The Rudest Book Ever

by Shwetabh Gangwar

The world doesn’t give a flying fuck about you. This world is a place full of people that will come in the form of friends, lovers and well-wishers; in the form of emotional adhesives, neatly packaged dreams and aspirational lollipops; in the form of saviours, fixers and salespersons.

A person’s emotional responses to different experiences create interpretations of those experiences, which the person assumes to be true. Therefore, emotional responses become one of the earliest teachers of the person.

Teaching what to think stops the product from learning how to think and since the person doesn’t learn how to think, it grows up to be confused and clueless regarding how to deal with this world.

Your parents wanted to prepare you to be one of the best products for this world. In action, what they end up doing is: prepare you technically, academically and skill-wise to be the best product for the race, like a car. The human element is barely accounted for.

Learning of any kind that involves zero investment of your thinking produces only imitation.

Just because somebody is

older doesn’t mean they have figured out life. In most cases, older people are children who have aged. Stop attaching maturity, wisdom, enlightenment to ageing.

He is old, hence he must be wise is one of the stupidest notions ...

Specialness is the badge of realisation you earn. It may seem very simple to you, but this thinking can change the course of your life. Any achievement dictates you have created or mastered something. This means that not only did you gain in terms of knowledge, but you built habits of discipline, hard work, prioritising and focusing—habits that will serve you in almost all aspects of life.

If you need somebody else to tell you that you are special, then you have not done anything to earn it in your own mind.

There are people who, despite having achieved, learned, and progressed a lot in their lives, have no sense of specialness in their minds. It happens because they did it all to prove something to somebody—it could be their parents, society, teachers.

Specialness then becomes a collection of skills, and feeling special is the sensation felt on upgrading in life after having mastered a skill.

Those who are able to find out what they want to do in life chase after greatness to prove to themselves that they are great at what they do. With time, they realise they don’t need anybody’s approval, as doing what they want to do gives them purpose, and fulfilling that purpose gives them satisfaction and a meaningful life.

You know a lot of sensible things, but the reason why you don’t apply them is because you don’t understand them. To understand something, it must come from the reasoning of your own mind. Knowledge can be borrowed, but you can’t borrow understanding.

Once you reach a conclusion derived from your thinking, it is called a realisation. And once you realise something, your perception changes about it once and for all. And that perception remains locked down until another realisation impacts it—that’s the process of learning and growing.

Always remember: your job is not to understand people, but to understand and take care of yourself.

Real data is found in the choices they make, not what they say they would like to make.

Always remember: the true test of any idea is not its popularity, but how deeply it makes you think.

The point of cultivation is not storing knowledge in your mind so you can use it later to impress people. That might make you knowledgeable, not intelligent. It’s pointless if it doesn’t reflect in your actions. Cultivation of the mind means keeping what makes you think and applying what makes sense.

the day you can look at a bunch of people all competing with one another to be better in the eyes of someone, and choose to not be a part of that game, is the day you win in the mental battle of life.

But if you focus majorly on getting appreciation and approval from them, then you are going to focus on who else they appreciate, and then probably compete with them. You will risk ruining your mood on days you performed well but didn’t receive their appreciation, and be more inclined to become their followers, their puppets and pawns to their schemes.

BECOMING A NATION

This is how you need to start seeing yourself from now on: You are a nation, not just a person. Other people are other nations. Your parents, siblings and those you love are neighbouring nations. If you have a good relationship with them, it’s great; if not, you both suffer. Your ‘self’ is the president of the nation. Your moral code and rules become your constitution. These rules come from knowing what causes harm to the nation. And the moral code ensures what lines you will never cross. Self-control is the security force that enforces the rules and moral codes in the constitution.

Self-respect is the happiness index of your nation. This is felt when self-control does its job well. The desire, urges or tendencies in you that cause harm are the terrorists. Your ego is the opposition party. It wants you to be the best, but it doesn’t know what ‘best’ is, except that it is a word that makes you feel great. And because of this, the self must govern the ego and work together on certain projects. Self-satisfaction is enjoying the prosperity from the results.

Therefore, the foreign policy should be never to give anyone else the authority of your nation. Whether it is desires or people; whether it is for love, approval and self-worth or pleasures; your self should be the authority.

People are gonna do whatever the fuck they want. You get to control what you do and how you think—that’s your only privilege. So, for your own benefit, in order to shut your ego down, you will have to learn to let go. The more you master it, the less you’re going to give a fuck about what people think of you.

‘Truth is rarely pure and never simple’.

The problem with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is it blinds you to the aspects of being human. People are many, many things, but never wholly good or entirely bad.

Everyone that you fight is not your enemy and everyone who helps you is not your friend.

There is no person on this planet with whom you would agree on everything one hundred per cent. There is no person on this planet with whom you would disagree on every single thing. There is no person on this planet from whom you cannot learn something new.

Every person in a relationship thinks their partner is special. Wow! According to that logic, every single person in a relationship is special. If so many people in this world were special, the word ‘special’ would have no meaning.

Nobody can fix someone who doesn’t want to fix himself/herself.

The supremacy of self helps maintain the thin line between addiction and dependency.

Ultimately, all that is going to matter is knowledge of your self—that is the only thing which will make sense, and the only thing that will give you any satisfaction in life, regardless of your age, what your net worth is, and what your relationship status is. The knowledge of you is what matters.