101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

by Brianna Wiest

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.

You imagine your life as though someone else

Before you make a decision, you recite a storyline in your head. It goes something like this: “She went to college, she got this job, she married this guy after a terrible breakup, and all was well.” This is what happens when your happiness starts to come from how other people feel about you, as opposed to how you feel about yourself.

Everything in your life does one of three things: shows you to yourself, heals a part of yourself, or lets you enjoy a part of yourself.

how much confidence you have in whether or not you can manage your life.

He says that the two fundamental elements self-esteem boils down to are self-efficacy, which is “a sense of basic confidence in the face of life’s challenges,” and self-respect, “a sense of being worthy of happiness.”

It’s a gift to know someone who was able to truly affect you, even if at first it didn’t seem like it was for the best.

What you learn and who you become is more important than how you temporarily feel.

the other side of resentment is wisdom.

The people who have been through a lot are often the ones who are wiser and kinder and happier overall.

This is because they’ve been “through” it, not “past” it or “over” it. They’ve completely acknowledged their feelings and they’ve learned and they’ve grown.

People who waste their lives search for reasons to love rather than ways to love.

They try to create avenues through which they can justify their happiness, rather than just letting themselves feel it for anything.

Clarity comes from doing, not thinking about doing.

Binge thinking is what happens when introspection becomes a means of avoiding a problem.

Wanting is the ugliest thing you can do. It keeps your experience in a state of “not having.”

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.

When you get angry, get really angry, just let things burn through you. The less you push these things away, the less they come out in inappropriate and debilitating ways.

love that’s effortless. You’ll be instructed to believe that success comes from grueling, soul-bending hard work, but that’s more something we impose on ourselves because letting effortless things also be successful ones makes them feel unmerited. That’s how we create problems where there are none.

All hatred is self-hatred. And everything is feedback.

Everything is a reflection of you because all anything can ever be is what you take from it and all you can ever take from it, and all you will ever take from it, is what you are aware enough to perceive.

The expanse of your experience is directly in line with your consciousness. Nothing is as it is; it is as you are.

You are not in the world; the world is in you. And though that sounds like another abstract platitude, it is not.

Awareness is the antidote to solving so many seemingly unsolvable problems. Just the simple knowing that your egocentric mind is deriving other people’s actions and assuming other people’s thoughts to torture you is enough to silence it.