The Science of Self Talk: How to Increase Your Emotional Intelligence and Stop Getting in Your Own Way (Master Your Self Discipline Book 5)

by Ian Tuhovsky

Well, first of all, “loser” is a value judgment, not a fact. And, yes, value judgments are extremely useful—indeed indispensable—if you’re trying to decide whether or not to buy something, or whether or not you want to get to know someone, or whether that person you think of as your friend is really a friend who's there for you when you’re in need or is just a mooch who’s taking advantage of you. Value judgments are also useful for weighing your own habits, decisions, and actions and deciding whether or not they’re good for you and the people you care about, whether they’re ethical, and so on. But value judgments are worse than useless when they’re global judgments of yourself. Because, for better or worse, you’re stuck with yourself. And you are the material you have to work with. So, since you can’t just reject yourself, it’s damaging to beat yourself up. You’ll just end up in a rut, feeling hopeless. And that won’t be because you were seeing things clearly. It will be because you blinded yourself to the truth. Or as the highly recommended former trader and risk and probability expert Nassim Taleb put it in his book Anti-fragile: A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. But that’s not you, because you’re here, reading this book and introspecting. You’re thinking a...

Well said..