Think Straight: Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life

by Darius Foroux

During this time, James also had panic attacks and hallucinations. This wasn’t new to him. His father faced the same agonizing things, years before him. This feat made James believe that his condition was biological, and therefore something he couldn’t overcome.

My condition is not this serious but I tend to overthink a lot. My mother tells me that my father used to do the same and it is somewhat hereditary. I hope this is not the case and I'll get my answers in this book.

James realized that we have the ability to choose one thought over the other. In other words, we can control what we think. However, James doesn’t say we can control our consciousness.

But since we have free will, we can decide which thoughts we focus on. Hence, we can influence the direction of consciousness.

If we want to think straight at all times, we must stay grounded, look at facts, listen to other people’s perspectives, and only then draw practical conclusions.

Easy to say, hard to practice. It'll require a lot of patience which is a hard-find in today's fast moving world. Still my optimism compels me to finish this book and then make conclusions. This way, at least for the time being, I'll be able to live upto author's words.

His most important idea is that we should question the source of our beliefs, not the belief itself. Because most of our beliefs are based on our or other people’s perception.

Thoughts should serve a useful purpose. If they don’t, they’re useless. That’s straight thinking.

I looked at appearances, first thoughts, and made a lot assumptions. But my thoughts didn’t serve a useful purpose. In fact, they served no purpose at all. Instead of thinking, I followed convention. I let others do the thinking for me. Most of us are like that.

Influenced by others. Their successes, fortune, appearences and everything. The story of my life.

The point is that there are multiple ways to achieve your goals. Also, if everyone is doing one thing, that often means you shouldn’t.

Made some unrealistic plans around my career. Saw everyone else doing it. It didn't end well for me. Ended up wasting a lot of time. Now focusing on my original goal. A little satisfied now.

If you want the dots to connect in the future, you have to make sure you form dots in your brain. The only way you form dots is by learning, doing, making mistakes, reflecting, or anything you can do to feed your brain with the input it needs to give you the output you want.

A major reason why I skipped my examination attempts was my failure to recognize the fact that all the info. that I have revised will automatically be recalled while I am attempting the paper. I underassessed my brain's capability to connect the dots that I've registered during my preparation.

It’s better to be aware of your thoughts and decide what you will ignore, and what you will give importance to.

Filtering my thoughts is the solution no.1. Practicality of every thought that rings your mind should be taken into consideration. Cannot waste your time chasing or enacting every idea that appears in your skull.

No matter how much I love what I do, the thought of quitting and just walking away shows up in my mind at least three or four times a month.

Only think about things you can control. That automatically eliminates about 99% of your thoughts because there’s very little you control in life.

This is my mother's favourite line when she advises me on stuff.

Do you ever think about the past? That’s the perfect example of a random thought that lacks a purpose, unless you’re reflecting on a past decision or mistake you made. In the case of reflection, you’re doing something useful. But other than that, every thought about the past serves no purpose. From that point of view, it’s useless.

Don’t bother with convincing people with different opinions of the “truth.” It’s just not a practical thing to do. Save your energy for other, more useful things.

No matter what I tried, I didn’t feel like I was improving or learning new things. But I kept going and pushing through the difficulty. After this pattern occurred a few times, I finally understood what was going on. Training your mind happens in stages—and before you can move on to the next phase of your learning development, you have to get through a wall. I believe that both learning skills and developing yourself happen in stages. At the beginning of a new stage, things are easy to learn because everything is new. But the closer you get to the end of a stage, things get more difficult. In my case, I got headaches. But I wasn’t near the end yet because, after a short setback, I got back at it again.

At some point, you hit a big wall. That’s the mental breakdown. It’s also a point at which you want to give up whatever you’re trying to achieve: Writing a book, starting a business, changing your career or leading a group of people. When you hit a wall, everything stops. The book all of a sudden seems useless, the business seems to fail, the career you want seems unreachable, and the people have stopped taking you seriously. All is lost.

Before we invented language, we communicated and thought in images. But for many centuries, words have been our primary way to communicate. And that’s why we also think in words. When I think, I talk to myself. And when I take notes, I also talk to myself.

Today, I know myself better than I did ten years ago. And in ten years from now, I’ll know myself better than I do today. Knowing yourself is step one. Step two is acting on that knowledge.

Still in this phase. Learning about myself. But Yes! I know myself better now than I used to.

Remember: Money is a replaceable resource. When you’re out of it, you can earn it back. You can’t say the same for time. Don’t spend too much time thinking about money.

But the most important lesson I’ve learned was that you don’t regret what you did in life, you regret what you didn’t do.

This is what eats me everyday. Even though I have a long life ahead of me, I cry about things I didn't do as if I'll never get to do it. This habit of mine needs to change.

When we hold on to a lot of things in the past, they form an obstacle to living in the present.

William James himself once said: “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”