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February 17 - March 28, 2022
Almost every great master, artist, teacher, innovator, inventor, and generally happy person could attribute some similar understanding to their success. Many of the world’s ‘best’ people understood that to change their lives, they had to change their minds.
You believe that creating your best life is a matter of deciding what you want and then going after it, but in reality, you are psychologically incapable1 of being able to predict what will make you happy.
Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.
You think “problems” are roadblocks to achieving what you want, when in reality they are pathways. 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. That action will inevitably lead you to think differently, behave differently, and choose differently. The “problem” becomes a catalyst for you to actualize the life you always wanted. It pushes you from your comfort zone, that’s all.
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.
A lack of routine is just a breeding ground for perpetual procrastination.
It’s in this non-resistance that they find the most peace of all.
The main thing socially intelligent people understand is that your relationship to everyone else is an extension of your relationship to yourself.
Life did not get easier; you got smarter.
Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands.
Everybody has a limited tolerance for feeling good. When things go beyond that limit, we sabotage ourselves so we can return to our comfort zones. The tired cliché of stepping outside them serves a crucial purpose: It makes people comfortable with discomfort, which is the gateway to expanding their tolerance for happiness.
The path to a greater life is not “suffering until you achieve something,” but letting bits and pieces of joy and gratitude and meaning and purpose gradually build, bit by bit.
People think happiness is an emotional response facilitated by a set of circumstances, as opposed to a choice and shift of perception/awareness.
How will you quantifiably measure this year? What will you have done? How many hours will you have wasted? If you had to live today—or any average day—on repeat for the rest of your life, where would you end up? What would you accomplish? How happy would you be? What relationships will you have fostered? Will you be looking back knowing you likely damn well missed out on what could have been the love of your life because you weren’t “ready?” What about the hours you could have been playing music or writing or painting or whatever-ing? Where will those have gone? You will never be ready for the
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Do you know why you don’t have the things you once thought you wanted? Do you know why you’re not the person you once thought you’d be? Because you don’t want those things anymore. Not badly enough. If you did, you’d have and be them.
you can ever know an “objective” reality, and we know that you can never know how much of subjective reality is a fabrication, because you never experience anything other than the output of your mind. Everything that’s ever happened to you has happened inside your skull.”
that “right” and “wrong” are two highly subjective things and that believing there is a universal code of conduct to which all people need to adhere only makes the person who believes that consistently disappointed.
Feelings other than happiness are not marks of failure. Health is having a spectrum of emotion. Negative emotions are good for you. In fact, maintaining a consistent experience of only “happiness”—or any emotion, really—would be a sign of mental illness.
Social media is actually making us more emotionally disconnected. Consistently consuming soundbites of people’s lives leads us to piece together a particular idea of reality—one that is far from the truth. We develop such anxiety surrounding social media (and whether or not we’re really living up to the standards expected of us) that we begin to prioritize screen time over real-life face time. As beings who require human intimacy (romantic and not) to survive, it’s becoming a more and more detrimental force in our culture.
there is something inherently human about wanting to imprint, impress, craft, mold, form, paint, write, and otherwise mold something abstract into that which is conceivable to someone else.
