The Antidote – Oliver Burkeman

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking – by Oliver Burkeman
Date read: 3/11/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Rejects the self-help industry and the "power" of positive thinking. One of my favorite books that I've read this year. Burkeman sees the obsession with positive thinking and attaining happiness as counterproductive, and the very thing that makes us unhappy. There are great chapters on Stoicism and negative visualization, meditation and non-attachment, resourcefulness and the myths of goal setting, as well as impermanence and the pitfalls of seeking safety above all else. Makes the case that living meaningfully starts with the negative path to happiness–one which embraces uncertainty, insecurity, and the realities of every day life–so you can better appreciate when things go right. Unrealistic positive expectations are not only ineffective, they're often counterproductive. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

Chapter 1 - On Trying Too Hard To Be Happy
The awkward truth seems to be that increased economic growth does not necessarily make for happier societies, just as increased personal income, above a certain basic level, doesn't make for happier people. Nor does better education, at least according to some studies. Nor does an increased choice of consumer products. Nor do bigger and fancier homes, which instead seem mainly to provide the privilege of more space in which to feel gloomy.

The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.

The alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death.

The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasized the benefits of always contemplating how badly things might go. It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground. It underpins the medieval tradition of memento mori which celebrated the life-giving benefits of never forgetting about death.

In business, drop obsession with goal setting, embrace uncertainty instead.

Trying to make everything right is a big part of what's wrong. Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

Crucial foundation to negative approach is that happiness involves paradoxes; that there is no way to tie up all the loose ends, however desperately we might want to.

Edgar Allan Poe - 'imp of the perverse': that nameless but distinct urge one sometimes experiences, when walking along a precipitous cliff edge, or climbing to the observation deck of a tall building, to throw oneself off - not from any suicidal motivation, but precisely because it would be so calamitous to do so.

People who seek out affirmations would be, by definition, those with low self-esteem.

Chapter 2 - What Would Seneca Do?
Stoics were among the first to suggest that the path to happiness might depend on negativity.

Stoicism, which was born in Greece and matured in Rome, should not be confused with 'stoicism' as the word is commonly used today - a weary, uncomplaining resignation that better describes the attitude of my fellow passengers on the Underground. Real Stoicism is far more tough-minded, and involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.

Spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people's motivation to achieve them.

Stoicism came to dominate Western thinking about happiness for nearly five centuries.

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -Shakespeare, Hamlet

A more elegant, sustainable and calming way to deal with the possibility of things going wrong: rather than struggling to avoid all thought of these worst-case scenarios, they [Stoics] counsel actively dwelling on them, staring them in the face. Psychological tactic that is single most valuable technique in the Stoics' toolkit. They referred to it as 'the premeditation of evils,' also called 'negative visualization' (William Irvine).

Benefits of Negative Visualization:
1) One of greatest enemies of human happiness is 'hedonic adaptation' - any new source of pleasure is swiftly relegated to the backdrop of our lives, we become accustomed to it. Regularly reminding yourself you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy will reverse the adaptation effect. "Whenever you grow attached to something, do not act as thought it were one of those things that cannot be taken away..." -Epictetus
2) Antidote to anxiety. Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle; negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.

As Seneca frequently observes, we habitually act as if our control over the world were much greater than it really is. In better times it's easy to forget how little we control: we can usually manage to convince ourselves that we attained the promotion at work, or the new relationship, or the Nobel Prize, thanks solely to our own brilliance and effort.

For the Stoics, however, tranquility entails confronting the reality of your limited control. 'Never have I trusted Fortune,' writes Seneca, 'even when she seemed to be at peace. All her generous bounties - money, office, influence - I deposited where she could ask for them back without disturbing me.' Those things lie beyond the individual's control; if you invest your happiness in them, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock. The only things we can truly control, the Stoics argue, are our judgments - what we believe - about our circumstances.

Essential to grasp a distinction here between acceptance and resignation: using your powers of reason to stop being disturbed by a situation doesn't mean you shouldn't try to change it.

Tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones. And dwelling on the worst-case scenario, the 'premeditation of evils', is often the best way to achieve this - even to the point, Seneca suggests, of deliberately experiencing those 'evils,' so as to grasp that they might not be as bad as you'd irrationally feared.

No wonder we get so anxious: we've decided that if we failed to meet our goal it wouldn't merely be bad, but completely bad - absolutely terrible. But nothing could ever be absolutely terrible because it could always be conceivably worse.

"If you accept that the universe is uncontrollable, you're going to be a lot less anxious." -Albert Ellis

Negative visualization more effective strategy than reassurance for helping those who are anxious. Ask: so what if worst fears did come true?

Chapter 3 - The Storm Before the Calm
Meditation has little to do with achieving any specific desired state of mind. It's about non-attachment - approaching life without clinging or aversion.

Rather than merely enjoying pleasurable things during the moments in which they occur, and experiencing the unpleasantness of painful things, we develop the habits of clinging and aversion: we grasp at what we like, trying to hold on to it forever, and push away what we don't like, trying to avoid it at all costs.

Learn how to stop trying to fix things, to stop being so preoccupied with trying to control one's experience of the world, to give up trying to replace unpleasant thoughts and emotions with more pleasant ones, and to see that, through dropping the 'pursuit of happiness', a more profound peace might result.

Motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists - people who really do get a lot done - very rarely include techniques for 'getting motivated' or 'feeling inspired.' Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasize the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood.

"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." -Chuck Close

On meditation: my vantage point on my mental activity had altered subtly, as if I'd climbed two rungs up a stepladder in order to observe it from above. I was less enmeshed in it all.

Chapter 5 - Goal Crazy
"Future - That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured." -Ambrose Bierce

Chris Kayes on Everest Climbers (Into Thin Air Expedition) in 1996:
-The Everest climbers had been lured into destruction by their passion for goals. His hypothesis was that the more they fixated on the endpoint - a successful summiting of the mountain - the more than goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities, of their senses of themselves as accomplished guides or high-achieving amateurs.

Typical Everest climber: someone who demonstrated considerable restlessness, dislike for routine, desire for autonomy, tendency to be dominant in personal relations, and a lack of interest in social interaction for its own sake. Their felt need for achievement and independence was very high. Climbers tend to be domineering loners with little regard for social convention.

Yale Study of Goals, 1953:
-Students graduating asked by researchers whether or not they had formulated specific, written-down goals for the rest of their lives. Only 3 percent of them said they had. Two decade later, the researchers tracked down the class of '53, to see how their lives had turned out. 3 percent with written goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97 percent combined. The only problem is that it is indeed a legend: the Yale study of Goals never took place.

Many of us, and many of the organizations for which we work, would be better to spend less time on goal setting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.

This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future.

Steve Shapiro: Giving up goals and embracing uncertainty instead. Promised to help him achieve more, by permitting him to enjoy his work in the present. Goal-free living simply makes for happier humans.

The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur isn't vision or passion. It's the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by a rigid focus on any one goal.

Chapter 5 - Who's There?
The ego, [Eckhart] Tolle likes to say, thrives on drama, because compulsive thinking can sink its teeth into drama. The ego also thrives on focusing on the future, since it's much easier to think compulsively about the future than about the present.

"When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought, but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in." -Eckhart Tolle

The thought then loses its power over you, and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. The is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.

"Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now." -Eckhart Tolle

Chapter 6 - The Safety Catch
"Security is a kind of death. I think." -Tennessee Williams

It turns out to be an awkward truth about psychology that people who find themselves in what the rest of us might consider conditions of extreme insecurity - such as severe poverty - discover insights into happiness from which the rest of us could stand to learn.

We fear situations in which we feel as though we have no control, such as flying as a passenger on an airplane, more than situations in which we feel as if we have control, such as when at the steering wheel of a car. Vastly more likely to be killed as the result of a car crash...

International surveys of happiness - including several reputable research projects such as the World Values Survey - have consistently found some of the world's poorest countries to be among the happiest. (Nigeria, where 92% of the populations lives on less than two dollars a day, has come in first place.)

The point is certainly not that it's better not to have money, say, than it is to have it. But it's surely undeniable that if you don't have it, it's much harder to overinvest emotionally in it. The same goes for prestigious jobs, material possessions, or impressive educational qualifications: when you have little chance of obtaining them, you won't be misled into thinking they bring more happiness than they do.

Living with fewer illusions means facing reality and insecurity head-on.

To seek security is to try to remove yourself from change, and thus from the thing that defines life. 'If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life,' Alan Watts writes, 'I am wanting to be separate from life.'

This, then, is the deep truth about insecurity: it is another word for life. That doesn't mean it's not wise to protect yourself, as far as you can, from certain specific dangers. But it does mean that feeling secure and really live life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites. And that you can no more succeed in achieving perfect security than a wave could succeed in leaving the ocean.

Chapter 7 - The Museum of Failure
Our resistance to thinking about failure is especially curious in light of the fact that failure is so ubiquitous.

Evolution itself is driven by failure; we think of it as a matter of survival and adaptation, but it makes equal sense of think of it as a matter of not surviving and not adapting.

Illusory superiority: mental glitch that explains why vast majority of people tell researchers that they consider themselves to be in the top 50% of safe drivers - even though they couldn't possibly all be.

Any advice about how to succeed, in life or work, is at constant risk of being undermined by survivor bias. We ignore or avoid failure so habitually that we rarely stop to consider all the people who may have followed any set of instructions for happiness or success - including those advanced in these pages - but then failed to achieve the result.

Neil Steinberg, journalist: "Musing over failure is not a particularly American activity. Sure it's big in Europe, where every nation, at one time or another, has had a lock on greatness, only to fritter it away smothering monster palaces in gold leaf and commissioning jeweled Fabergé eggs by the dozen. England had her empire; Spain her Armada; France, her Napoleon; Germany, it's unspeakable zenith. Even Belgium had a moment of glory..."

The vulnerability revealed by failure can nurture empathy and communality.

We too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure becomes an attack on who we are.

Training to failure isn't an admission of defeat - it's a strategy.

JK Rowling: "Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me...I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized and I was still alive. [Failure] gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations...Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned."

Chapter 8 - Memento Mori
Epicurus made the point, what has become known as the 'argument of symmetry.' Why do you fear the eternal oblivion of death, he wonders, if you don't look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born.

The more you remain aware of life's finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away.

Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully - which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety.

Epilogue - Negativity Capability
Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

For the Stoics, the realization that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can't choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility.

Talk Like TED – Carmine Gallo

Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds– by Carmine Gallo
Date read: 3/5/17. Recommendation: 7/10.

Gallo dissects the most popular TED talks and discusses the nine elements they all have in common. Great resource if you're hoping to improve your public speaking, presentation, or storytelling skills. The most engaging speakers elicit a set of common themes grouped as emotional, novel, or memorable. If nothing else, these lessons will help you become a better communicator.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

My notes:

The most popular TED presentations share nine common elements.

The most engaging presentations are:
-Emotional: They touch my heart.
-Novel: They teach me something new.
-Memorable: They present content in ways I'll never forget.

"And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become." -Steve Jobs

Part 1 - Emotional
"They key part of the TED format is that we have humans connecting to humans in a direct and almost vulnerable way. You're on stage naked, so to speak. The talks that work best are the ones where people can really sense that humanity. The emotions, dreams, imagination." -Chris Anderson

Dig deep to identify your unique and meaningful connection to your presentation topic.

You cannot inspire others unless you are inspired yourself. You stand a much greater chance of persuading and inspiring your listeners if you express an enthusiastic, passionate, and meaningful connection to your topic.

"In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job....Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive." -Robert Greene

Compelling communicators, like those TED presenters who attract the most views online, are masters in a certain topic because of the inevitable amount of devotion, time, and effort invested in their pursuit, which is primarily fueled by fervent passion.

If you want to help someone, shut up and listen.

Tell stories to reach people's hearts and minds.

Bryan Stevenson, the speaker who earned the longest standing ovation in TED history, spent 65 percent of his presentation telling stories. Brain scans reveal that stories stimulate and engage the human brain, helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it much more likely that the audience will agree with the speaker's point of view.

Tell a story that makes it easy for the audience to connect with you on a personal and emotional level.

"You have to get folks to trust you. If you start with something too esoteric and disconnected from the lives of everyday people, it's harder for people to engage." -Bryan Stevenson

Ethos is credibility - we tend to agree with people whom we respect for their achievements, title, experience, etc. (10%)
Logos is the means of persuasion through logic, data, and statistics (25%)
Pathos is the act of appealing to emotions (65%)

"We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning." -Andrew Stanton

Best TED presenters stick to one of three types of stories:
1) Personal stories that relate directly to the theme of the conversation of presentation
2) Stories about other people who have learned a lesson and the audience can relate to
3) Stories involving the success or failure of products or brands

Business professionals rarely tell personal stories, which is one reason why they make such an impact when they do.

In a business presentation, telling stories is the virtual equivalent of taking people on a field trip, helping them to experience the content at a much more profound level.

Practice relentlessly and internalize your content so that you can deliver the presentation as comfortably as having a conversation with a close friend.

The verbal equivalent of a highlighter is to raise or lower the volume of your voice, change the speed at which you deliver the words, and/or use short pauses to punch key words.

Pay attention to how you speak in everyday conversation and how it changes during your presentation. Most people slow down their rate of speed when they give a speed or a presentation, making their verbal delivery sound unnatural. Don't deliver a presentation. Have a conversation instead.

Here's a simple trick: When you record your presentation, walk out of the frame once in a while. I tell clients if they don't leave the camera frame several times during a five-minute presentation, they're too rigid.

Don't put hands in pockets, makes you look bored, uncommitted, and sometimes nervous.

Part 2 - Novel
Reveal information that's completely new to your audience, packaged differently, or offers a fresh and novel way to solve an old problem.

Learning is addictive because it's joyful. It's also necessary for human evolution.

Bombard your brain with new experiences. Building novel concepts into your presentation does require some creativity and a new way of looking at the world.

Sample topics from the most-viewed presentations on TED.com. Notice how each promises to teach you something new:
-Schools Kill Creativity
-How Great Leaders Inspire Action
-Your Elusive, Creative Genius
-The Surprising Science of Happiness
-The Power of Introverts
-8 Secrets of Success
-How to Live Before You Die

The Twitter headline works for two reason: 1) it's a great discipline, forcing you to identify and clarify the one key message you want your audience to remember and 2) it makes it easier for your audience to process the content.

Nearly every TED presentation contains data, statistics, or numbers to reinforce the theme of the talk.

The key to being a great spokesperson is also to craft a succinct message that conveys your big idea.

Remember what worked. Think back to anecdotes, stories, observations, or insights that have made you and your colleagues smile in the past. If they worked there and are appropriate to your presentation, weave them into your narrative and practice telling it.

Part 3 - Memorable
"And being aware is just remembering that you saw everything you've seen for the first time once, too." -Neil Pasricha

On authenticity: "It's just about being you and being cool with that. And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy. You meet people that you like talking to. You go places you've dreamt about. And you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled." -Neil Pasricha

Break your presentation into three parts, each lasting 6 minutes. It makes it easier for you to remember/deliver. Makes it easy for everyone else to follow.

A message map is the visual display of your idea on one page. (page 198)
-Step 1: Twitter-friendly headline
-Step 2: Support the headline with three key messages
-Step 3: Reinforce the three messages with stories, statistics, and examples

I can't tell you how many times I've met leaders who are passionate, humorous, enthusiastic, and inspiring, only to discover that the minute they get onstage they become soulless, stiff boring, and humorless.

You cannot move people if they don't think you're real.

Present content to a friend or spouse before you have to present it to the intended audience. More likely to let some of your "real" self come out when delivering the information to someone you have a relationship with.

Letters from a Stoic – Seneca

Letters from a Stoic – by Seneca
Date read: 2/13/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Introduction to Penguin Classics edition. Perhaps the most highly regarded/referenced work of Stoic philosophy along with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Go straight to the source. It's a classic and one of the most important works you'll read. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

my notes:

Introduction in Penguin Classics:
Supreme ideal is usually summarized in ancient philosophy as a combination of four qualities: wisdom (or moral insight), courage, self-control and justice (or upright dealing). It enables a man to be 'self-sufficient', immune to suffering, superior to the wounds and upsets of life.

Letter II:
You do not tear from place to place and unsettle yourself with one move after another. Restlessness of that sort is symptomatic of a sick mind. Nothing, to my way of thinking, it better proof of a well ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

To be everywhere is to be nowhere. People who spend their whole life traveling abroad end up having plenty of places where they can find hospitality but no real friendships.

A multitude of books only gets in one's way. So if you are unable to read all the books in your possession, you have enough when you have all the books you are able to read.

You ask what is the proper limit to a person's wealth? First, having what is essential, and second, having what is enough.

Leter III:
Think for a long time whether or not you should admit a given person to your friendship. But when you have decided to do so, welcome him heart and soul, and speak as unreservedly with him as you would with yourself.

For a delight in bustling about is not industry - it is only the restless energy of a haunted mind.

Letter V:
Let our aim be a way of life not diametrically opposed to, but better than that of the mob. Otherwise we shall repel and alienate the very people whose reform we desire; we shall make them, moreover, reluctant to imitate us in anything for fear they may have to imitate us in everything.

People should admire our way of life but they should at the same time find it understandable.

Letter IX:
What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?

Letter XII:
The man who looks for the morrow without worrying over it knows a peaceful independence and a happiness beyond all others.

Letter XV:
Without wisdom the mind is sick, and the body itself, however physically powerful, can only have the kind of strength that is found in person in a demented or delirious state. So this is the sort of healthiness you must make your principal concern. You must attend to the other sort as well, but see that it takes second place.

So continually remind yourself, Lucilius, of the many things you have achieved. When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you.

Letter XVI:
No one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom...

[Philosophy] moulds and builds the personality, orders one's life, regulates one's conduct, shows one what one should do and what one should leave undone, sits at the helm and keeps one on the correct course as one is tossed about in perilous seas. Without it no one can lead a life free of fear or worry.

Epicurus: 'If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions you will never be rich.' Nature's wants are small, while those of opinion are limitless.

Letter XVIII:
Set aside now and then a number of days during which you will be content with the plainest of food, and very little of it, and with rough, course clothing, and will ask yourself, 'Is this what one used to dread?' It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with difficult times.

If you want a man to keep his head when the crisis comes you must give him some training before it comes.

Security from care is not dependent on fortune - for even when she is angry she will always let us have what is enough for our needs.

For no one is worthy of a god unless he has paid no heed to riches. I am not, mind you, against your possessing them, but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing.

Letter XXVII:
Of this one thing make sure against your dying day - that your faults die before you do.

Letter XXVIII:
Though you cross the boundless ocean, whatever your destination you will be followed by your failings.

Socrates: "How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away."

You have to lay aside the load on your spirit. Until you do that, nowhere will satisfy you.

As it is, instead of traveling you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.

I do not agree with those who recommend a stormy life and plunge straight into the breakers, waging a spirited struggle against worldly obstacles every day of their lives. The wise man will put up with these things, not go out of his way to meet them; he will prefer a state of peace to a state of war.

Letter XLI:
No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own.

Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him - they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly man's.

Letter LV:
Soft living imposes on us the penalty of debility.

The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself. I've seen for myself people sunk in gloom in cheerful and delightful country houses, and people in completely secluded surroundings who looked as if they were run off their feet.

Letter LXIII:
When one has lost a friend one's eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation.

Would you like to know what lies behind extravagant weeping and wailing? In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it.

Even a person who has not deliberately put an end to his grief finds an end to it in the passing of time. And merely growing weary of sorrowing is quite shameful as a means of cutting sorrow in the case of an enlightened man. I should prefer to see you abandoning grief that it abandoning you.

Letter XLV:
What is death? Either a transition or an end. I am not afraid of coming to an end, this being the same as never having begun, nor the transition for I shall never be in confinement quite so cramped anywhere else as I am here.

Letter LXXVII:
No one is so ignorant as not to know that some day he must die. Nevertheless when death draws near he turns, wailing and trembling, looking for a way out. Wouldn't you think a man a prize fool if he burst into tears because he didn't live a thousand years ago? A man is as much a fool for shedding years because he isn't going to be alive a thousand years from now. There's no difference between the one and the other - you didn't exist and you won't exist - you've no concern with either period.

As it is with a play, so it is with life - what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.

Letter LXXVIII:
A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.

What's the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then?

In the meantime cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune's habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.

Letter LXXXIII:
So-called pleasures, when they go beyond a certain limit, are but punishments...

Letter XC:
We were born into a world in which things were ready to our hands; it is we who have made everything difficult to come by through our own disdain for what is easily come by. Shelter and apparel and the means of warming body and food, all the things which nowadays entail tremendous trouble, were there for the taking, free to all, obtainable at trifling effort. With everything the limit corresponded to the need. It is we, and no one else, who have made those same things costly, spectacular and obtainable only by means of a large number of full-scale techniques..

Letter XCI:
We should be anticipating not merely all that commonly happens but all that is conceivably capable of happening, if we do not want to be overwhelmed and struck numb by rare events as if they were unprecedented ones...

One thing I know; all the works of mortal man lie under sentence of morality; we live among things that are destined to perish.

A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.

In the ashes all men are leveled. We're born unequal, we die equal.

Letter CIV:
What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city? If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.

But travel won't make a better or saner man of you. For this we must spend time in study and in the writings of wise men, to learn the truths that have emerged from their researches, an carry on the search ourselves for the answers that have not yet been discovered.

Letter CV:
Envy you'll escape if you haven't obtruded yourself on other people's notice, if you haven't flaunted your possessions, if you've learnt to keep your satisfaction to yourself.

Besides, to be feared is to fear: no one has been able to strike terror into others and at the same time enjoy peace of mind himself.

Never to wrong others takes one a long way towards peace of mind. People who know no self-restraint lead stormy and disordered lives, passing their time in a state of fear commensurate with the injuries they do to others, never able to relax.

Letter CVII:
Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings. We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise. And since it is invariably unfamiliarity that makes a thing more formidable than it really is, this habit of continual reflection will ensure that no form of adversity finds you a complete beginner.

Letter CVIII:
He needs but little who desires little. He has his wish, whose wish can be to have what is enough.

Letter CXXII:
No need to do as the crowd does: to follow the common, well-worn path in life is a sordid way to behave.

Letter CXXIII:
Nothing need arouse one's irritation so long as one doesn't make it bigger than it is by getting irritated.

Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We've been using them not because we needed them but because we had them. Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they're in most people's houses. One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we're seduced by convention.

The Obstacle Is the Way – Ryan Holiday

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph – by Ryan Holiday
Date read: 1/30/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

One of the most accessible modern introductions to Stoic philosophy. Holiday examines the inevitable obstacles we all face in life, how to better frame them as opportunities to practice virtue, and how to harness them to create momentum of our own. He structures the book around the three interconnected disciplines required to overcome any obstacle: perception, action, and will. There's an incredible amount of knowledge packed into these 200 pages. No matter what challenges you face or where you're trying to go, it's a great resource for fine tuning your attitude, strategy, and mental toughness. Inspired by Marcus Aurelius, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." -Marcus Aurelius

Obstacles as an opportunity to practice some virtue: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity.

As it turns out, this is the one thing all great men and women of history have in common. Like oxygen to a fire, obstacles became fuel for the blaze that was their ambition.

Not "be positive" but learn to be ceaselessly creative and opportunistic. Not: This is not so bad. But: I can make this good.

Sangfroid: unflappable coolness under pressure.

Most people can't access this part of themselves, they are slaves to impulses and instincts they have never questioned.

Talent is not the most sought-after characteristic. Grace and poise are, because these two attributes precede the opportunity to deploy any other skill.

"Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself." -Publius Syrus

When people panic, they make mistakes. They override systems. They disregard procedures, ignore rules. They deviate from the plan. They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They just react - not to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins.

This is the skill that must be cultivated - freedom from disturbance and perturbation - so you can focus your energy exclusively on solving problems, rather than reacting to them.

"Don't let the force of an impression when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test." -Epictetus

In the writings of the Stoics, we see an exercise that might well be described as Contemptuous Expressions. The Stoics use contempt as an agent to lay things bare and to "strip away the legend that encrusts them."
     -Strip things of their glamour, meat is a dead animal, wine is old grapes -- Marcus Aurelius
     -Allows us to see things as they really are.

Objectivity means removing "you" - the subjective part - from the equation. Just think, what happens when we give others advice? Their problems are crystal clear to us, the solutions obvious.

Perspective is everything...When you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you.

"In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices." -Epictetus

Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can't actually influence is wasted - self-indulgent and self-destructive.

Remember that this moment is not your life, it's just a moment in your life. Focus on what is in front of you, right now. Ignore what it "represents" or it "means" or "why it happened to you."

"Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There's no other definition of it." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

Psychologists call it adversarial growth or post-traumatic growth. "That which doesn't kill me makes me stronger" is not a cliche but fact. The struggle against an obstacle inevitably propels the fighter to a new level of functioning. The extent of the struggle determines the extent of the growth.

We forget: In life, it doesn't matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you've been given. And the only way you'll do something spectacular is by using it all to your advantage.

The thing standing in your way isn't going anywhere. You're not going to outthink it or outcreate it with some world-changing epiphany. You've got to look at it...

It's okay to be discouraged. It's not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching forward – that's persistence.

Our capacity to try, try, try is inextricably linked with our ability and tolerance to fail, fail, fail.

The one way to guarantee we don't benefit from failure - to ensure it is a bad thing - is to not learn from it.

Everything we do matters...Everything is a chance to do and be your best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires.

Think progress, not perfection.

"The Great Captain will take even the most hazardous indirect approach - if necessary over mountains, deserts or swamps with only a fraction of the forces, even cutting himself loose from his communications. Facing, in fact, every unfavorable condition rather than accept the risk of stalemate invited by direct approach." -B.H. Liddell Hart

You don't convince people by challenging their longest and most firmly held opinions. You find common ground and work from there. Or you look for leverage to make them listen.

Sometimes you overcome obstacles not by attacking them but by withdrawing and letting them attack you. You can use the actions of others against themselves instead of acting yourself.

It means that very few obstacles are ever too big for us...Remember, a castle can be an intimidating, impenetrable fortress, or it can be turned into a prison when surrounded.

Adversity can harden you. Or it can loosen you up and make you better - if you let it.

In many battles, as in life, the two opposing forces will often reach a point of mutual exhaustion. It's the one who rises the next morning after a long day of fighting and rallies, instead of retreating - the one who says, I intend to attack and whip them right here and now - who will carry victory home...intelligently.

"Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectations." -Seneca

When the cause of our problem lies outside of us, we are better for accepting it and moving on. For ceasing to kick and fight against it, and coming to terms with it. The Stoics have a beautiful name for this attitude. They call it the Art of Acquiescence.

The hubris at the core of this notion that we can change everything is somewhat new.

Amor fati: a love of fate
Not: I'm okay with this.
Not: I think I feel good about this.
But: I feel great about it. Because if it happened, then it was meant to happen, and I am glad that it did when it did. I am meant to make the best of it.

"A man's job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able - always remembering the results will be infinitesimal - and to attend to his own soul." -Leroy Percy

Stop putting that dangerous "I" in front of events. I did this. I was so smart. I had that. I deserve better than this. No wonder you take losses personally, no wonder you feel so alone. You've inflated your own role and importance.

Death doesn't make life pointless, but rather purposeful.

Embracing the precariousness of our own existence can be exhilarating and empowering.

The philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a Stoic as someone who "transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking."

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck – by Mark Manson

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life– by Mark Manson
Date read: 1/17/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

One of the most entertaining writers you'll find. Essentially a deep dive into one my favorite articles from his blog. The core of the book focuses on allocating more time and energy to what matters most (the appropriate allocation of fucks). Instead of over-investing in trivial, superficial things (the inappropriate allocation of fucks). He criticizes our culture's obsession with unrealistically positive expectations and the sense of inadequacy that it provokes. Life is a struggle, we should instead determine what we're willing to struggle for. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations.

Giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it's giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.

I mean, if you look at your Facebook feed, everybody there is having a fucking grand old time.

Back in Grandpa's day, he would feel like shit and think to himself, "Gee whiz, I sure do feel like a cow turd today. Buy hey, I guess that's just life. Back to shoveling hay." But now? Now if you feel like shit for even five minutes, you're bombarded with 350 images of people totally happy and having amazing fucking lives, and it's impossible to not feel like there's something wrong with you.

By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell; you say to yourself, "I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?"

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.

Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

I believe that today we're facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it's okay for things to suck sometimes.

When we believe that it's not okay for things to suck sometimes, then we unconsciously start blaming ourselves. We start to feel as though something is inherently wrong with us, which drives us to all sorts of overcompensation.

Life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family.

Emotions evolved for one specific purpose: to help us live and reproduce a little bit better. That's it. They're feedback mechanisms telling us that something is either likely right or wrong for us - nothing more, nothing less.

Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it's because you're supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.

An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last.

Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can benchpress a small house. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

Numerous professors and educators have noted a lack of emotional resilience and an excess of selfish demands in today's young people.

The flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal.

The problem is that the pervasiveness of technology and mass marketing is screwing up a lot of people's expectations for themselves.

Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless.

The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies - that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as "Your actions actually don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things" and "The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that's okay."

The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.

The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over out lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.

We are responsible for experiences that aren't our fault all the time. This is part of life.

Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things.

In this way, "knowing yourself" or "finding yourself" can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities.

I say don't find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that's what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.

When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.

The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.

This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you're uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you're somehow owed something by this world.

Tools of Titans – Tim Ferriss

View fullsize

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers– by Tim Ferriss
Date read: 1/14/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

If you're a fan of the Tim Ferriss podcast, you'll enjoy this book. It's a collection of all his interviews, distilled into their most useful bits of information. Ferriss offers insight into the habits and mental models of top performers across every industry, from fitness to Silicon Valley. This book is a gold mine for thought provoking quotes. A few of my favorite sections feature Naval Ravikant (entrepreneur/investor), Josh Waitzkin (chess prodigy), and Alain de Botton (philosopher). There are sure to be a handful of ideas that will resonate with you and help improve your own mental models. It's a book I revisit with regularity. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Humans only use 10% of their brains? Not quite..."The most complex structure in the entire universe doesn't have just a parking lot waiting for someone to drive in and start building. It's all used all the time, and in complex ways that we don't always understand." -Adam Gazzaley

More than 80% of the world-class performers I've interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice. Both can be thought of as "cultivating a present-state awareness that helps you to be nonreactive."

Take one breath a day..."I tell my students that all they need to commit to is one mindful breath a day. Just one. Breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and your commitment for the day is fulfilled. Everything else is a bonus." -Chade-Meng Tan

Wishing for random people to be happy...During working or school hours, randomly identify two people who walk past you or who are standing or sitting around you. Secretly wish for them to be happy. That is the entire practice. Don't do anything; don't say anything; just think.

It's not what you know, it's what you do consistently.

"'Busy,' to me seems to imply 'out of control.' Like, 'Oh my God, I'm so busy. I don't have any time for this shit!' To me that sounds like a person who's got no control over their life." -Derek Sivers

Lack of time is lack of priorities. If I'm "busy," it is because I've made choices that put me in that position.

"The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right." -Neil Gaiman

"When you can write well, you can think well." -Matt Mullenweg

The world doesn't need your explanation on saying "No."

"Forget purpose. It's okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives." -James Altucher

"Losers have goals. Winners have systems." -Scott Adams

"If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things...It sounds like generic advice, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any successful person who didn't have about three skills in the top 25%." -Scott Adams

Quick gmail trick: If you append + and a word to the beginning, messages will still get delivered to your inbox. You could use bob+insta@bobsmith.com.

Worst advice: "That you should prioritize growing your social following (Instagram, FB, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube). Grow things that you can fully control that directly affect sales, like your email list. 'Likes' don't pay the bills. Sales do." - Noah Kagan

"Any time I'm telling myself, 'but I'm making so much money,' that's a warning sign that I'm doing the wrong thing." -B.J. Novak

To become "successful," you have to say "yes" to a lot of experiments. To learn what you're best at, or what you're most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.

"Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue - but really, it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect." -Maria Popova

On advice to your younger self: "'The public is not a threat.' When you realize that we all need each other, and that we can all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away." -Sebastian Junger

"Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don't wobble." -Zen Mantra

"To me, success is you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn't exist before." -Kevin Kelly

"When dealing with anyone who's upset, Bill Clinton always asks, 'Has this person slept? Have they eaten? Is somebody else bugging them?" -Alain de Botton

"The very word 'success' has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that's really unhelpful...Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well." - Alain de Botton

"The more you know what you really want, and where you're really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, [that's when] the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static start to loom large and become very threatening." -Alain de Botton

Cal Fussman was allotted 2.5 minutes for an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. He kept it going 30 minutes by going to the heart with the first question: "What's the best lesson your father ever taught you?"

Cal also suggests asking this question to others more often: "What are some of the choices you've made that made you who you are?"

"In any situation in life, you only have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it." -Naval Ravikant

"The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It's just like building muscles." -Naval Ravikant

On why Naval no longer has a quest for immortality: "If you study even the smallest bit of science, you will realize that, for all practical purposes, we are nothing. We're basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small, backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse...There are entire civilizations that we remember now with just one or two words like 'Sumerian' or 'Mayan.' Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No."

"Most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don't cultivate 'turning it on' as a way of life in the little moments - and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big - then there's no chance in the big moments." -Josh Waitzkin

"One of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack's life was parents who have unproductive language around weather being good or bad. Whenever it was raining you'd hear [people] say, 'It's bad weather. We can't go out,' or if it wasn't, 'It's good weather. We can go out.' That means that, somehow, we're externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So, Jack and I never missed a single storm, rain or snow, to go outside and romp in it...We've developed this language around how beautiful it is. Now, whenever it's a rainy day, Jack says, 'Look, Dada, it's such a beautiful rainy day,' and we go out and play in it. I wanted him to have this internal locus of control - to not be reliant on external conditions being just so." -Josh Waitzkin

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." -Theodore Roosevelt

In the beginning of your career, you spend time to earn money. Once you hit your stride in any capacity, you should spend money to earn time, as the latter is nonrenewable.

"And if you say you're not creative, look at how much you're missing out on just because you've told yourself that. I think that creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we're born with that some people don't cultivate, that they don't realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives." -Robert Rodriguez

Tribe – Sebastian Junger

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging – by Sebastian Junger
Date read: 1/9/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

Clear, concise, and thought-provoking read that examines the struggle to find loyalty, belonging, and meaning in modern society. Junger spotlights military veterans and the growing rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, but he also takes a step back to examine the human condition at large. He discusses hardship, raw experiences, social bonds, community, mental health, and what we can learn from tribal societies. Tribe explains that there are three essential needs that must be met if we wish to feel content–the need to feel competent at what we do, the need to feel authentic in our lives, and the need to feel connected to others. Junger considers the effects of their absence and makes a compelling case that we should strive to rediscover and prioritize their importance. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.

It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans - mostly men - wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own...Emigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal.

The intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn't necessarily compete with.

Genetic adaptations take around 25,000 years to appear in humans, so the enormous changes that came with agriculture in the last 10,000 years have hardly begun to affect our gene pool.

First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good.

A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day - or an entire life - mostly encounter complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society - despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology - is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness.

According to a global survey by the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate they do in poor countries.

Poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses - and certainly isn't the American ideal - but it's much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence...a wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls ways outside more than a million years of human experience.

Human beings needs three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.

"The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment...that maximizes consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences." Journal of Affective Disorders, 2002

Dishonest bankers and welfare or insurance cheats are the modern equivalent of tribe members who quietly steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources.

"Whether...civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested...[both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." Thomas Paine, 1795.

Before the war [WW2], projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down...Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids.

Fritz's theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a "community of sufferers" that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others." It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.

What catastrophes seem to do - sometimes in the span of a few minutes - is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

A person's chance of getting chronic PTSD is in great part a function of their experiences before going to war.

A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.

Whatever the technological advances of modern society - and they're nearly miraculous - the individualized lifestyles that those technologies seem to spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.

"In the United States we valorize our vets with words and posters and signs, but we don't give them what's really important to Americans, what really sets you apart as someone who is valuable to society - we don't give them jobs. All the praise in the world doesn't mean anything if you're not recognized by society as someone who can contribute valuable labor." -Sharon Abramowitz

There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one's way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community.

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction - all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them the most.

Littering, perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in.

One way to determine what is missing in day-to-day American life may be to examine what behaviors spontaneously arise when that life is disrupted.

We live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about - depending on their views - the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government. It's a level of contempt that's usually reserved for enemies in war-time, except that now it's applied to our fellow citizens.

Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker.

"If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different - you underscore your shared humanity. I'm appalled by how much people focus on differences." -Rachel Yehuda

Ego Is the Enemy – Ryan Holiday

Ego Is the Enemy – by Ryan Holiday
Date read: 1/5/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

My favorite Ryan Holiday book. If you haven't read any of his work yet, start here. It's a great look into how–in an effort to nurse our ego–we often act in opposition to our best interests. He discusses how to leverage ideas from Stoic philosophy, the pitfalls of self-narrative, and the importance of being a lifelong learner. Numerous life lessons and productive mental models packed into a quick read. Along with Tribe by Sebastian Junger, this is the book I've gifted the most in the past year.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

"Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words." -Rainer Maria Rilke

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." -Richard Feynman

Just one thing keeps ego around - comfort. Pursuing great work - whether it is in sports or art or business - is often terrifying. Ego soothes that fear. It's a salve to that insecurity. Replacing the rational and aware parts of our psyche with bluster and self-absorption, ego tells us what we want to hear, when we want to hear it.

Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.

We build ourselves up with fantastical stories, we pretend we have it all figured out, we let our star burn bright and hot only to fizzle out, and we have no idea why. These are symptoms of ego, for which humility and reality are the cure.

You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It's easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.

Be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status.

Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It's more "Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am." It's rarely the truth: "I'm scared. I'm struggling. I don't know."

So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and strong.

Doing great work is a struggle.

Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

"It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows." -Epictetus

The art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life, particularly harsh and critical feedback...The ego avoids such feedback at all costs.

On Eleanor Roosevelt: She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn't driven by passion, but by reason.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Used one word to describe the style of his famous coach [John Wooden]: "dispassionate." As in not passionate. Wooden wasn't about rah-rah speeches or inspiration. He saw those extra emotions as a burden. Instead his philosophy was about being in control and doing your job and never being "passion's slave."

Neither of them [Wooden or Roosevelt] were driven by excitement, nor were they bodies in constant motion. Instead, it took them years to become the person they became known as. It was a process of accumulation.

Passion typically masks a weakness. It's breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance.

Passion is seen in those who can tell you in great detail who they intend to become and what their success will be...but they cannot show you their progress. Because their rarely is any.

How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? Well, that's the passion paradox.

Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.

When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You're not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.

Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful.

"I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who 'keep under the body'; are those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite." -Booker T. Washington

It doesn't degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.

It is a timeless fact of life that the up-and-coming must endure the abuses of the entrenched.

The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments?

It will be a lonely fight to be real, to say "I'm not going to take the edge off." To say, "I am going to be myself, the best version of that self. I am in this for the long game, no matter how brutal it might be."

No matter what you've done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you're not still learning, you're already dying.

It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life. Learn from everyone and everything.

An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.

Narrative is when you look back at an improbable or unlikely path to your success and say: I knew it all along. Instead of: I hoped. I worked. I got some good breaks. Or even: I thought this could happen.

Crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse. It's also dangerous and untrue. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance. It turns our life into a story - and turns us into caricatures - while we still have to live it.

A great destiny, Seneca reminds us, is great slavery.

"To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age." -Robert Louis Stevenson

All of us waste precious life doing things we don't like, to prove ourselves to people we don't respect, to get things we don't want.

You need to know what you don't want and what your choices preclude. Because strategies are often mutually exclusive. One cannot be an opera singer and a teen pop idol at the same time. Life requires those trade-offs, but ego can't allow it.

So why do you do what you do? That's the question you need to answer. Stare at it until you can. Only then will you understand what matters and what doesn't. Only then can you say no, can you opt out of stupid races that don't matter, or even exist.

Sympatheia - a connectedness to the cosmos. The French philosopher Pierre Hadot has referred to it as the "oceanic feeling." A sense of belonging to something larger, of realizing that "human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity." *cosmic sympathy

That's what we're after here. That's the transcendental experience that makes our petty ego impossible.

Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice one one end and recklessness on the other. Generosity, which we all admire, must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use. Where the line - this golden mean - is can be difficult to tell, but without finding it, we risk dangerous extremes.

Ego loves this notion, the idea that something is "fair" or not. Psychologists call it narcissistic injury when we take personally totally indifferent and objective events.

Robert Greene: There are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time.

You will be unappreciated. You will be sabotaged. You will experience surprising failures. Your expectations will not be met. You will lose. You will fail. How do you carry on then?

"Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do...Sanity means tying it to your own actions." -Marcus Aurelius

Your potential, the absolute best you're capable of - that's the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.