Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other – in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.
Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.
To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;.
This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.
Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
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. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.
There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. It’s impossible not to be. Choosing to not consciously interpret events in our lives is still an interpretation of the events of our lives. Choosing.
We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.
Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.” And.
Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.
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.
You cannot be a powerful and life-changing presence to some people without being a joke or an embarrassment to others.
Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone. It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you.
It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.
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.
But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.
We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing we essentially have no identity at all.
People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.