More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 20 - April 30, 2025
Incrementalism is a little-by-little, inch-by-inch, slowly-but-surely, entirely unceremonious affair. Incrementalism is a hard sell, except that it’s so effective.
The difference between what we struggle with and what we’re challenged by lies not in the task itself, but in the amount of support we connect to as we engage the task.
Challenges are energizing because, even though we’re doing something difficult, we’re connected. Connection builds energy. Struggles are exhausting because we’re isolated. Isolation drains energy.
Being isolated is not the same as being alone. The latter can be healthy—a form of intellectual, creative, physical, spiritual, or emotional incubation from which you emerge restored and energized.
When you’re isolated and you don’t feel safe, you make every decision from a posture of defense. Subsequently, your decisions (and your life) become a reflection of fear instead of
It was never the terrible things that happened to you that made you stronger; it was the resiliency-building skills you engaged to process the terrible things.
One of the most significant findings in Perry’s research is that your “relational health” has more predictive power over your mental health than the adversity you’ve encountered.
Connection is the ultimate arbiter of mental wellness. When you’re disconnected, you can’t heal or grow; you can only numb and languish. Connection isn’t something that happens to you; it’s a choice you make.
We could all dramatically change our lives if we “just” started doing a few simple things regularly, and we know that. And we still don’t do them.
Everyone has a stack of simple things that are hard for them. Simple isn’t easy.
When you conflate simple with easy, you don’t give yourself a runway of patience or self-compassion to take off from when approaching simple tasks.
Wellness is not about figuring out how to get rid of your weaknesses; it’s about accepting your weaknesses so you can deploy your energy into maximizing your strengths.
When you have a true passion for something you’re not good at, that’s not the same as having a weakness; it just means you’re a beginner. When you’re trying to improve upon that which you hold passion for, you’re not hemorrhaging energy because you’re being pulled, not pushed.
Leaning heavily on your gifts is what explodes your potential. Ignoring your gifts while you attempt to triage your shortcomings puts that explosion of potential on pause.
You’re not desperate to find a spare fifteen minutes, you spent an hour watching trash TV last night before lurking all over Instagram. What you’re desperate for is not the time to do it; it’s the energy to do it.
You’re defeated because you ran out of energy, not because you ran out of time.
Seth Godin says, “If it’s not a reason for everyone in your situation, it’s an excuse.”
When we don’t focus on energy management, we’ve gone through the day with no boundaries and no recovery periods.
We figure the best we can hope for is a little “me time,” which bears an eerie resemblance to numbing and avoidance (because it is numbing and avoidance). Patterns of numbing and avoidance don’t make anyone feel productive, but they especially don’t make perfectionists feel productive.
Perfectionists love being productive. We vow that we’re no longer going to care about or emphasize productivity while simultaneously caring about and emphasizing productivity.
There’s nothing wrong with being productive. It feels great to be productive when what you’re doing is aligned with your values.
Focusing on productivity also causes problems when you use “time” on the x axis and “task completion” on the y axis as the exclusive barometer of your productivity.
Maintaining premium energy is what gives you the stamina for the never-ending task of rising to your potential.
Don’t worry about getting so lost in your leisure that you won’t return to your work. You’re a perfectionist; the drive within you to excel is compulsive, so you won’t be able to help returning to your work.
What energizes you without hurting you? How might your life change if you did more of that?
Closure is a fantasy wherein you can bookend remnant confusion with bricks of logic so that everything makes perfect sense. Closure is a fantasy wherein all pain can be justified and all suffering exists for a righteous reason.
The demand for closure is an expression of cognitive perfectionism. Seeking a complete list of reasons “why” is an analytical approach to grief. You can’t apply analytics to grief.
I don’t like it when people say things like, “Your freedom is on the other side of your fear.” There is no other side. Mental health is not a door you walk through; it’s also not a staircase, or a checklist, or anything designed to be completed.
Some moments are devastating, retching, abominable, horrible. Period. We don’t need to transmute every uncomfortable emotion into something shiny and useful.
We put such pressure on ourselves to know exactly who we are and what we want in every moment; it’s okay for some things to be fuzzy.
We grieve in every season. Moving in the direction of your potential requires a perpetual loosening of your grip, a constant letting go.
You think closure will be the thing that takes away your hurt, but it’s self-compassion that will prove to be your salve. Give yourself permission to hurt.
People who heal are not the anointed ones who’ve figured out how to tie up all the loose ends; they’re the ones who’ve pulled the string on something new.
Curiosity is the unsung hero of mental health. Curiosity is strong; it can pull you out of anything.
It’s okay to hold something for a long time, look at it, turn it over, feel it, think about it, turn it over again, talk about it, write about it, and then look up and say, “I don’t know.” It’s okay to not have closure.
Meaning is what transcends entertainment we like into art we love. The same is true for the stories of our own lives. We’re not fulfilled by discovering perfect closure; we’re fulfilled by discovering meaning.
It’s not that perfectionists are bad at restoring; it’s that they’re horrible at it.
Perfectionists interpret the experience of being tired as if they did something wrong and need to correct for their error.
Decompressing involves taking the pressure off, not piling it on—that’s what decompression means, a reduction in pressure. Perfectionists are bad at decompressing because they thrive on pressure.
So how do you restore if restoring requires decompression, but you thrive on pressure?
Perfectionists become unnerved during passive relaxation unless they’re able to incorporate play into their lives.
If you only decompress, you end up feeling lazy, vaguely gross, and empty inside. If you only actively relax, you end up feeling like you’re trying hard to restore but your efforts just end up causing you more stress.
It’s okay if doing nothing is boring for you. Just as there are different iterations of support in addition to emotional support, there are different iterations of rest in addition to physical rest.
Restoration is a repeating requirement for living consciously. You can make progress without restoration, but you can’t sustain it without restoration.
Restored Parisian perfectionists come to understand that it’s not that you want to be perfectly liked by all people at all times; it’s that you have a live-wire understanding of the power of connection. Connections validate us.
Everyone needs validation. It’s okay that you need validation; what’s not okay is for you to employ external validation as a primary source of self-worth.
Healthy connections don’t require you to sublimate yourself—you remember that when you’re restored. Connections that require performance become unappealing to you.
Restored messy perfectionists come to understand that it’s not that you’re too disorganized to follow through or that you need the middle of the process to be perfect, it’s that you’re trying to avoid loss.
The work you have the energy to engage in when you’re restored is using your enthusiasm to recruit the support you need. You learn what boundaries are and how to implement them. You take an inventory of your values and decide what you want to commit to and what you don’t.
Once you stop burning through your internal resources trying to resist loss, you’re able to redirect all that neon energy of yours towards one clear path.
