on the warning signs that something is wrong, but not the subtle signals that something is right.

The fact that the kind of love worth choosing and keeping is the kind that ever so slightly tilts the axis on which your world spins, leaving nothing to ever be the same again.

How many people go to bed at night crying, wishing they had what you have—the job, the love, the apartment, the education, the friends, and so on.

Finding the exceptional in the ordinary is the real extraordinary.

(If you think love is something that exists anywhere but within your own mind and heart, you will never have it.)

Forget the final picture you want your life to amount to. It will never exist the way you think it should, and in the meantime, it will only ensure that you waste what you do have in the moment. There’s only one final destination here—the only thing you’re rushing toward is the end of your life.

The only place you have complete control over what’s said to and around you is in your home.

Changing how other people think and treat you is not a matter of how outraged you get, but how willing you are to explain, teach, and share. Defensiveness never precedes growth, it stunts it.

Particularly, they do not assume that everything they see or hear has something to do with them. They do not compare themselves to other people, simply because the idea that other people exist in comparison to oneself is mindless at best and selfish at worst.

Rather than embody an inflated image of their invincibility, their disposition is predominantly peaceful and at ease, which is the mark of a truly secure person.

Emotions outlast the memories that created them. We take past emotions and project them onto situations that are in our current lives. This is to say, unless we heal what happened in the past, we’re always going to be controlled by it. Furthermore, our irrational fears and most severe day-to-day anxieties can be traced back to a cause, which needs to be addressed to effectively stop the effect.

When there aren’t any psychological factors that play into physical pain, or rather, there’s no innate instinct that we need to process or readjust ourselves to survive, we let the memory go. However, our brains will prioritize rejection or other social emotion or humiliation, because we need to remain in the “tribe” to survive.

“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”

How you judge other people. What you first reach to insult someone with—especially when it’s physical—says infinitely more of you than them.

Seek out ways to appreciate the way people are, not the way you want them to be.

Start appreciating how rare and beautiful it is to even just have one close friend in life. Not everybody is so lucky.

Find meaning and joy in the work you do, not the work you wish you did. Finding fulfillment in work is never about pursuing your idea of what your “purpose” is. It is always about infusing purpose into whatever it is you already do.

Aspire to be someone who gives things meaning, not who seeks things to give them meaning. Rather than chasing “success,” chase kindness. Rather than believe wealth is the mark of a life well lived, believe that intelligence is, or kindness is, or open-mindedness is.

Be mindful, present and intentional with everything you do. It is not the quantity of what we accomplish, but the quality of it.

Stop being so cerebral. Do things with your hands. Cook, clean, go outside.

Do more. If you have time to be regularly consumed by irrational, spiraling thoughts, you need more to focus on, more to work toward, more to suffer for. Make sure you’re living more than you’re thinking about living.

Take the instances in which you’re most uncomfortable to mean that it’s time you expand yourself. You need to learn to think differently, see differently, do differently. You need to open yourself. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck in the cocoon phase forever.

Fall in love with the unknown, for the fact that it will almost always bring you things better than you could have imagined—things

Sometimes, the best way to get over anything is just to work on forgetting about it. Not everything requires analysis.

The best way to forget is to fill your life with new, better things.

Recognize that there’s a correlation between worry and creativity. It’s the most basic aspect of human evolution—the more we fear something, the more creative we are in creating solutions to adapt to the alternative. See your fears as catalysts for bettering your life, not as you being condemned to suffering.

“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.” —Marcus Aurelius

Practice happiness. External events don’t create meaning or fulfillment or contentment; how we think about them does. If you’re operating on a scarcity mindset, you’ll always be unhappy, no matter what you have or get.

Be mindful of who you surround yourself with. Your most constant company will account for a lot of how you turn out over the coming years. Pay attention.

Spend time on your own, especially when you feel like you don’t want to. You are your first and last friend—you are with you until the end. If you don’t want to be with you, how can you expect anyone else to, either?

Connect with people. Connect with people. Connect with people.

Create vision boards. Or just use Pinterest more. Seeing the life you want is the first step to creating it.

Dedicate your time to helping someone else. Volunteer at a homeless shelter, donate your belongings, work with kids after school. Make your life about more than just your own wants.

Focus on getting better, but let go of the end goal. You get better, not perfect.

Read books that interest you, and read them often. Hearing a new voice in your mind will teach you how to think differently.

Recognize that fear is an indicator that something is powerful and worthwhile. The deeper the fear, the deeper the love.

“This too shall pass.”

You either see yourself as a victim of what happens to you, or as someone given opportunity to change, grow, see differently, and expand. You either see uncomfortable feelings as suffering you have to deal with or signals you have to learn from. You either see the world as something makes you feel, or you see your interpretation of the world as a projection of your feelings.

When we think there is a purpose for our pain, the discomfort of it dissolves. It turns from an annoyance to an opportunity. Our suffering ceases.

When people believe that they are victims, they forfeit their power.

If we want to find peace, we need to know there’s a purpose for suffering.

You will either sit in discomfort for the rest of your life, or you will grow and be better for the things that are most difficult. It is very clear who does what.

The only problem with your life is the way you think about it. Objectively, you have everything you could ever want or need, yet your unhappiness simply comes from a lack of appreciation (which is a cultivated trait, if not a practice).

Once you achieved something, you immediately started to think of it as “another thing done” rather than “another thing in my life to enjoy.”

You haven’t practiced holding the emotion of happiness. We all have a tolerance for how “good” we’ll let ourselves feel, our “upper limit.” To go past it, we have to actually practice letting ourselves feel—otherwise, we’ll self-sabotage to bring ourselves back to our comfort zones.

You care more about comfort than you do about change. You’d rather remain moderately uncomfortable than deal with the uncertainty that is making a real change in your life.

You consciously choose to spend time with people who aren’t “good” for you. Meaning: They don’t really care about you, or they inspire you to behave in a way that is counter to what you’re trying to achieve. In other words, they bring out the worst in you, yet you continue to see them anyway.

Our minds have a limited means for self-control. This is to say, we are only capable of withholding ourselves from our impulses and desires for a period of time each day. With practice, we can extend that period, but it is finite regardless.

You cannot convince someone to love you if they don’t.