Author : Mark Manson
Good values are :
- Reality based
- Socially constructive
- Immediate and controllable
Some examples :
- Honesty
- Innovation
- Vulnerability
- Standing up for oneself
- Standing up for others
- Self respect
- Curiosity
- Charity
- Humility
- Creativity
Bad values are :
- Superstitious
- Socially destructiv
- Not immediate or controllable
Some examples :
- Dominance through manipulatipon or violence
- Indiscriminate fucking
- feeling good all the time
- Being liked by everybody
- Always being the center of attention
- Not being alone
- Being rich for the sake of it
Honesty is a good value because it’s something you have complete control over, it reflects reality and it benefits over.
Good, healthy valures are achieved internally. Something like creativity or humility can be experienced right now. You simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience it. These values are immediate and controllable.
Bad values are generally reliant on external events. Flying a private jet, being told you are right all the time, owning a house in the bahamas. While sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control and often require socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.
What are the values that you prioritize above everything else, and that therefore influence your decisions ?
Instead of looking to be right all the time, we shpould be looking at how we are wrong. Being wrong opens up to the possibility of change, brings opportunity of growth.
Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lifes also ends up being the most formative and motivating.
Manson’s law : Work expends so as to fill up the time available.
The narrower and rarer the identity you chose for yourself the more everything will seem to threaten you, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.
How to be alittle less certain of yourself
- What if I am wrong ? 4
- What would it mean if I were wrong ?
- Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and the others ?
Just as one must suffer physical pain to get better, same thing with emotional pain
Delineation between two people’s responsibilities for their own problems is crucial
Denial of death by Becker
- Humans can imagibne themselves in hypothetical situations
- We have 2 selves, the physical selve (eats, snores, poops), second self is our conceptual self, our identity or how we see ourselves
