What I’m Reading

* Overcoming Your Demons: “Inside of every struggle is the seed of some of the happiest moments of your life.”

*Emotional Flexibility: “In a nutshell, emotional flexibility is about holding everything at once — happiness, joy, and enthusiasm at the same time as anger, sadness, and frustration — and being able to feel differently at various points throughout the same day and perhaps even the same hour.”

* Most Accomplishments Are Invisible: “I achieved the ability to do certain everyday things most people do with ease. But they took an enormous amount of work, and I wouldn’t trade a single one for a million bucks.”

* The Dark Horse Path to Happiness: “Whenever you find yourself seeking, or wanting a certain outcome out of life, note what you’re doing and then refocus on practicing your core values.”

* On Perfection: Perfection dangles on a string as we run in place chasing after it on our respective treadmills. We’ve put perfection up a pedestal that none of us can ever reach.”

* Obsession Is Natural By Kobe Bryant

* Do What You’re Doing: It sounds trite. But it draws your attention to the self-defeating inner resistance that often underlies challenging tasks.

* Mental Models: “Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.”

* How to Not Believe Your Ultra-Persuasive Rationalizations: “We have to train in how we respond to the fear, so that we don’t collapse.”

* Resistance Thrives in Darkness: “Resistance’s most diabolical trick is that it masquerades so convincingly as our own voice.”

* The Best Investment You Can Make: “Take a moment to get to know your family just a little better. Because once they are gone, you are the one who will have to tell their stories.”

* Why Study Philosophy? To Challenge Your Own Point of View: “You need to be a citizen in this world. You need to know your responsibilities. You’re going to have many moral choices every day of your life. And it enriches your inner life.”

* On Success and Obsession: “This is the best thing you will read today. On what makes people successful and why obsessive interest may be the most important factor of all.”

*Lessons From Journaling: “If you don’t reread what you write, what’s the point? When you reread you get perspective… you see patterns… you gain insight.”

* Goal Setting: “The goal updating never ends, but it can only help.”

* The Common Denominator of Success: “The common denominator of success — the secret of success of every man who has ever been successful — lies in the fact that he formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.”

* How to Make Life More Pleasurable: “When pleasures are more occasional, they’re more pleasurable, and that’s reason enough to limit how often we indulge in them.”

* The Most Important Forces Shaping the World: “Each of these Big Things will have a profound impact on the coming decades because they’re both transformational and ubiquitous. They impact nearly everyone, albeit in different ways. With that comes the reality that we don’t know exactly how their influence will unfold.”

* The Best of Goethe’s Aphorisms: “Ingratitude is always a kind of weakness. I have never known men of ability to be ungrateful.”

* My Interview On The Substrand Podcast: I had a great time covering a wide range of topics.

* 13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings: “You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.”

* Quitting While You’re Ahead: “The right goals are obviously important … because some goals are more motivating than others.”

* Why I Write: “Writing is the ultimate test of whether your thoughts make sense or are merely gut feelings. Feelings about why something is the way it is don’t need to be questioned or analyzed in your head because they feel good and you don’t want to rock the boat.”

* 8 Rules to Do Everything Better: “The most important rules to grow your body and mind.”

* How To Develop Mental Toughness: “An expert’s guide to sticking it out through pain and suffering.”

* What Does It Mean To Be Tough?: “Toughness is experiencing something that is subjectively distressing, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take a thoughtful action that aligns with your core values.”

* A Sacred Space: “Leave your ego, leave your greed, leave your competitiveness with your rivals, leave your fear and your self-doubt and your lack of belief in yourself. In here, in this space where we work, there is no room for such stuff.”

* Personal Development Goals Worth Pursuing: “Until motivation is sold by the bottle, you can work on building it little by little.”

* Becoming a Morning Person: “You will likely start your day with more energy than before, improve your overall mood in the morning, and create some quality time for getting more accomplished in the day.”

* On Comparing Yourself to Others: “If you can’t compare yourself to others and you can’t compare yourself to your former self, what should you do? You should compare yourself to where you would expect to be in the ‘average’ state of the world.”

* Cross The Gap Before It Grows: “When you avoid something, it doesn’t merely remain unfamiliar. It becomes stigmatized in your mind. With each instance of avoidance, your inclination to avoid it grows.”

* Get Up! Begin Your Day: “I am rehearsing doing something I don’t want to do. I’m rehearsing doing something I’m afraid of. I’m rehearsing doing something that hurts.”

* Letter To My Younger Self: “You’re going to be part of something else. You’re going to be part of changing the women’s game. Of showing other girls who felt they didn’t belong that they do belong.”

* Why We Can Never Do Just One Thing: “We can’t expect to interact with any system without repercussions. Over time, even minor externalities can cause significant strain in our lives and relationships.”

* The Fast Track To A Life Well Lived Is Feeling Grateful: “At base, emotions are about the future, not the past. From an evolutionary standpoint, feeling pain or pleasure that can’t change anything would be a useless waste of the brain’s efforts. The true benefit of emotions comes from their power to guide decisions about what comes next.”

* The Surfer’s Secret to Happiness: “If you added up the seconds that a good surfer actually spent riding the waves, it would amount to only the smallest fraction of an entire life. Yet surfers are surfers all the time.”