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April 15 - July 20, 2025
heroic individualism: an ongoing game of one-upmanship, against both yourself and others, paired with the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the only arbiter of success.
Studies show that happiness is a function of reality minus expectations. In other words, the key to being happy isn’t to always want and strive for more. Instead, happiness is found in the present moment, in creating a meaningful life and being fully engaged in it, right here and right now.
happiness at any given moment equals reality minus expectations.
the more someone tries to avoid unpleasant circumstances, thoughts, feelings, and urges—exactly what Hayes had been doing before his insight on that fateful night— the stronger and more frequent they become. “If you cannot open up to discomfort without suppression,” he says, “it becomes impossible to face difficult problems in a healthy way.”
ACT suggests that when you’re in a difficult or scary situation—be it physical, emotional, or social—resisting it almost always makes it worse.
The most powerful teachings of ACT, which I’ll detail later in the chapter, can be distilled into a three-part process, which happens to fit into the acronym ACT: Accept what is happening without fusing your identity to it. Zoom out to a larger perspective or awareness from which you can observe your situation without feeling like you are trapped in it. Choose how you want to move forward in a way that aligns with your innermost values. Take action, even if doing so feels scary or uncomfortable.
It’s completely normal to feel stress. It’s completely normal to find ourselves in unappealing circumstances. This doesn’t mean you are broken. It means you are human. The more you fear, deny, or resist problems, pain, and difficult circumstances—from minor annoyances to major disturbances—the worse off you’ll be. The more you focus on what you can control and cease worrying about what you cannot, the better.
An elegant Buddhist parable teaches not to let the arrow hit you twice. The first arrow—be it a negative thought, feeling, event, or circumstance—you can’t always control. But you can control the second arrow, or your reaction to the first one. Often, this reaction is one of denial, suppression, judgment, resistance, or impulsive action—all of which tend to create more, not less, difficulty and distress. The Buddha taught that it is this, the second arrow, that hurts worse, and it is also the second arrow that prevents you from doing anything wise about the first one.
When you adopt a performance-approach mindset, you are playing to win, focusing on the potential rewards of success. You have an easier time immersing yourself in the moment and entering a flowlike state. Under a performance-avoidance mindset, however, your focus is on dodging mistakes and circumventing danger.
when athletes compete with a performance-approach mindset, they tend to perform above and beyond their expectations and perceived talent level. A performance-avoidance mindset, on the other hand, is often detrimental.
“Nothing I accept about myself can be used to diminish me,” she wrote
Audre Lorde
Numerous studies show that individuals who react to challenging situations with self-compassion respond better than those who judge themselves harshly. The logic behind this is straightforward: if you judge yourself, you’re liable to feel shame or guilt, and it is often this shame or guilt that keeps you trapped in your undesirable situation, preventing you from taking productive action. If, on the other hand, you can muster up kindness toward yourself, you gain the strength to move forward in a meaningful manner.
This is what is happening right now. I’m doing the best I can. Research shows that mantras like this are effective at defusing negative judgment and bringing you back into the present moment so that you can take productive action instead of resisting or ruminating.
You don’t need to feel good to get going. You need to get going and then you’ll give yourself a chance at feeling good.
Here’s how the pieces come together: Accept where you are. This is often the hardest part of getting where you want to go. Use the lens of a wise observer to see your situation clearly without becoming fused to it. If your situation and your awareness of your situation begin to collapse on each other, pause, realize what is happening, take a few deep breaths, and zoom back out to gain space. If you start judging yourself or your situation harshly, or find yourself spiraling into rumination, try to practice self-compassion. This is what is happening right now. I’m doing the best I can. Once you
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When you find yourself tight, anxious, or insecure about an important endeavor in your life, pause and remember that you’re as ready as you’re going to be. Take a breath or two and imagine that nothing is wrong. What would that feel like?
Acceptance is about being with your reality, whatever it may be. By doing so, you lessen the distress caused by wanting things to be different and judging yourself when they are not. You rid yourself of the gap between your expectations and your experience,
a big reason that all of us, including McMillan’s athletes, can’t put down our phones or log off our email is because we’ve come to associate nonstop notifications with validating our importance in the world.
This may mean leaving his phone turned off and in another room, or his internet browser and email client closed. Studies show that merely having these potential distractions in sight reduces the quality of our presence, even if we aren’t using them.
If your phone is within your line of sight, it is probably contributing to the deterioration of your presence and attention.*
“If we find ourselves in situations where we can’t manage our attention, then it’s also worth asking, What am I doing here?”
“How often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged,”
a concept in ancient Buddhist psychology that is often referred to as selective watering. In short, the mind contains a diverse variety of seeds: joy, integrity, anger, jealousy, greed, love, delusion, creativity, and so on. Buddhist psychology taught that we should think of ourselves as gardeners and our presence and attention as nourishment for the seeds. The seeds that we water are the seeds that grow. The seeds that grow shape the kind of person we become.
While to-do lists can be beneficial, if they are unwieldy they impede upon presence, keeping us from productive activity and pointing us toward undiscerning productivity,
you don’t want to cultivate things that rob you of time.”
We do things quickly—not better, but quickly—to gain time. But what’s the point if in the time we gain we just do more things quickly? I have yet to meet someone who wants their headstone to read, “He rushed.”
In a Harvard Business School working paper titled “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” a team of researchers from Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania set out to explore the potential downside of goal setting. They found that overemphasizing goals—especially those that are based on measurable outcomes—often leads to reduced motivation, irrational risk-taking, and unethical behavior.
a series of seven experiments in which they had adult participants share information about themselves with one another at varying levels of vulnerability. They repeatedly found that the individual doing the sharing felt that their vulnerability would be perceived as weak, as a negative. But the person on the other end of the conversation, the listener, felt the exact opposite: the more vulnerable the sharer was, the more courageous they perceived him or her to be. The listener viewed vulnerability as an unambiguously positive trait.
Merely verbalizing a challenging thought, feeling, or situation to another person has a powerful way of taking the edge off, making whatever it is you are going through easier, even if only a little, to work with.
self-determination theory, or SDT for short. SDT demonstrates that humans thrive when three basic needs are met: Autonomy, or the ability to have at least some control over how we spend our time and energy. Competence, or a path toward tangible improvement in our chosen pursuits. Relatedness, or a sense of connection and belonging.
When you start to experience chronic loneliness, your baseline perception of threat increases. Think back to evolution: if you didn’t have a group surrounding you, the pressure to stay safe and secure would fall solely on your shoulders. You’d constantly be scanning for danger, perhaps even forgoing sleep. Unfortunately, someone who feels constantly under threat and is worried about themselves has a harder time being empathetic toward and connecting with others.
If you use social media to augment in-person community—to meet people online and then get together off-line; to find groups of people with similar interests; to stay in touch with those in other geographies or when you cannot meet in person—then it can be beneficial. If you use social media as a substitute for in-person community and other, richer forms of connection, however, it can be deleterious.*
If someone is working in the same room as others who are internally driven, that person’s attitude improves. If, however, someone is working in the same room with those who aren’t too excited about their work, then that person’s motivation decreases.
A 2017 study out of Northwestern University found that sitting within twenty-five feet of a high performer at work improved an employee’s performance by 15 percent. But sitting within twenty-five feet of a low performer hurt their performance by 30 percent.
One of Cacioppo’s first principles for countering loneliness and building community is to seek collectives. We tend to like people who are like us, those with whom we share interests, activities, and values. There is also less pressure to hit it off when getting involved in a group versus trying to meet people one-on-one.
You don’t become what you think. You become what you do.
“The way practice works,” an anonymous Japanese Zen teacher once remarked, “is that we build up our practice, then it falls apart. And then we build it up again, and then it falls apart again. This is the way it goes.”
