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Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him.’
The steering wheel comprises four pieces: our spiritual practice (sadhana), the association that we keep (sanga), our character (sadachar) and our service to God and to others (seva).
As you become successful, do not forget the keys to happiness.
Behind the smiles, everyone is going through personal struggles we know nothing about.
Having a friend to listen to your problems and discuss them with you is the beginning of finding a solution.
We all have three things in common: we are all stuck, we all have a journey to complete and we all have a destination.
We must find positivity in the bleakest situations and live by the principle of gratitude.
‘The traffic of the mind.’ I smiled at him. ‘The mind is what we use to perceive the world. We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.
We have to train our mind to focus on the positive and feel empowered to deal with the negative.’
The mind is like the tongue. It drifts towards the negative areas of our life, making us restless and uneasy. It schemes to uproot the problems that are causing us so much pain, not realizing that the persistent scheming is causing us more emotional damage. The mind neglects the thirty-one other ‘seed-free’ areas of life, choosing not to focus on the simple joys available to us.
Gratitude is not a feeling; it is a state of mind that can be developed, and it allows us to tap into a reservoir of unlimited positive energy. Being grateful happens in two steps. The first is to realize that there is good in the world and that good has fallen upon us. The second is to know that goodness is coming from something other than us, that an external reality is giving the gifts of grace to our very own reality. This could be our family, our friends, nature and even God. We have so much to be grateful for!
A poem composed by Johnson Oatman, Jr, which we had sung in our primary school, summarizes my message eloquently: When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed, When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost, Count your many blessings, name them one by one, And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.
‘It’s not the happy people who are grateful; it’s the grateful people who are happy.
Monk Mindset: We must have a positive state of mind when dealing with problems. Think: Is there anything positive about this situation I am in? Being positive does not mean we neglect the negative. We must constructively deal with negative situations while simultaneously focusing on the positive. Just like our tongue can be obsessed with something stuck in our teeth, our mind has a default setting to be obsessed about the negative. Gratitude is a state of being that allows us to see the positive. It comes from realizing that there is good in the world, that some of that good is with us and
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Stop and reflect on your life regularly. Pressing the pause button to practise gratitude is the way to make it a constant in your life.
Hans Christian Andersen who said, ‘When words fail, music speaks.’ But that is only the case if you make time to listen.
‘One’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgements,’
‘There is one evidence-based thing we can do. The only price is commitment and consistency. This is writing a gratitude log daily, which is based on three principles of gratitude: recognize, remember and reciprocate.’
Gratitude Log This log can be kept on your phone and written on your journey to work, or you may want to write it in your diary in a quiet space. This is a simple exercise that will take approximately ten minutes a day to do, and there are no hard or fast rules. It is best to do this activity in the morning, because starting your day with gratitude will leave you feeling positive for the rest of the day.
Exercise Reflect on the last twenty-four hours and identify three to five people or situations that you are grateful for. The more descriptive you are, the easier it will be to excavate the emotion of gratitude from within you. The daily description should consist of three to five people or things you are grateful for, and once every week, it should contain three to five action points to thank the people you are grateful for. You can be grateful for anything—something as simple as someone smiling at you, giving you a seat on the train, or a co-worker buying you lunch. We cannot repay every
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Monk Mindset: We must learn how to press pause and reflect on what we are grateful for. It is not good enough to say that we are too busy to be grateful. If we do not press pause, how many beautiful moments of our life are we missing? The ways to start practising gratitude are: to recognise the good that has been done unto us and say ‘thank you’; to remember the good and mean it; and to reciprocate through actions of giving back and live by the same values. Gratitude is not merely an emotion; it is a way of life that can be learnt and practised. We must prioritize the time to practise
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When things are beyond your control and there is nothing you can do, why worry?
The easiest way to bring clarity to our life is to seek guidance from people who possess clarity.
‘To get to that level of detachment or state of gratitude, you need what you called spiritual strength.
A spiritual process gives us the ability to come out of this mental loop and helps transform the greatest difficulties into opportunities.’
Monk Mindset: Some things in life are beyond our control. When we are in that situation, we feel overwhelmed as we try everything in our power to control it. But that is useless! The founders of WhatsApp did not get jobs at Twitter and Facebook when they applied, which worked out in their favour in the future. Hence, what we see as bad at one point in time can turn out to be the best thing to happen to us. Just as I could not control the virality of my ‘out-of-context’ video, similarly there are many situations in life that are out of our control. Think: Is this in my control? If yes, you can
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Spiritual practice is the foundation of our happiness. It guides us in times of turmoil and grounds us in times of joy.
The simplest way to explain spiritual practice is to describe the hierarchy of connections. At any moment, we can be making three kinds of connections:
3 Connections types:
1. Outside ourselves
2. Inside ourselves
3. Above ourselves
Modern science recognizes the huge benefits of meditation: relieving us of stress, giving us a sense of purpose, thus enabling us to become more creative, among many other benefits.
ancient eastern literature gives us deeper insight. ‘Meditation is like a plane: It first takes you high, then far away and then further away imperceptibly.
meditation is a discipline that helps us control the mind.
Monk Mindset: We are not human beings having spiritual experiences; we are spiritual beings having human experiences. We are not this body; we are a spiritual being. We need to understand the hierarchy of connections. Ultimately, we must connect to something above ourselves. This can give us the power to spread happiness and joy around the world. There are many ways to connect to this higher power. We may have our own, which is great, and we should go deeper into it. One of the most effective methods that has worked really well for me is mantra meditation.
We should deal with each other sensitively; our attitude towards life affects how we act in our relationships.
When we treat inanimate objects, like buckets or our possessions, with disrespect or insensitivity, we will end up treating people the same.
Insensitivity becomes part of our general attitude, and our instinct does not discriminate between things and people.
‘There are two sides to that. For practical purposes, we will often benefit from putting things into compartments but we should know that the way we act in one area of our life can have dire consequences in another.’
Monk Mindset: We must be sensitive with our words and actions. Being sensitive means to think about how the other person may feel before we say or do something. How do we practise being sensitive? We must treat even inanimate objects with consideration and respect. If we do not, then the mentality of insensitivity may become a part of our general attitude. One’s instinct or general attitude does not discriminate between things and people. Treating things badly can affect our attitude negatively, which may percolate into our relationships.
There are many ways to perceive others. We should start choosing the one that magnifies the positive and avoids the negative.
‘The bee teaches us so much,’ I went on, as a thought came to my mind. ‘They are always looking for the nectar that flowers possess and avoid lingering where there is dirt. We should be like the bee—always seeing the best in people and choosing to avoid their faults.’
I have learnt that there are five different ways we can perceive people in our relationships.
But Type-1 people don’t even agree that their windows are dirty, what to speak of cleaning them. They not only continue to perceive the clean laundry as dirty but also keep bad-mouthing it.
Points in favour of this employee. He then made a list of all the strengths this man had, including the time he had made the company millions of dollars.
To focus on the good and deal with the bad is a principle that can save relationships and help us make the right decision.
‘Neglecting the bad does not mean that we do not deal with it practically. It just means that we do not allow our mind to focus on and hover over the bad.’
Monk Mindset: Seeing the best in people can be challenging at times, especially when we are in constant proximity to them. We can perceive people in the following five ways: See only bad and magnify it. See good and bad, neglect the good and focus on the bad. See good and bad, and be neutral to both. See good and bad, choose to focus on the good and neglect the bad. See the good and magnify it. The ideal state is the fourth stage, in which one’s relationships flourish. Reaching the fourth stage takes consistent hard work and practice.
Corrective feedback can make or break our relationships.
“Our mutual funds and our relationships have one thing in common: we must invest in both before we can withdraw.”
Learning the art of appreciation is vital for building healthy relationships.
As is commonly said, “It was not what you said, it’s how you said it.” Our tone of voice, body language and facial expressions account for more than the words we use.
