January 2020

[…] Anybody who is living by selflessness, who wants to always be helpful for other people, who is so focused on in any way being useful and valuable to other people: this is just a target for being exploited. People will take advantage, get free help. “Hey, can you help me?” “Hey, I could use […]

[…] What if you don’t actually need anything? What if you don’t need to have good results at all? What if you don’t need to receive anything? What if you don’t need to even become anything, you don’t need to gain anything, simply needing nothing at all? Imagine if your efforts were entirely dedicated to

A concept I keep seeing coming up in self-development is this delay effect, where we can work really hard on something, put in a lot of effort, and then we notice absolutely no change. Everything just seems to plateau, seems to be going nowhere, and then suddenly, at some point, you wake up and feel

[…] This whole idea of minimalism, this whole movement, is about simplifying our lives by removing some of that stuff. But there’s just so much stuff, and it seems like most people, they can’t even list all the things that are filling their lives. Can you make a list of everything in your life? It

So when we’re starting something new, it’s usually because we feel like it. There’s some reason that drives us to do something. It feels good. We feel this kind of positive feedback loop as we do something more and more, and we get a good reaction, we get good results from doing it, and so

It seems like we make decisions all the time based on feelings, and why not? Go with your gut: we can learn so much from the feelings, the intuitions that come up, that sometimes seem to know more than we know. Because we can only compute logically to a certain degree within certain known parameters,

It seems like a big obstacle to self-development for many people, an obstacle to getting started, is some idea of just not being ready, of being too weak, too lacking in willpower, unable to get things started. So I think it’s very helpful to always remember that it’s OK to start from zero, from absolute

Seems like a tricky balance between ambition and humility. Now, what’s the advantage of either side? Go to ambition: then you are really shooting for the top, really shooting to do something great, that’s inspiring, that can lead to doing wonderful things. It can make work fun, because you’re actually working towards something that seems

Everyone has experienced being in a mental hole to one degree or another. The feeling of being in a hole. The feeling like “Everything in my life is very closed in. I can’t see very far. I can’t move anywhere. Everything is just sort of stuck the way it is.” And it’s not easy to

The search for happiness seems like such a big part of our lives, such a central focus of concern. Am I happy? Am I happy enough? Am I going to be happy? Am I going to get more happy? Am I gonna lose my happiness? Sometimes it can seem like it’s an out-and-out struggle for