THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A FUCK (Article)

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• The strongest, most admirable people we know in terms of lack of fucks given.
• Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given. We give a fuck about a rude gas attendant, we give a fuck if a show we liked was cancelled. We give a fuck when our coworkers don't bother asking us about our awesome weekend. We give a fuck when it's raining and we were supposed to go jogging in the morning.
• Because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life fucks us.
• Developing the ability to control and manage the fucks you give is the essence of strength and integrity. We must craft and hone our lack of fuckery over the course of years and decades. Like a fine wine, our fucks must age into a fine vintage, only uncorked and given on the most special fucking occasions.

Subtlety #1: Not Giving A Fuck Does Not Mean Being Indifferent; It Means Being Comfortable With Being Different

• There is nothing admirable or confident about indifference. People who are indifferent are lame and scared. They're couch potatoes and internet trolls. In fact, indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality, they actually give too many fucks. They are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices, and there they make none. They hide in a grey emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed and self-pitied, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life.
• Being completely indifferent: not lawyering up and going after an asshole who screwed my mom out of a large chunk of money.
• When people don't give a fuck, we don't mean that they don't care about anything, what we just mean is that these people don't care about adversity in the face of their goals, they don't care about pissing some people off to do what he feels is right or important or noble.
• The admirable thing is staring failure in the face and shoving your middle finger back at it. The people who don't give a fuck about adversity or failure or embarrassing themselves or shitting the bed a few times. "Because they know it's right." They know it's more important than them and their own feelings and their own pride and their own needs. They say, "fuck it", not to everything in life, but they say it to everything unimportant in life. They reserve their fucks for what truly fucking matters. Friends, family, purpose. And because of that, because they reserve their fucks for only the big things, the important things, people give a fuck about them in return.

Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.

• A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
• The old lady who screams at the cashier for not having a coupon worth 30 cents doesn't have anything better to do with her days than to sit home cutting out coupons all morning. She's old and lonely. Her kids are dickheads and never visit. She hasn't had sex in over 30 years. So she snips coupons. That's all she's got.
• If you find yourself consistently giving too many fucks about trivial shit that bothers you, chances are you don't have much going on in your life to give a legitimate fuck about. That's the real problem.
• The question is simply, how we each choose to allot our fucks.

Subtlety #3: We all have a limited number of fucks to give, pay attention to where and who you give them to.

• Most things have little lasting impact on our lives. Those people's opinions we cared about so much before have long been removed from our lives. We realize how little people pay attention to the superficial details about us and we focus on doing things more for ourselves rather than for others.
• Maturity: We becoming more selective with the fucks we're willing to give. Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what's truly fuckworthy.
• We now reserve our ever-dwindling fucks only for the most truly fuckworthy parts of our lives: our families, our best friends, our golf swing.
• When we are old, our ability to give a fuck has receded to the point of non-existence. Mundane things: where to eat lunch, doctor's appointments, 30-cent discounts, driving without drifting to sleep.
• Then one day, on our deathbed, we're hopefully surrounded by the people who gave the majority of our fucks to throughout our life, and those few who still give a fuck about us, with a silent gasp we will gently let our last fuck go.

The Book

Don't Try

• Charles Bukowski: an alcoholic, a womanizer, a chronic gambler, etc. He wanted to be a writer, but for decades his work was rejected by almost everyone. Thirty years of alcohol, drugs, gambling, prostitute.
• When he as 50, an editor at a small publishing house took a strange interest in him. "I have one of two choices--stay in the post office and go crazy, or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve."
• First novel: "Post Office." Dedicated to nobody.
• His tombstone: "Don't try."
• He knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. The genius in his work was not in overcoming unbelievable odds or developing himself into a shining literary light. It was his ability to be completely honest with himself and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt.
• He also didn't care about his success. He showed up to poetry readings hammered and verbally abused people in the audience. Fame and success didn't make him a better person. Nor was it by becoming a better person that he became famous and successful.
• Conventional life advice fixates on what you lack--on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you.
• You learn the best ways to make money because you feel you don't have enough money.
• The Feedback Loop From Hell: you get anxious about something, then you become anxious about being anxious. You become pissed off, then you become pissed off about being pissed off.
• "I feel like such a loser for calling myself a loser. I should stop calling myself a loser."
• The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.
• Pursuing something means you lacked it in the first place.
• You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never be alive if you are looking for the meaning of life.
• Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
• The moments of non-fuckery are the moments that most define our lives. The major switch in careers, the spontaneous choice to drop out of college, the decision to dump that deadbeat boyfriend.
• To not give a fuck is to stare down life's most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
• Practical enlightenment is becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable, that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. Because once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you, you will become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

Happiness is a Problem

• Life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. Not all suffering is equal. Some suffering is certainly more painful than other suffering. But we must all suffer nonetheless.
• Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and necessary components to creating consistent happiness.
• Suffering is biologically useful. It is nature's preferred agent for inspiring change. We evolved to live with a certain level of satisfaction and insecurity, because it's the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that's going to do the most work to innovate and survive.
• Pain teaches us what to pay attention to when we're young or careless. It helps show us what's good for us versus what's bad for us.
• Problem's don't end, they just improve.
• Don't hope for a life without problems. There's no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.
• Happiness: to be happy we need something to solve. It is a form of action, it's an activity. It isn't something you find. Happiness is a constant work-in-progress. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

Emotions are Overrated

• Emotions are just feedback mechanisms telling us that something is either likely right or likely wrong. Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
• Negative emotions are supposed to make you do something. Positive emotions are rewards for taking the proper action.
• Many people are taught to repress their emotions for various personal, social, or cultural reasons. To deny one's negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve their problems.
• Some also overidentify with their emotions. Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line pretty much always sucks.
• An obsession with emotion fails u for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.
• Hedonic treadmill: the idea that we're always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different.
• This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable--the person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice--whatever makes us feel good will also inevitable make us feel bad.

Choose Your Struggle

• Everybody knows what feels good. A more interesting question is, "What pain do you want in your life?", and "What are you willing to struggle for?", because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
• Most people want to have an awesome relationship, but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings, and the emotional psychodrama to get there.
• Happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Solutions lie in the acceptance and active engagement of that negative experience--not the avoidance of it, not the salvation from it.
• People want an amazing physique, but you don't end up with one unless you legitimately appreciate the pain and physical stress that come with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you eat, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.
• People want to start their own business, but you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the repeated failures, the insane hours devoted to something that may earn absolutely nothing.
• People want a partner. But you don't end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings.
• What is the pain that you need to sustain?
• Being a musician: I didn't really want it. I wanted the result, but I wasn't in love with the process, and because of that, I failed at it. I hardly tried at all. The daily drudgery of practicing, finding a group and rehearsing, It's not about "being a loser", but it's about "I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn't." I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn't work that way.
• People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench a house. People who enjoy long workweeks and the corporate ladder are the ones who fly at the top of it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.
• Our struggles determine our success. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems.

You Are Not Special

• In the 1960s, developing "high self esteem" became the rage in psychology.
• The data is in: merely feeling good about yourself doesn't really mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself. Adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.
• A truer and more accurate measurement of one's self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.
• People who are entitled--they deserve good things without actually earning them. He believes he should be able to be rich without actually working for it. He believes he should have an amazing lifestyle without actually sacrificing anything.
• Entitled people have a delusional degree of self-confidence. And because they need to feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their time thinking about themselves. It takes a lot to convince yourself that your life doesn't stink.
• The true worth of a person is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.
• A person who actually has a high self-worth is able to look at the negative parts of his character frankly--and then acts to improve upon them.

Things Fall Apart

• When "real traumatic shit" happens, we begin to unconsciously feel as though we have problems that we're incapable of ever solving.
• If we have problems that are unsolvable, our unconscious figures that we're either uniquely special or uniquely defective in some way.
• Being a player: validation. I was worthy, I was wanted, I was loved. I felt entitled to say or do whatever I wanted, to break people's trust, to ignore people's feelings, and then justify it later with shitty, half-assed apologies.
• Entitlement:
  • I'm awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
  • I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
• There is no such thing as a personal problem: chances are millions of people have had it in the past and will have in the future. You are not special with your problems.
• It's a statistical improbability that we are good in all areas of our life. And we are flooded with the best of the best. This has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal.
• Not just millenials but the tendency toward entitlement is apparent across all of society.

So What's the Point?

• A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they'll never achieve anything, they'll never improve, and that their life won't matter.
• The great people are anti-entitled. They understand that they are not so great, and that they could be so much better.
• The ticket to emotional health comes from eating your veggies--accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as "you actions don't matter that much" and "the vast majority of your life will be boring, and that's okay".
• You will have an appreciation for life's basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, and laughing with someone you care about.

The Value of Suffering

• If suffering is inevitable, then the question one should be asking is not "How do I stop suffering?", but "Why am I suffering--for what purpose?"
• Self-awareness: multiple layers.
  • First: A simple understanding of one's emotions. This is when I feel happy. This makes me feel sad. This gives me hope.
  • Second: The ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. "Why do you feel angry? Why do you feel uninspired?"
  • Third: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?
• Self-help gurus want you to make more money, while ignoring the "why do you need to be rich in the first place? How are they choosing to measure success/failure for themselves?"
• Think of why things are bugging you. Ex: "my brother doesn't return my texts."
  • Why? It feels like he doesn't give a shit about me?
  • Why? Because if he wanted to have a relationship with me, he would take ten seconds out of his day to interact with me.
  • Why does his lack of relationship with you feel like a failure? Because we're brothers, and we're supposed to have a good relationship?
  • This leads to "being close with your family is normal, and I don't have that".

Rock Star Problems

• We measure ourselves by different metrics.
• If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Shitty Values

• Pleasure. It's great, but a horrible value to prioritize your life around. It is a false god. People who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose.
• Material success. Once you are able to provide for basic physical needs, the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero.
• Always being right. People who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.
• Staying positive. Sometimes, life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it. It's okay to be angry, but don't punch people in the face. When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life's problems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness. Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life.
• In the long run, completing a marathon makes us more happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends makes us happier than buying a new computer. One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

Defining Good and Bad Values

• Good values are reality-based, socially constructive, and immediate/controllable.
  • Honesty: it's something you have complete control over. It reflects reality. It benefits others.
  • Good values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.
• Bad values are superstitious, socially destructive, and not immediate or controllable.
  • Popularity: If your metric is being the most popular person at a party, then much of what happens will be out of your control: you don't know who else will be at the event, and you probably won't know who half those people are.
  • Bad values: Dominance through manipulation or violence, indiscriminate fucking, feeling good all the time, always being the center of attention, not being alone, being liked by everybody, being rich for the sake of being rich.
• Good values are achieved internally. Something like creativity or humility can be experienced right now, you simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience it.
• Bad values are reliant on external events--flying in a private jet, being told you're right always, owning a house in the so-and-so.
• Values are about prioritization. Everybody would love a house in the Bahamas, but what are the values that you prioritize above everything else, and that therefore influence your decision-making more than anything else?
• When we have poor values, we are essentially giving fucks about the things that don't matter, things that in fact make our life worse. But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better--toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects.
• Self-improvement: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.

You Are Always Choosing

• Compare having to run a marathon when you're forced to versus running it because you want to.
• If you're miserable in your current situation, chances are it's because you feel like some part of it is outside your control.
• When we feel that we're choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us, we feel victimized and miserable.
• William James: was considered a failure, unemployed, nearly died of smallpox, fell into a depression.
• One night, he wrote that he would spend one year believing that he was 100% responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what.
• During this period, he would do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. If nothing improved, then it would be apparent that he was truly powerless and then he would take his own life.
• He went on to become the father of American psychology.
• Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. Choosing to not consciously interpret events is still an interpretation. Choosing to not respond is still a response to the events in our lives. It's still your responsibility to interpret the meaning of the event and choose a response.

The Responsibility/Fault Fallacy

• Because a man felt that he was too short, he didn't often go out and try to meet women. The few times he did, he would home in on the smallest behaviors from any woman eh talked with that could possibly indicate he wasn't attractive enough for her and then convince himself that she didn't like him, even if she really did.
• His choice of value was disempowering--the problem is that he is not tall enough in a world meant (in his view) for tall people. Yes, it's every single woman's fault for not liking a self-pitying, shallow guy with shitty values. Obviously.
• We are responsible for experiences that aren't our fault all the time. This is part of life. Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from the choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you're currently making, every second of every day. You're choosing to read this. You're choosing to think about the concepts. You're choosing to accept or reject the concepts. It may be my fault that you think my ideas are lame, but you are responsible for coming to your own conclusions. It's not your fault that I choose to write this sentence, but you are still responsible for choosing to read it or not.
• Although she had done something horrible to me and she could be blamed for that it was now my own responsibility to make myself happy again. She was never going to pop up and fix things for me. I had to fix them myself.
• When you look back on things, you notice that people just don't magically cheat on somebody unless they are unhappy for some reason. I also had a role in enabling the shitty relationship to continue for as long as it did. If the people in your relationship are selfish and do hurtful things, it's likely you are too, you just don't realize it.
• Tragedy: Just because I don't have a kid who died doesn't mean I haven't experienced terrible pain myself.
• OCD: Tell the kids that they're to accept the imperfections of their compulsive desires. If you think your family is going to die, they just accept that your family might actually die and that there's nothing you can do about it.
• Get the kids to recognize that their values are not rational--their values are not even theirs, but rather the disorder's--and that by fulfilling these irrational values they are actually harming their ability to function in life.
• Then, add a new value that is more important than OCD and focus on that. Taking control of your own thoughts/feelings/being happy.
• Poker: luck doesn't dictate the long-term results of the game, but the choices of the players who play.
• If you have to add up all of the people who have some psychiatric disorder, struggle with depression or suicidal thoughts, have been subjected to neglect or abuse, have dealt with tragedy or the death of a loved one, and have survived serious health issues, you have to round up everyone, because nobody makes it through life without collecting a few scars on the way out.

Victimhood Chic

• It's now easier to push responsibility onto some other group or person.
• This might be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously.
• People get addicted to feeling offended because it gives them a high. But part of living in a democracy is that we all have to deal with views and people we don't necessarily like. That's simply the price we pay.

There Is No How

• How do you change your old values?
• Giving up a value you've depended on for years is going to feel disorienting. This is hard, but this is normal.
• Rejections: many of the relationships in your life were built around the values you've been keeping, so the moment you change those values, your turnaround will reverberate out through your relationships.

You're Wrong About Everything

• As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn't care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much.
• When I was with my first girlfriend, I thought we would be together forever. And when that relationship ended, I thought I'd never feel the same way about a woman again.
• Each individual gets to decide what is enough, and that love can be whatever we let it be.
• It is good that Future Mark will look back on Present Marks' assumptions and notice similar flaws. That will be a good thing, because that will mean I have grown.
• We're always in the process of approaching truth and perfection, without actually ever reaching truth and perfection.
• There s no correct dogma or perfect ideology--there is only what your experience has shown you to be right for you, and even then, that experience is probably somewhat wrong too.
• Because we have differing needs and personal histories and life circumstances, we will all inevitably come to different correct answers about what our lives mean and how they should be lived.
• Many people become so obsessed with being "right" about their life that they never end up actually living it.
• Rejection--sure, it hurts, failure sucks. But there are particular certainties that we hold on to. It is easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure.
• Certainty is the element of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened, and even then, it's debatable.
• Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt: doubt about our own beliefs, doubt about our own feelings, doubt about what the future may hold for us. Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we're wrong all the time. Because we are.
• Because we don't actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don't trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn't, and that's not worth much.

Architects of Our Own Beliefs

• People think there is a pattern when there really isn't.
• The human mind is capable of coming up with and believing in a bunch of BS that isn't real. And it turns out, we're really good at it.
• Our brains our meaning machines--what we understand as meaning is generated by the associations our brain makes between two or more experiences.
• Problems: the brain is imperfect, and that the brain is designed to hold on to that meaning.
• False memory: this happened in the 80s.
• We can view memories differently based on how we feel about the people in those memories.
• Even if you do the right things, if your values are fucked, then the fact that you do everything "right" doesn't make her right.
• The assumption: people do bad things because they feel bad about themselves. What's really happening: some of the worst criminals felt pretty good about themselves. This feeling good about themselves in spite of the reality around them gave the sense of justification for hurting and disrespecting others.
• The pursuit of certainty often breeds more insecurity. Things like checking your boyfriend's text messages. It's in these moments of insecurity/deep despair that we become susceptible to entitlement: that we deserve to cheat a little to get our way, that other people deserve to be punished, we deserve to take what we want.
• The more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
• This openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place. Before we can look at our values and prioritizations and change them into better, healthier ones, we must first become uncertain of our current values.
• The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. If you think something can change the way you view yourself, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it.
• There's a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the world. Anything the shakes up that comfort--even if it could potentially make your life better--is inherently scary.
• This is why people are often so afraid of success--for the exact same reason they're afraid of failure, it threatens who they believe themselves to be.
• You avoid writing that screenplay you've always dreamed of because doing so would call into question your identity as a practical insurance adjuster. You avoid talking to your husband about being more adventurous in the bedroom because that conversation would challenge your identity as a good, moral woman. You avoid telling your friend that you don’t want to see him anymore because ending the friendship would conflict with your identity as a nice, forgiving person.
• We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to them and we justify them and maintain them. Even if we don't mean to, that's how our brain is wired.
• If I believe I'm a nice guy, I'll avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief.
• If I believe I'm an awesome cook, I'll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again.
• The belief always takes precedence: until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change.
• In this way, knowing yourself or finding yourself can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations.

Kill Yourself

• The "you" is an arbitrary mental construction and that you should let go of the idea that "you" exist at all; that the arbitrary metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus you're better off letting go of everything.
• When someone admits to herself, "You know, maybe I'm not good at relationships", then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage. She has no identity to protect by staying in a miserable, crappy marriage just to prove something to herself.
• When the student admits to himself, "You know, maybe I'm not a rebel; maybe I'm just scared," then he's free to be ambitious again. He has no reason to feel threatened by pursuing his academic dreams and maybe failing.
• There is little that is unique or special about your problems. That's why letting go is so liberating.
• Narcissism: feeling as though your problems deserve to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that doesn't obey the laws of the physical universe.
• The recommendation: don't be special; don't be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
• You're not uniquely intelligent, spectacularly talented, intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you're somehow owed something by this world.

How to Be a Little Less Certain of Yourself

• What if I'm Wrong?
  • When something bothers someone, maybe it's their own insecurities (About getting married? Sibling rivalry? Jealousy?)
  • As a general rule, we're all the world's worst observers of ourselves. When we're angry, jealous, or upset, we're oftentimes the last ones to figure it out.
  • It's worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you're sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you're already wrong about something major in your life, and until you're able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.
• What would it mean if I Were Wrong?
  • Many people are able to ask themselves if they are wrong, but few are able to go the extra step and admit what it would mean if they were wrong.
  • It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
  • :what would it mean if I were wrong about my sister's wedding? (Often the answer is straightforward, and some form of "I'm being an asshole.") If he is wrong, and his sister's engagement is fine and health and happy, there's really no way to explain his own behavior other than through his own insecurities and fucked-up values.
• Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
  • Should he: continue drama and complicating what should otherwise be a happy moment, and damage the trust and respect he has with his sister, just because he has a hunch that this guy is bad for her.
  • Or should he: mistrust his own ability to determine what's right or wrong and remain humble, trust her ability to make her own decisions, and even if he doesn't, live with the results.

Failure is the Way Forward

• When you're sleeping on a smelly futon, starting a blog and a stupid Internet business doesn't sound like such a scary idea. If every project I started failed, if every post I wrote went unread, I'd only be back exactly where I started. Why not try?
• I grew up in a wealthy family. Money was never a problem, but it was more often used to avoid problems than solve them. I was again fortunate, because this taught me at an early age than making money.
• You can be rich and miserable, or you could be broke and pretty happy. So why use money as a means to measure my self-worth?
• Would I rather make decent money and work a job I hated, or play at Internet entrepreneur and be broke for a while?
• If I try this thing and fail in a few years and have to go get a job anyway, will I have really lost anything? Instead of being a broke and unemployed 22-year old with no experience, I'll be a broke and unemployed 25-year old, with no experience.
• If someone is better than you at something, then it's very likely that they've failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it's likely because he hasn't been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
• A child trying to walk will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at not point does that child ever stop and think, "Oh I guess walking isn't for me."
• Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. This can come from schools or parents and mass media.
• We can be truly successful only at something we're willing to fail at. If we're unwilling to fail, then we're unwilling to succeed.
• This fear of failure can come from having chosen shitty values. If I measure myself by the standard "make everyone I meet like me", I will be anxious, because failure is defined by the actions of others, not by my own actions. I'm not in control; thus my self-worth is at the mercy of judgments by others.
• If your metric for the value "success by worldly standards" is "buy a house and car" and you spend twenty years working your ass off to achieve it, once it's achieved, the metric has nothing left to give you. Then, midlife crisis.
• Goals as they are conventionally defined are limited in the amount of happiness they can produce in our lives. Things like "graduate from college", "buy a lake house", "lose fifteen pounds" are limited in the amount of happiness they can produce in our lives.
• Picasso wrote until he was really old. He lived into his nineties and continued to produce art up until his final years. Had his metric been "become famous", "make money", or "paint one thousand pictures", he would have stagnated at some point along the way. His underlying value was simple and humble. It was the value "honest expression".

Pain is Part of the Process

• World War II survivors: a sizable percentage of them believed that the wartime experiences they'd suffered, although painful and traumatic, had actually caused them to become better, more responsible, and even happier people.
• Before the war: ungrateful for their loved ones, lazy and consumed by petty problems, entitled.
• After the war: more confident, more sure of themselves, more grateful, unfazed by life's trivialities and petty annoyances.
• Fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather they are often representative of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential.
• Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life.
• Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. It's only when we feel intense pain that we're willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us.
• We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we've been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.
• Pain is part of the process. It's important to feel it. If you just chase after highs to cover up the pain, if you continue to indulge in entitlement and delusional positive thinking, if you continue to overindulge in various substances, then you'll never generate the requisite motivation to actually change.
• VCR questions: from the outside, the answer is simple: just shut up and do it. But from the inside, these feel impossibly complex.
• VCR questions are funny because the answer appears difficult to anyone who has them and appears easy to anyone who does not. And the problem here is pain. Filling out the appropriate paperwork to drop out of med school is straightforward and obvious action; breaking your parents' hearts is not.
• For many years, the thought of speaking to a stranger felt impossible to me. How? How do you just walk up and talk to a person? How can somebody do that?
• Because I failed to separate what I felt from what was, I was incapable of stepping outside myself and seeing the world for what it was: a simple place where two people can walk up to each other at any time and speak.
• Many people, when they feel some sort of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they're feeling. Their goal is to get back to "feeling good" again as quickly as possible.
• Learn to sustain the pain you've chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act DESPITE it.
• Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. ALL of life is like this. It never changes. Even when you're happy. Even when you're farting fairy dust. Even when you win the lottery and buy a small fleet of Jet Skis, you still won't know what the hell you're doing.

The "Do Something" Principle

• If you're stuck on a problem, don't sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don't know what you're doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.
• Don't just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
• Action isn't just the effect of motivation; it's also the cause of it. Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration.
• Forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier.
• "Two hundred crappy words per day."
• If we follow the "do something" principle, failure feels unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely acting--when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite--we propel ourselves ahead.

The Importance of Saying No

• After all the years of excitement/digital nomad, the biggest lesson I took from adventuring was this: absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.
• Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it.
• Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one's life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or one person.
• While all of my experiences were great, few of them would have any lasting significance. Whereas my friends back home were settling down into marriages, buying houses, and giving their time to interesting companies or political causes, I was floundering from one high to the next.
• Russia: people are blunt. If something is stupid, you say it's stupid. If someone is being an asshole, you tell him he's being an asshole.
• At first it was weird, but you appreciate it for what it really was: unadulterated expression. Honesty in the truest sense of the word. Communication with no conditions, no strings attached, no ulterior motive, no sales job, no desperate attempt to be liked.
• Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves.
• Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little or not economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. People's displays of unpleasant honesty were rewarded for the simple fact that they were necessary for survival.

Rejection Makes Your Life Better

• We need to reject something, otherwise we stand for nothing. If nothing is better or more desirable than anything else, then we are empty and our life is meaningless.
• The avoidance of rejection is often sold to us as a way to make ourselves feel better, but this gives us short-term pleasure by making us rudderless and directionless in the long term.
• The act of choosing a value for myself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I'm probably choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life.
• If I'm choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I'm rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs.
• Honesty is a natural human craving, but part of saying honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word "no".
• For most of human history, romantic love was not celebrated as it is now. In facet, up until the mid-nineteenth century, love was seen as an unnecessary and potentially dangerous psychological impediment to the more important things in life.
• Most elements of romantic love that we pursue--the dramatic and dizzyingly emotional displays of affection, the topsy-turvy ups and downs--aren't healthy, genuine displays of love.
• The truth is, there are healthy forms of love and unhealthy forms of love. Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other's support.
• Healthy/unhealthy relationship: how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility, and the willingness of each person to both reject and be rejected by their partner.
• Anywhere there is an unhealthy or toxic relationship, there will be a poor and porous sense of responsibility on both sides, and there will be an inability to give and/or receive rejection.
• By "boundaries" I mean the delineation between two people's responsibilities for their own problems. People in a healthy relationship with strong boundaries will take responsibility for their own values and problems and not take responsibility for their partner's values and problems.
• Bad statements:
  • You can't go out with your friends without me, you know how jealous I get. You have to stay home with me.
  • My coworkers are idiots.
  • I can't believe you make me feel so stupid in front of my own sister.
  • I'd love to take that job in Milwaukee, but my mother would never forgive me for moving so far away.
  • I can date you, but can you not tell my friend Cindy? She gets really insecure when I have a boyfriend and she doesn't.
• When you have murky areas of responsibility for your emotions and actions, you never develop strong value for yourself. Your only value becomes making your partner happy. Or your only value becomes your partner making you happy.
• People can't solve your problems for you, and they shouldn't try, because that won't make you happy. You also can't solve other people's problems for them either, because that likewise won't make them happy.
• Entitled people who blame others for their emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them, and they will receive the love they've always wanted.
• Entitled people who take the blame for other people's emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they "fix" their partner and save him or her, they will receive the love and appreciation they've always wanted.
• Overblaming and overaccepting blame perpetuates the entitlement and shitty self-worth that have been keeping them from getting their emotional needs met in the first place.
• Victim: "This is my problem; you don't have to fix it for me. Just support me while I fix it myself." Taking responsibility for your own problems and not holding your partner responsible for them.
• Saver: "Look, you're blaming others for your own problems; deal with this yourself." Helping someone solve their own problems.
• People with strong boundaries understand that it's unreasonable to expect two people to accommodate each other 100 percent and fulfill every need the other ha.

How to Build Trust

• Men typically lie in the "do I look good" situation to make their girlfriends/wives happy. I don't, because honesty in my relationship is more important to me than feeling good all the time. The last person I should ever have to censor myself with is the woman I love.
• She calls me out on my bullshit too, which is one of the most important traits she offers me as a partner. She makes me a better person, even though I hate hearing it at the time.
• Without conflict, there can be no trust. For a relationship to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no and hear no.
• Without that negation and without that occasional rejection, boundaries break down and one person's problems and values come to dominate the other's. Conflict is not only normal, but it's necessary for the maintenance of a health relationship. If two people who are close are not able to hash out their differences openly and vocally, then the relationship is based on manipulation and misrepresentation, and it will slowly become toxic.
• This is what's so destructive about cheating. It's not about the sex. It's about the trust that has been destroyed as a result of the sex. Without trust, the relationship can no longer function. So it's either rebuild the trust or say your goodbyes.
• Cheating: it's because something other than the relationship is more important to them. It may be power over others, it may be validation through sex it may be giving in to their own impulses. Whatever it is, it's clear that the cheater's values are not aligned in a way to support a healthy relationship.

Freedom Through Commitment

• More is not always better. We are actually often happier with less. If you have a choice between two places to live and pick one, you'll likely feel confident and comfortable that you made the right choice. You'll be satisfied with your decision.
• The big story for me personally over the past few years has been my ability to open myself up for commitment. I've chosen to reject all but the very best people and experiences and values in my life.
• Committing to a single job, a single woman, and a single geographical location. I've found increased opportunity and upside in rejecting alternatives and distractions in favor of what I've chosen to let truly matter to me.
• Commitment gives you freedom because you're no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you other wise would.

And Then You Die

• If there is no reason to do anything, then there is no reason to NOT do anything, that in the face of the inevitability of death, there is no reason to ever give in to one's fear or embarrassment or shame, since it's all just a bunch of nothing anyway, and that by spending the majority of my short life avoiding what was painful and uncomfortable, I had essentially been avoiding being alive at all.
• Josh's death marks the clearest before/after point I can identify in my life.
• Death is the light by which the shadow of all of life's meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, and all metrics and values suddenly zero.
• "The Denial of Death".
  • Humans are unique in that we're the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly. We are able to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations, to contemplate the past and future, to imagine other realities or situations where things might be different.
  • Because we are able to conceptualize death, we are also the only animal capable of imagining a reality without ourselves in it.
  • Two selves: the physical self and the conceptual self (our identity, or how we see ourselves). We are aware that the physical self will die, and so we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever (books, buildings, chatting with children).
  • These are our "immortality projects". Cities, governments, structures, religions, literature.
  • Wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people's immortality projects rub up against another group's .Centuries of oppression and the bloodshed of millions have been justified as the defense of one group's immortality project against another's.
  • When our immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror creeps back into our mind.
  • People's immortality projects were actually the problem, not the solution, that rather than attempting to implement their conceptual self, people should question their conceptual self and become more comfortable with the reality of their own death.
• It's all right to die. Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. Death confronts us with a far more painful and important question: what is your legacy?
• What is the hurricane that you'll leave in your wake?
• This is the only truly important question in our life.
• Yet we avoid thinking about it, because it's hard, it's scary, and we have no clue what we're doing.
• The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable of the chaotic world around you.
• Entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe, that we are the one suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others.
• Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not.
• You too are going to die, and that's because you too were fortunate enough to have lived. You may not feel this. But go stand on a cliff sometime, and maybe you will.
• "We're all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by life's trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing."
• The acceptance of my death, the understanding of my own fragility, has made everything easier--untangling my addictions, identifying and confronting my own entitlement, accepting responsibility for my own problems--suffering through my fears and uncertainties, accepting my failures and embracing rejections--it has all been made lighter by the thought of my own death.

THE REAL VALUE OF MONEY

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• When you buy food, you are buying away the experience of hunger.
• When you buy a new suit for work, you are buying the social signals that you invest in yourself, that you take yourself seriously, and that you can be relied upon by others.
• Stress cycles: High pressure job, then get money.
• Ego cycles: They work in environments where they feel powerless. They take out their insecurity by spending their money on superficial status symbols.
• Pain cycles. Physical (boxer) or emotional (demeaning jobs/abusive bosses). Pain relief--alcohol, drugs.
• True wealth occurs when the way we spend our money is not compensating for how we earn it.
• Wealth occurs when the way we earn money and the way we spend money are aligned with one another — when our money is earned through a positive experience and spent on other positive experiences.
• The way to short-circuit these cycles, the way to escape the endless chase for another buck and the way to create genuine wealth, is to stop using money as your metric for success.
• The real value of money emerges when we leverage it as a tool towards our success rather than making it success itself. When we channel it towards the experiences and values that we find more important. When we use it to build an innovative business, when it fuels our creativity or infuses our community, when it supports our family or shares love with our friends or adds to our personal health and satisfaction.

10 LIFE LESSONS I LEARNED FROM SURVIVING MY 20S

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• Fail early and often. No responsibilities yet. The best lessons are the disastrous failures that you have.
• You can't force friendships. It's just how things are.
• You're not supposed to accomplish all of your goals.
• No one actually knows what the hell they're doing. Everyone works off their current best guess.
• Most people in the world basically want the same things. Food, money, job, family, wanting to look cool and important. Everyone is proud of where they came from. Everyone has insecurities, anxieties, is afraid of failure, loves their friends and family...
• The world doesn't care about you.
• Popular culture = really extremists.
• The sum of the little things matter: "If by overnight success, you meant staying up and coding all night, every night, for six years straight, then it felt really tiring and stressful."
• The world is not that scary--travel.
• Your parents are people too. You will notice that they also have their own screw-ups. Accept that they are people too. They're doing their best, even though they don't always know what the best is.

HOW TO QUIT YOUR DAY JOB AND TRAVEL THE WORLD

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• If the answer to "do you love what you do" is a resounding "Yes, I live for this shit!", then I encourage you to seriously consider doing something about it.
• We won't care about how got that quarterly bonus or a corner office.
• What motivated me through that period: TERROR. The idea that I would never make money doing what I love; the terror that I'd have to go back to living off a job I hated...
• 90% of your plans are going to fail. Get used to it.
• Planning your escape.
  • Sell all your useless crap and get your financial house in order. And they're often counterproductive for achieving happiness in general.
  • Source of income? Online business, remote work, get transferred?
• Escape velocity.

THE STAGGERING BULLSHIT OF “THE SECRET”

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• "I'm the center of the universe" angle to the same old ideas.
• She explains "The Secret"'s attraction with cosmological nonsense.
• Confirmation bias: We pay more attention to objects that match our pre-existing thoughts and beliefs (this is biologically economical and efficient).
• The Secret requires that you never doubt yourself, never consider negative repercussions, and never indulge in negative thoughts. This is the confirmation bias on steroids. This can become "delusionally positive" thinking.
• Trying to suppress thoughts about something only makes those thoughts more likely to recur. The more you try to get rid of unwanted thoughts, the more these thoughts dominate your mental space. Thinking about the things you do not want can lead to more negative thinking and put you in a vicious cycle of negativity.
• People who ignore reality in favor of feeling good all the time have a tendency to attract the most desperate and gullible members of society. Those followers then "manifest" their dreams by spreading the law of attraction, and spread it out to other desperate well-wishers. This carries on this way through generations.
• Books like The Secret are like McDonald's for the mind. They're easy and make you feel good, but they make you mentally fat and lazy, and emotionally, you die a much more painful death.
• Call me crazy, but I believe that changing and improving your life requires destroying a part of yourself and replacing it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is therefore, by definition, a painful process full of resistance and anxiety. You can’t grow muscle without challenging it with greater weight. You can’t build emotional resilience without forging through hardship and loss. And you can’t build a better mind without challenging your own beliefs and assumptions. Why should we ever expect that becoming a better person is easy, or pleasant, or positive?

YOUR TWO MINDS

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• When you close your eyes and try to eliminate any thoughts (and fail miserably like the rest of us), obviously your mind is thinking.
• But if your mind is thinking, then who is observing the mind thinking?
• When you did the exercise and your mind kept wandering back to what you had to do at work tomorrow, who was it that was watching your mind worry about work tomorrow? It was your mind watching your mind.
• "Thinking Mind" and "Observing Mind".
• We can't completely control the Thinking Mind: the Observing Mind observes the Thinking Mind thinking about elephants despite telling it not to think about it.
• The same goes for emotions. And that’s actually where most of our suffering comes from – not from the negative emotions themselves, but from the fact that we’re helpless from getting sucked into the negative emotions.
• Most of our psychological and emotional stress happens because our Thinking Mind and Observing Mind are “fused” and we don’t recognize the difference.
• People ask me all the time, “How do I stop feeling so jealous?” or “How do I stop feeling so angry?” or “How do I not get nervous in this situation anymore?” The answer: you don’t. You can’t control your Thinking Mind. Those emotions pop up and will continue to pop up. Now, instead of thinking, “I was angry at my brother,” think instead, “I felt anger towards my brother.” You HAD anger, but you weren’t controlled by the anger.

Emotions are not a choice. Behavior is.

I feel the same fear and worry anyone else does, I just don’t identify with it. I accept it and move on despite it.

I don’t let my Thinking Mind control me. I defuse from my emotions. When I feel fear, I consciously choose to act despite it. When I feel worry, I consciously choose to act despite it.

These days I’m often able to sit down and write 5,000 words or more in a single day. I still feel the same anxiety. I still hear the same thoughts (“I need to eat first,” “I should take a nap,” “I’m not in a writing mood right now.”)

But now, instead of identifying with these thoughts, I acknowledge them:

“I feel nervous about writing today.” “I have the thought that I need to eat first.” “I have the thought that I need to take a nap first.”

And then I turn to my Thinking Mind and promptly tell him that he’s full of shit and that I don’t need a damn thing except to sit my ass down and start writing.

We all produce excuses and negative emotions involuntarily. Guess what? That’s NEVER going to change.

When people come to me ask how to “stop feeling angry,” or “stop getting nervous,” this is their problem: As soon as you try to eliminate a thought or emotion, you make it stronger.

As the Buddhist saying goes: “What you resist will persist.”

Or as Tony Robbins says: “You feel what you focus.” The more you focus on an emotion, the more powerful it becomes. Thus, negative emotions are like quicksand, the more you struggle to get out of them, the further into them you sink.

“My boss is not an idiot. But I am having the thought that my boss is an idiot.” “I don’t hate my ex-girlfriend. I am feeling hatred toward my ex-girlfriend.” “I am not lonely and depressed. I am feeling loneliness and depression.”

Language is very powerful. Disidentifying from these emotions and thoughts in this way does two things: 1) implies that they’re temporary states, and not permanent conditions; and 2) forces you to take responsibility for them. They’re nobody’s fault, they just are.

THE “DO SOMETHING” PRINCIPLE

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• Most people only commit to action if they feel a certain level of motivation. And they only feel motivation when they feel an emotional inspiration.
• Emotional Inspiration → Motivation → Desirable Action
• If someone wants to fix their relationship with their mother, the emotions of the situation (hurt, resentment, avoidance) completely go against the necessary action to fix it (confrontation, honesty, communication). If someone wants to lose weight but experiences massive amounts of shame about their body, then the act of going to the gym is apt to inspire in them the exact emotions that kept them at home on the couch in the first place. Past traumas, negative expectations, and feelings of guilt, shame and fear often motivate us away from the actions necessary to overcome those very traumas, negative expectations, and negative emotions.

HOW MOTIVATION REALLY WORKS

• Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.
• The conclusion is that if you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, then do something, anything really, and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.
• It began out of simple pragmatism: you paid me to be here so you might as well do something. I don’t care, do anything!
• The first couple years I worked for myself, entire weeks would go by without accomplishing much for no other reason than I was anxious and stressed about what I had to do, and it was too easy to put it off. I quickly learned that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier.
• If I had to redesign an entire website, then I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “OK, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of it. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.
• Inevitably, the appropriate action occurs at some point or another. The motivation is natural. The inspiration is genuine. It’s an overall far more pleasant way of accomplishing my goals.
• I recently heard a story about a novelist who had written over 70 novels. Someone asked him how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated every day, as writers are notorious for procrastination and for fighting through bouts of “writer’s block”. The novelist said, “200 crappy words per day, that’s it.” The idea is that if he forced himself to write 200 crappy words, more often than not, the act of writing would inspire him and before he knew it he’d have thousands down on the page.

THE THREE LEVELS OF SELF-AWARENESS

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• LEVEL 1 – WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?

  • Have you struggled with a relationship, felt lonely, isolated, or unheard, felt unproductive or lost on what you should do, been under-slept, under-fed, low energy, stressed about work or finances, uncertain about your future, and physically hurt, ill, or debilitated?
  • We avoid pain through distraction.
  • We have to be aware of our distractions. We can't binge on distraction.
  • The goal with distraction isn't to defeat it, but merely to develop an awareness and control of our distractions. Allot video games into your free time in a way that's satisfying and healthy.
  • The first level of self-awareness: an understanding of what you are feeling.

• Level 2: What the hell are you feeling?

  • People freak out when meditating because they get overwhelmed by all of the feelings they've been bottling up forever.
  • "Finding yourself" means discovering how you actually feel about the shit going on in your life, and often you've been hiding these feelings from yourself for years.
  • Emotions are powerful, especially for people who have been suppressing their emotions for most of their lives. Suddenly opening up to them will feel life-changing and incredibly profound.
  • When you look down on layers of intention and motivation, just go down a bit until you start repeating yourself.

• Level 3: What the hell are your blind spots?

  • The more you become aware of your own emotions and your own desires, the more you discover that you are just FULL OF SHIT.
  • A large percentage of your thoughts, arguments, and actions are merely reflections of whatever we are feeling in that moment. I get into an argument with my editor, and I decide I'll hate the movie I'm watching with my wife.
  • We use our loved ones as an emotional punching bag to validate all the crap that we are feeling, whether they deserve it or not.

• Flaws of our minds:

  • Our memories are unreliable and we make shit up.
  • We constantly overestimate ourselves.
  • Contradictory evidence somehow makes us surer of our position rather than inspire us to question it.
  • Our attention focuses on things that cohere to our pre-existing beliefs. (This is why two people can watch the same event and come away with two contradictory methods of it.)
  • We tell small lies to improve our results.
  • We are abysmal at estimating stats.

• Knowing weaknesses:

  • Hold weaker opinions: there is a good chance that your intuitions or assumptions are flat-out wrong.
  • Take yourself less seriously.
  • Learn your bullshit patterns. Where does your mind go when you feel sad, angry, guilty, anxious?
  • Recognize the problems you create for yourself. "Hey you're doing this shit when you're sad and you always regret not talking to someone. Then I go talk to someone."
  • Be realistic. Some people are bad at happiness but are good at managing their anger. What are your strong and weak emotions? Which emotions do you respond poorly to? Where are your biggest biases and judgments coming from? How can you challenge or re-evaluate them?