As Freud once said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice – whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.
Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks.
But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them.
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.
We know who we are and we accept ourselves, including some of the parts we aren’t thrilled about.
When viewed from this perspective, personal growth can actually be quite scientific. Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and important; that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data. There.
Basically, the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting.
Nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.
It’s the backwards law again: the more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel. But the converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know.
The mark of an unhealthy relationship is two people who try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves. Rather, a healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other.
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. Don’t ever forget that. And don’t ever be afraid of that.
There are some experiences that you can have only when you’ve lived in the same place for five years, when you’ve been with the same person for over a decade, when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half your lifetime.
And people are always mistaking what feels good for what is good.
The older you get, the more experienced you get, the less significantly each new experience affects you.
Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that’s likely to save the planet one day.
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 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.
The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.
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.