101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

by Brianna Wiest

Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.

Bad feelings should not always be interpreted as deterrents. They are also indicators that you are doing something frightening and worthwhile.

Marcus Aurelius sums this up well: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Simply, running into a “problem” forces you to take action to resolve it.

The things you love about others are the things you love about yourself. The things you hate about others are the things you cannot see in yourself.

Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.

You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day—not your fears or impulses.

Happiness is not how many things you do, but how well you do them. More is not better. Happiness is not experiencing something else; it’s continually experiencing what you already have in new and different ways.

When you regulate your daily actions, you deactivate your “fight or flight” instincts because you’re no longer confronting the unknown.

As children, routine gives us a feeling of safety. As adults, it gives us a feeling of purpose.

You feel content because routine consistently reaffirms a decision you already made.

As your body self-regulates, routine becomes the pathway to “flow2.”

When we don’t settle into routine, we teach ourselves that “fear” is an indicator that we’re doing the wrong thing,

The point of hard work is to recognize the person it makes you, not what it "gets" you (the former you can control; the latter, you can’t).

Learn to differentiate what’s actually happening from what you’re currently thinking about.

Fire can burn your house down, or it can cook you dinner each night and keep you warm in the winter. Your mind is the same way.

Practice radical acceptance. Choose to love your home, and your body, and your work, even if you don’t like it all the time. Choose to build your life from a place of gratitude and vision, rather than running from your own fears.

If I had the life I wanted, what would today look like?

If I had the love I wanted, what would today look like?

My life consists of my days—what am I doing with this one?

What would my most fully realized self do with today?

Am I truly doing the best I can right now?

If I didn’t feel tired, what would I do today?

What, and who, is worth suffering for? What would you stand for if you knew that nobody would judge you?

What would you do if you knew that nobody would judge you? Based on your daily routines, where will you be in five years? Ten? Twenty? Whom do you admire most, and why? What do you not want anybody else to know about you? What are a few things you thought you would never get over while you were going through them? Why did they seem so insurmountable? How did you? What are your greatest accomplishments so far? What would be too good to believe if someone were to sit down and tell you what's coming next in your life? Who from your past are you still trying to earn the acceptance of? If you didn't have to work anymore, what would you do with your days? What are the five most common things in your daily routine aside from the basics such as eating and sleeping? What do you wish those five most common things were instead? If you really believed you didn't have control over something, you'd accept it as a matter of fact. What do you struggle to accept that you have "no control" over? What part of you makes you think or hope otherwise?

You think of money in terms of “obligation,” not “opportunity.” Your mindset is: “I have to pay my bills” as opposed to “I get to pay my bills, which house me, clothe me, and feed me, and that I can pay for by myself.” If you don’t value money by appreciating what it does for you, you’ll never feel as though you have enough.

Our feelings are how we communicate with ourselves.

“You can choose your family. You can choose your religion. You can choose who you are every day and it doesn’t have to be the same person you were yesterday. You do not have to become only what other people are comfortable with or can understand.”

“I don’t have to accept anything. I don’t have to change everything.”

“What I went through made me who I am; what I’m going through will make me what I will be.

“Wisdom is knowing that you don’t and will never really know anything.

“If I choose not to be upset, not to spend time feeling a certain way, then I do not feel upset.

Surrendering to it is not accepting defeat; it’s being honest. It’s being real and messy and gorgeous and tortured and darkly nuanced and glimmeringly hopeful. That’s what we’re meant to be. The only thing we really want to transcend is the inability to be what we are, as we are it. There is just as much value in the negative space. Not every second of your life has to be filled. A packed agenda is not success. Living to work as opposed to working to live is not a quality of life. Things are not split into “times in which you’re doing something that other people can quantify” and “times you’re doing nothing.” It’s all important.

You do not have to only be what other people are comfortable with.

I guarantee there is not one person you wouldn’t love if you knew their true story, their whole story, if you lived a day or a year or a lifetime in their shoes. We can’t expect equality when we’re holding up façades of inequality through dishonesty.

You should say how you feel before it stays in the darkness so long that it becomes the foundation on which the rest of your life is built—and then collapses through.

Never learning to say “sorry” or “thank you”—not for the sake of how it will make you look, but because you are able to recognize the ways in which you could have done better and the things for which you’re humbled.

You don’t “have” to, you “get” to.

It doesn’t matter how awful someone is being or how correct you are in your takedown of their mental-emotional state, you’re still wrong for doing it. It’s not your job to police for the universe; it’s your job to take care of why you feel more comfortable attacking assumptions you make about others rather than the assumptions you fear they’re making about you.

your true soul mate is the one who shows you to yourself.

You don’t need to know what you’re doing to still do something extraordinary.

Feeling lost or like you “don’t know what you’re doing” is only solved by learning to think about things differently. That’s all.

the recurring inner narrative, the little voice that’s telling you the story of your life, has to let go of the old chapters to genuinely write the new ones.

Choose not to be harmed, and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.

Always show up. To their baby showers and art exposés and graduations and moving days. Not because that’s what “good friends/boyfriends/girlfriends do,” but because that’s what you do when you care about someone else’s happiness as much as you do your own.

You won’t be there to hear the stories and eulogies they tell of you—you’re only here to know them now.

Just read, damnit.

You don’t need to have every answer, nor will you ever have every answer. It’s never about how certain you are, it’s about how willing you are to try anyway.