Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.
Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.
The Buddha said that suffering is like being shot by two arrows. The first arrow is the physical pain – it’s the metal piercing the skin, the force colliding into the body. The second arrow is the mental pain, the meaning and emotion we attach to the being struck, the narratives that we spin in our minds about whether we deserved or didn’t deserve what happened. In many cases, our mental pain is far worse than any physical pain. In most cases, it lasts far longer.
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. Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
It was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself – especially the worst parts of himself – and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt.
YOUR values determine your behavior, not what you think she wants, not what you think others want, but what is best for you and best for the relationship.
Hopefully by now you’re getting a clearer idea of what demographic of women you’re currently attracting and which demographic of women you’d like to attract. In the next chapter, we will get into specifics on how to pursue the correct demographic for you and become as attractive as you possibly can be.
Young adulthood is a period when many people struggle with values, control, and community.
Perhaps then, we will not only realize but finally embrace the Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our purpose, and we were, and still are, nothing.
The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
Romance novels are basically pornography for women.
Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness.
Friction is when a woman finds you to be an attractive man, but there are value differences or external circumstances that prevent her from acting on that attraction or being interested in you.
If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing so.
Happiness comes from solving problems.
Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.
Our Struggles determine our successes. Our problems birth our happiness.
We all possess some degree of narcissism. It’s inevitable, as everything we ever know or experience has happened to us or been learned by us. The nature of our consciousness dictates that everything happen through us. It’s only natural, then, that our immediate assumption is that we are at the center of everything – because we are at the center of everything we experience.
Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. That’s why they don’t make any meaningful choices. They hide in a gray, emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed and self-pitying, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life.
After all, the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear. Disappointment Panda would be the hero that none of us would want but all of us would need.