choices........................

 

In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.

From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.

-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here

Eric Barker........................

 

.............................weighs in on self-sabotage:

Žižek says we aren’t unified. We’re not transparent to ourselves. We say one thing, do another, and then rationalize like crazy. We don’t just fail to know ourselves. We actively collaborate in not knowing ourselves. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to hear from a man who looks like he resides in a storm drain.
But we don’t need more false reassurance. We need a brilliant lunatic to point at the machinery of our lives and say: “You see, that part there? (sniffs, rubs nose) This thing you think is normal? That’s where the madness lives.”
And this is why Slavoj Žižek is our most helpful ally against self-sabotage.

war and peace.................

 

The most sophisticated villain creation happens in your own head.  You split yourself into parts and declare war.  The disciplined self fights the lazy self.  The ambitious self quarrels with the comfortable self.  The good self goes to war with the bad self.

This internal villainization feels productive because you're fighting your demons and conquering weakness.  You declare war on procrastination, make it the enemy, and fight it with willpower and discipline.  It fights back by getting stronger.  The harder you battle, the more energy you feed it.  Your resistance becomes its fuel.

Every internal villain follows the same pattern.  The more you fight anxiety, the more anxious you become about being anxious.  The more you battle negative thoughts, the more mental energy you spend thinking negative thoughts.  The more you battle against your body, the more your body wars against you. . . .

The solution is integration and understanding that your procrastination is trying to protect yourself from judgment, your anxiety is trying to keep you safe, and your comfortable self is trying to preserve energy for survival.

They are merely parts of you serving outdated functions.  Fighting them creates internal civil war, but understanding them creates internal peace.  The issue is peace doesn't provide the same chemical hit as war, so most people keep fighting themselves until they die.

-Stan Taylor, The Black Book of Power

stress.....................

 

You've been so focused on the loss of external things that you failed to account for the ongoing loss of internal things.  And unlike money or jobs, time and integrity don't regenerate once spent.  Every day you live disingenuously is a day of your life burnt.  How many more are you willing to torch? . . .

In health terms, chronic stress is deadly when it wrecks your immune system, heart, and brain.  So, keeping the peace externally might be killing you slowly, whereas a short burst of conflict, followed by a freer life, could literally improve your health.  Your contract could be cutting years off your life by keeping you under constant stress.  Loss aversion made you avoid short-term pain as the cost of long-term well-being.  A bad trade.

-Stan Taylor, The Black Book of Power

thoroughly.................

 

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.

-George Bernard Shaw, from here

the temperament.....................

 

Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ.  Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

-Warren Buffett

a worthy goal....................

 

     "When I am reading a book, whether wise of silly," Swift once wrote, "it seemeth to me to be alive and talking to me."  The books he owned that have survived show that he constantly talked back, filling the margins with comments and objections, as he did when he referred to King William's morals.  Describing this period ten years later, he said of himself, "The author was then young, his invention at the height, and his reading fresh in his head.  By the assistance of some thinking, and much conversation, he had endeavoured to strip himself of as many real prejudices as he could."  That was his lifelong goal: to be faithful to firm principles, but only after thinking them through.

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Knowledge is good.................

 

“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll make in your life.” - Warren Buffett. Gaining more knowledge and skills is never a mistake.

-from this assortment of quotes from some smart people

Feels like he's nagging....................

 

People underestimate themselves and overestimate how long things take.

You can do far more than you think, far better, and far faster.

-Shane Parrish, from here

internal......................

 

Improvement is being better than your past self.  It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Do not compare against others, compare against your past self.  Keep the focus internal.

-James Clear, from this edition

a prisoner of words..............

 

Subject to these reservations, we must hope for a common rallying.  But first our Leftist intellectuals, who have swallowed so many insults and may well have to begin doing so again, would have to undertake a critique of the reasonings and ideologies to which they have hitherto subscribed, which have wreaked the havoc they have seen in our most recent history.  That will be the hardest thing.  We must admit that today conformity is on the Left.  To be sure, the Right is not brilliant.  But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws.  The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.  Until such an effort at re-examination is well underway, any rallying will be useless and even harmful.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 essay, "Socialism of the Gallows", found in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

I regarded it as a fraud..................

 

My problem was that for my first ten years in school, I was at the back of the class.  In the end, I came to see myself as my teachers saw me and as everyone in my class saw me.  Without knowing it I made a compact with being last.  And when, eventually, my exam results showed that I was first, I regarded it as a fraud.  Nothing so trivial as a fact could give the lie to an old sense of self.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

reforming.....................

 

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves.  Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us.  Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.  The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.  "If anything ail a man," says Thoreau, "so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even . . . he forthwith sets about reforming—the world."

-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

The goal.....................

 

The goal was never to transform the external world by acting physically upon that world, but to transform it in producing better human beings, in allowing human beings to develop an inward knowledge of themselves.

-Matthieu Ricard, as taken from here

Tim Ferriss........................

 

..........................visits the self-help trap.

Along the way, he suggests Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs 

should actually be Maslow's Hamburger of Needs.

..................worth the read.

It's the little things..................

 

From ancient times until now, wise men and women who wanted to make the world a better place didn’t start with some grandiose plan for others. Instead, they practiced the “make your bed” philosophy, where real change most often starts with self-improvement.

-Jeff Minick, with his list of seven ways

On intentional scheduling...............

 

Here’s the standard interpretation of this result: Social media is distracting, and if you’re distracted, it becomes harder to maintain control over your schedule. So, the more you use social media, the worse you become at time management.

But I’ve become interested in the reverse form of this argument: the better your planning system, the less time you’ll spend on engagement-based applications like social media.

-Cal Newport, as posted here

downstream......................

 

And that’s the funny thing: so many of our problems aren't even the actual problem. They are the downstream effect of some deeper, unseen problem. And the work to actually fix the problem usually has way less to do with fixing and way more with simply learning how to see it clearly in the first place.

-Mark Manson, from this episode

Clearing....................

 

When something throws you out of easiness, there's something you need to pay attention to.  The uneasiness is pulling up something that needs to be cleared.  We clear it by looking within ourselves and finding what makes us uneasy, owning it, and forgiving our self because one is a fallible human being.  One has to learn to show oneself kindness in the willingness to forgive.  This then transfers into willingness to forgive others.  Spiritual aspirants must learn to accept things the way they are, not the way they want them to be.

-David R. Hawkins

On mastery.....................

 

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

-attributed to Lao-Tzu