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When other people manage to escape, sleepwalkers find ways to marginalize or ignore them by pointing out something wrong with their escape plan.
you don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.
sacrificing now to save for the future, can be helpful in setting aside money in a retirement account for old age. It can also serve as an effective rationalization for life avoidance.
The alternative is to write your own winning lottery ticket, not by the sudden accumulation of wealth but the gradual reduction to what you decide is essential for your life.
Joseph Campbell understood this years ago when he wrote about the meaning of life. “People say that what we’re seeking is a meaning for life,” he began before clarifying, “I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. What we seek is an experience of being alive.”
Since a lot of adults have not figured out what they really want, they naturally find it difficult to pass on the values of soul-searching to children.
In this classic exercise, you write out your idealized, perfect day in great detail, beginning from what time you get up and what you have for breakfast all the way through what you do for each hour of the day and who you talk to. The more detail you can add to the plan, the better. Then you begin to make plans to adjust your life to get closer to the perfect day you’ve imagined for yourself.
“life list” of things you’d like to do at some point in your life.
If you have trouble getting started, this trick may help: fast-forward in your mind a long time (hopefully) to your death-bed. When the time comes to say goodbye, what memories do you want to have?
Five-Year Goals: This list gets reviewed once a year and contains some of the “big things” you hope to do in the near future. Note that as some of the goals on the one-year list are completed, other goals from the five-year list shift down. Lifetime Goals: This list gets reviewed once a year and includes everything that you want to do, but either don’t have a timeline for or will take a long time to accomplish.
As long as what you want does not cause harm to others, you never need to apologize for pursuing your own dreams and big ideas.
As a general rule, if you don’t know what to do on any given day, spend at least some of your time helping someone else.
When faced with a choice between abundance and scarcity, choose abundance.
Scarcity involves hoarding, and abundance involves sharing.
When faced with uncertainty about taking a leap of faith, take the leap. You’ll regret the things you didn’t do much more than anything you did, so you might as well try new things.
Intelligence is not a prerequisite, but determination is.
You can create the life you want, you can make the world a better place at the same time, and you can have it all. Just be prepared to work for it.
begins with clearly understanding what you want to get out of life.
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. —ELBERT HUBBARD
it wasn’t that she was fearless; it was that she found a way to accept the fear and work with it to do something that mattered more.
Fear begins with an undefined worry, a voice in the back of your head that says you’re not good enough, you won’t succeed with anything big or significant, and you might as well give up and stop trying to stand out. The implied message is, “Who are you, anyway?”
the fear of failure, the fear of success, and the fear of change.
All things being equal, we generally resist change until the pain of making a switch becomes less than the pain of remaining in our current situation.
I know this sounds like a small decision—giving up one morning’s work—but at the time it felt incredibly freeing.
Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. —DALE CARNEGIE
“What’s the absolute worst thing that could happen?” if something goes wrong can be very empowering. It helps you put things in their proper perspective. To take it further, you can also ask, “Will the world end if this does not go the way I expect?” Shockingly, I’ve found that the answer is usually “no.”
set up a Twitter account called rebootself. The goal was to “reboot” everything about his life he was unsatisfied with, starting with quitting smoking. Sean invited anyone who was interested to follow along with his goal. Each day he posted updates: “It’s been 72 hours since my last cigarette . . . ,” “One week down . .
Second, even if we decide against the action we were considering, taking the active decision not to do it will at least get it off our mind.
Fear is normal! The goal is to conquer the fear, not to avoid it or pretend it doesn’t exist. • The pain of making a change must become less than the pain of staying in the current situation.
The question is not who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me. —AYN RAND
People will always try to stop you from doing the right thing if it is unconventional. —WARREN BUFFETT
Gatekeepers are especially effective at telling you which choices you have, thus giving you the illusion of freedom while simultaneously blocking access to what really matters.
Generally speaking, universities are open to everyone who has mastered the skill of taking standardized tests. Churches and religious institutions are open to all who agree to adopt a particular doctrine that defines acceptable and unacceptable beliefs.
Many organizations have an entire Department of No, which usually goes by a disguised title such as Legal or Human Resources.
When someone threatens tradition or asks questions, gatekeepers will appeal to a logic based on history, even if their recollection of history is incorrect.
People refer to the higher power when they aren’t really sure why something is being done in a certain way, but they know that a “just because” answer won’t suffice on its own.
Since I don’t have kids, it’s hard to respond—which is why this kind of straw man argument can be so effective for gatekeepers.
when the underdog deploys an unconventional strategy, the underdog is actually favored to win.
in one situation the underdog deliberately changes the rules of the confrontation. Remember that gatekeepers are all about limiting choices (you can have a or b, but not c or d). The underdog strategy looks for alternatives.
It’s also clear, however, that there are times when morality and the law are on opposite sides.
old Chinese proverb in mind: the person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it. Gatekeepers are good at interrupting, so you’ll need to become good at doing the impossible.
If you’re not happy with the way something is done, you don’t have to accept it. • Gatekeepers are authority figures who seek to limit the choices of others—you can do a or b, but not c, d, or e. • Gatekeepers are good at justifying their actions through circular reasoning. A typical argument involves the phrase “Everyone else is doing this, so why shouldn’t you?” • When challenging authority, direct confrontation is not always the best way. Instead, use the underdog strategy to change the rules of the game.
You need to be absolutely passionate about what you believe in. If you don’t feel passionate about anything, chances are you haven’t discovered what you’re really good at yet. Keep looking.
What do you really want to get out of life? How can you help others in a way that no one else can?
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: you have no one to blame. —ERICA JONG
when times are tough, you need the security of someone else’s business to get you through. I think a better statement is: when times are tough, you’d better get creative.
I didn’t create any kind of sustainable infrastructure; I did everything myself.
But be careful. When you focus on escaping the humdrum of the cubicle (or wherever you spend your workdays), you also need to have something to escape to. Otherwise you may end up no happier than you were prior to the escape.
In a pattern that continues to this day, I worked harder than anyone I knew on the subjects that I liked . . . and for all the other work, well, the results weren’t pretty.
THE ONE-YEAR, SELF-DIRECTED, ALTERNATIVE GRADUATE SCHOOL EXPERIENCE • Subscribe to the Economist and read every issue religiously. Cost: $97 + 60 minutes each week. • Memorize the names of every country, world capital, and current president or prime minister in the world. Cost: $0 + 3-4 hours once. • Buy a round-the-world plane ticket or use frequent flyer miles to travel to several major world regions, including somewhere in Africa and somewhere in Asia. Cost: variable, but plan on $4,000. (Check the “Online Resources” section for more information.) • Read the basic texts of the major world
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