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anytime we asked any of the men in our lives about something, they’d just chuckle and say, “Oh, you’ll find out. You’ll find out,” leaving us to fill in the blanks. But nothing good happens when you leave young men to fill in the blanks, because when they start filling them, the bad ideas they come up with take them to all sorts of unhealthy places.
I was not a good husband or a good father, but I truly believed I was a wonderful husband and an amazing father, because I’d spent my life surrounded by men who were even worse than me.
The controlled eventually becomes the controller, and after a lifetime of powerlessness, I was trying to bend the world to my will.
What I know now is that we have to make the time to sit with the people we love and let them have their pain or their sadness. Often, that’s all people need—to have their feelings validated—and they’ll feel better.
looking at yourself in the mirror and facing your demons is the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. You will duck it and avoid it—and make excuses for ducking it and avoiding it—for a long, long time.
you can’t love people and control them at the same time, because control is not love. It’s manipulation. It’s abuse.
The purpose of being tough is not to attack, but to protect. The purpose of being strong is not to dominate, but to support. The purpose of having power is not to rule, but to serve. What I’ve learned is that to be a true man is to be the ultimate servant. With any talent or advantage that life has given you, whether by birth or by circumstance, your duty is to use that advantage in the service of others.
I became obsessed with achieving perfection in all areas of my life, to be so perfect that I could make up for the bad things I did in secret,
Inside, I was a mess, less a person and more a collection of barely controlled compulsions and habits: a simmering cauldron of rage born of the powerlessness I felt in the face of just about everything.
You don’t work for money. You work for appreciation. You work to create value and to be valued.
Money has to flow like a river. If you dam it up and keep it all to yourself, you’ve stopped the flow of the river, and eventually it’s going to run dry and there’s nothing more coming back to you.
The best way to become successful is to serve people. The more people you serve, the more valued you are. The more valued you are, the more you receive, which can come in the form of more money, or it can come in the form of other intangibles that are worth more than money, like happiness, respect, and a sense of purpose. Work becomes its own blessing. So now, the question I ask myself every morning is not “How do I make more money?” The question I ask myself is “How do I increase my value?”
Sometimes it’s bubbling up from somewhere deep in your subconscious. But there’s a good chance that the ideas you’re hearing are coming from the last person or the loudest person who had your ear. Advertisers know it. Cult leaders know it. Con men know it. Politicians know it. Those types of people are extremely skilled at getting into our heads.
Even if you have a gun to your head, you have a choice. We have agency. Every minute of our lives, we can choose how we feel and how we respond to events and what we want to do. We don’t always get to choose our circumstances, but we always get to choose what to do with the circumstances that we have.
Letting someone else make you angry is giving them too much control over your life. You cannot control what happens to you, but you can always control how you respond.
Anyone can become so convinced of the goodness of their cause that they will excuse any action that supports it, and in the end they will wind up no better than the abusers they set out to destroy.
