The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*CK #2 | MONDAY MOTIVATION #3
Monday Motivation
Welcome to the first installment of Monday Motivation here on my blog! Every Monday I share with you information that I learnt from reading books throughout the week, hopefully motivational!
This Mondays' book is The One Thing by Gary Keller.
#This is what I learned in the book this week:
3 You Are Not Special
Unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself. It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults. The problems with feeling special and entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them. Any attempt to reason with them is seen as simply another ‘threat’ to their superiority by another person who ‘can’t handle’ how smart/talented/good-looking/successful they are. The true measurement of self-worth is how a person feels not about their positive experiences, but rather how they feel about their negative experiences. Entitled people are unable to recognise any problems they may have with any honesty and thus incapable of improving their lives, leading to greater and greater denial. When really traumatic events happen in our lives, we feel very overwhelmed in trying to solve it, leading to us to feel miserable and helpless.
As we have seen entitlement can come in the form of I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment. What most people don’t correctly identify as entitlement as those people who perpetually feel as though they’re inferior and unworthy of the world. ‘I suck and the rest of you are awesome, so I deserve special treatment’. The truth is that there’s no such things as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn’t minimise the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances. Just be aware of the trap of self-pity and entitlement.
The Tyranny of Exceptionalism
Most of us a pretty average at most things there are to do. Even if we are exceptional at one things, chances are you’re average or below average at most other things. That’s just life. Although, throughout media it is the extremes that get publicity. Having the internet, Google, Facebook, youtube and 500 plus channels on the TV our attention can only be limited from the constant bombardment of information. The media sell the extremes because that is what gets eyeballs. This has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, this makes us feel very insecure and somehow not good enough. If you accept this for yourself, then you basically accept the fact that a majority of everyone else isn’t good enough and this is a dangerous mindset. After removing this constant pressure to be something amazing, the stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate will dissipate. You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences and simple pleasures. Friendhips, helping others, reading a book, laughing. These things sound ordinary. But maybe theyre ordinary for a reason, because they are what actually matters. Mass-media driven exceptionalism.
4 The Value of Suffering
The Self Awareness Onion
Self awareness is like an onion, there are multiple layers to it. The first layer is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. The second layer is one’s ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. This layer of questioning helps us understand the root of cause of the emotion that overwhelm us. Once we understand this we can do something to change this. The deepest layer of self awareness, the third layer, is our personal values. ‘why do I consider this to be success/failiure? How am I choosing to measure myself? These are the difficult but powerful questions. Most self-help gurus ignore this deeper level of self awareness. They take people who are miserable because they want to be rich, give them advice on how to make more money, yet ignore important value based questions such as: ‘why do you feel such a need to be rich in the first place’? This honest self-questioning is difficult. Asking these uncomfortable questions often uncovers great truths.
This bring into question our metrics and our values. What values do I hold dear and what metrics do I use to progress towards that value. For example, I want to be rich is the value. And the metric is that I am richer than someone else. If they have £100million and you have £50million, you will believe therefore that you are not rich, yet you have £50million. Perhaps not a great example but I hope you understand. Can this be implemented into another area of your life? If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failiure/success.
Shitty Values
What common values can we have which can create a lot of problems for us?
1. Pleasure
Ask any drug addict how pursuit of pleasure has turned out. Ask an adulterer who has shattered their family and lost their children how pleasure went. Ask the man who almost ate himself to death how pleasure helped him solve his problems. Pleasure is marketed to us 24/7 to get it. Although pleasure is the by-product of happiness.
2. Material Success
Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make or what car they drive. Research shows that once one is able to provide for bias needs the correlation between money and happiness quickly declines.
3. Always being right
We make poor assumptions and give into cognitive biases and are wrong constantly. If we want to always be right, we lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathise with others and not be in a constant state of learning and growth.
4. Staying positive
While there is something to be said for ‘staying on the sunny side of life’, the truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it. Denying negative emotions can lead to emotional dysfunction. When we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness.
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Feedback, try to make some original thoughts, it will increase the value you bring to the Blockchain, like the DTube videos you used to do in the beginning! Try to dive deeper into original thoughts and try to make some responses to other Steemit users more. :)
@phoneinf Thinkin gof bringing those videos back, was not sure whether to use Dtube or Dlive. Takes a lot of guts to do videos! Cheers