Notes

Amazon (Link)

My life changed dramatically from August 2019 to August 2020. This book helps explain why: I started to follow the principles in this book without even realizing it. Although I read this book in August 2020, it almost serves as a manual for someone wanting to change. Would highly recommend it if you have an open mind and want to create change in your life.

Introduction

• The only way to attract the love you want is to love and embrace your self.
• “I am made of the same stuff as everything else in the world. I am the same as the oak leaf and the earthworm and the sky beyond. It is all one thing, and I am a part of it”
• What is creativity? Creativity is next to love. It is simply endless experimentation without judgment or criticism. In a word: play. We are at play all the time, so is everything in the universe
• Big 3 = Love, Creativity, Intention
• When we are scared or sad, we try to distance ourselves from the experience rather than feel it, resonate with it, love it. We do not feel what we feel. We do not try to tell the truth about our feelings to others

• Answer two questions: (1) How do I live at peace with myself? (2) How do I live in harmony with the people around me?
• We are at our best when we are doing what we did as a kid.
• Every aspect of reality is sacred.
• Fear cannot be controlled. Since it is already there, it is too late to change it. Better to flow with it – to let it be – and put your energy into figuring out what you need to do.
• Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change those I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference.
• The secret of happiness is knowing that there are some things you can control and some things you cannot.
• Stoic Philosophy: live in harmony with the way things are.
• In order to change things, you must first embrace them the way they are.

Five Lessons of Conscious Living

1. Seek your true self.
2. Let go of the uncontrollable.
3. We are all made up of the same thing.
4. Life is fullest when we’re most true to ourselves.
5. Life reaches its full potential when we bring forth our creative desires and the treasures which we have been blessed with and act on them in the world.

• Put space between you and your thoughts.
• You are already a spiritual being.
• Beautiful line: “I had spent so much of my life having opinions and defending my point of view: now I realized that they were all exactly the same, just places where I glued my foot to the floor and limited my ability to dance.”
• You are supported by so many different people. We do not often pause to acknowledge the person who makes your sandwich, the person responsible for the tire on our cars, or the person responsible for making the cup of coffee… but when we do notice them, when we do become grateful for them, life becomes better. We feel more connected to ourselves and the world around us.
• Identify the fear in negative emotions.
• He asked… “What is the purpose of my life?” He found his answer: to expand in love and creativity every day and to assist those who are interested to expand in their ability to be more loving and creative.
• Knowing purpose gave him instant checkpoint for evaluating any action

• To find your purpose, ask yourself questions like:
  • What do I most love to do?
  • What could engage me so deeply I’d never want to retire?
  • What am I really about?
  • What would be a purpose so grand that it could express itself through everything I do, from shoveling snow to making love to sitting on a bus?
• Fear is beyond our control. So if we cannot control it, the only sane alternative is to relax into the pure acceptance of it.
• “You are a distinct portion of the essence of God, and contain part of God in yourself.”
• We choose how gently we get our lessons by how open we are to learning. Life teaches us with a sledgehammer if we refuse to pay attention.
• We are shaped more by our choices than by our genes or past history.
• At the bottom of our problems is something we’re afraid to face. In order to face our problems…
  • Look for a feeling you are not facing
  • Look anyplace you are not facing the truth
  • Look at agreements you are not keeping
• We are either committed 100% or not committed at all.
• If you think you are your past, you give power of your choice to do anything outside your control. The past has already happened and you cannot do anything about it. What is real is this moment, and you have the ultimate choice when you’re in it.
• “There are fools who dance and fools who watch the dance. If I must be a fool, let me be a dancing fool.”
• You are faced with the same question dozens of times throughout the day: do I tell the truth or not?
• When we open our mouths to communicate something of emotional significance, we speak with one of two intentions:  the intention to be (1) right or (2) in harmony.
• Start a conversation with, “Isn’t it great how easy our lives become once we take responsibility for them?”
• 85% of our messages to children are negative – “Don’t!” “Stop!” “How could you?” When we shift to love, our messages come through much deeper.
• Paradox of self esteem: We can only give to others effectively when we love ourselves deeply. We can only love ourselves deeply only when we contribute to others fully. It’s like breathing: if you breathe all the way in, you can breathe all the way out.
• Ask yourself: “Can I love myself unconditionally? If I can love myself, I open the possibility of loving others the same way. If I cannot love myself, there is no possibility of loving others.”
• “Love is the antidote to fear. Fear pulls us into contraction but love allows us to expand again. When we don’t know how to love ourselves, we live in that state of contraction permanently. Fear is not only a fist around stomachs; it grips out hearts as well. Loving ourselves is the only way out of the grip of fear.”
• “When I stopped lying to myself and other people, the music started again inside of me.”
• If you wake up in the morning and you do not feel good about yourself, look for where you are out of integrity. Look for where you’re not being honest with yourself or someone else. Look for agreements you haven’t kept. Fix these however you can and notice the positive feelings return to yourself.
• When you were a child, you learned a personality to get your needs met. To survive and prosper in a family, you adopted the social masks that worked in that particular time and place.
• Many of our self-esteem problems are not about us personally.
• Each time we take an action, we strengthen the motivating force behind the action. For example, it is easier to work out the 20th time than the first.
• Each time you go through a big transition in your life, you break through into the unknown. You are outside your normal box. When these expansions happen, self-esteem issues come to the surface. Part of you wants to break through into the unknown, into a higher version of yourself. Part of you wants to stay in the comfort zone, the zone of the known.
• “Fear is excitement without the breath” –Fritz Perls
• The ultimate healing move is to love your fear conditionally.
• You can love yourself for hating yourself.
• If you are expressing your creative potential, you get to feel good about yourself. If you are not, you don’t. “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” (!!)
• People working to express their creativity feel good about themselves whether they are rich or poor.
• Do some creative work every day to keep the pipes oiled
• Throughout a two hour lunch, Picasso’s hands were never idle. He doodled, sketched, and drew. Keep creativity flowing, don’t worry about the outcome. 
• Put serious focus into a few projects
• Questions to ask yourself:
  • “What are the top four or five goals in your life?”
  • From a future perspective, “Is this what I really wished I had done?”
• If you really want to feel intimate with someone, say something authentic about your feelings when you feel them – speak the truth of fear and anger as well as hurt.
• “Polite” / PC culture makes so many people sad because we have been brainwashed to overlook the obvious signs of feelings, to pretend they are not there.
• Questions to ask when you’re not feeling good:
  • Where am I out of integrity?
  • What feelings am I denying?
  • What truths am I hiding?
• To be “in alignment” means feeling and handling our fear, expressing the creativity that is within us

• You’ve got to go all in if you wish to succeed because without total commitment, you are fooling yourself.
• You are already getting what you’re committed to.
• When the room lights are off, how much inner light is still on?
• Be a Leveler – someone who knows that having a good time and helping others have a good time is what life’s all about. Levelers choose love over creating melodramas based on fear.
• You’re either in one of two camps: “What Can I Get?” or “What Can I Do To Help?”
• Trying to get other people to love us – when we don’t think we’re loveable – is like a dog chasing its own tail.
• Don’t know how to love yourself? Love yourself for not knowing exactly how to love yourself.
• If you are authentic with yourself, you’ll stay in a naturally good mood as you walk around the world. If you tell the authentic truth, you’ll have clear relationships with others. If you don’t, things will get out of control quickly.
• Under all major messes is a truth that didn’t get told, a truth that would have taken about 10 seconds to tell.
• If you lead with appreciation – actually start conversations off with appreciations throughout the day – you’ll create a field of positive energy around you wherever you go.
• On listening: Breathe while other people are speaking. Pause briefly after they finish before you rush in with your point of view. People like it when you give them an informal summary of what they’ve just said.
  • “If I understand what you’re saying, you…”
  • “Let me see if I’ve got what you mean…”
• Simple rule to follow: do what you say you’re going to do. Don’t do what you say you’re not going to do.
• Say something authentic every hour
• Speak an appreciation once an hour
• “When you reach out to touch another person, you are touching the whole universe. You are the universe touching itself. The universe is a whole, and it also has individual parts. Although we may think of ourselves as individual parts, we are always in relationship to the wholeness of ourselves, others, and the world around us.”
• When we think of “the world,” we are really just thinking of our relationships
• The only hope for genuine growth comes from taking responsibility for everything we’ve previously claimed victimhood for.
• We create the exact situations we complain about most
• Gay’s belief: monogamy is the only path that works. Everything else is complicated and requires so much time to process. Impossible to be in integrity with all parties involved. Little energy after for creativity.
• We lose sexual interest in people whom we lie. As long as we speak the truth, we are contributing to a healthy sexual environment as well as a healthy environment in general
• There is only one intention that brings ultimate sexual fulfillment: to celebrate the essence of your partner and yourself through lovemaking
• William James (founder of Psychology) believes his greatest discovery: one can change the outer circumstances of one’s life by changing one’s thoughts
• When we are expanding our consciousness in love and awareness and gratitude, our goals seem to manifest quickly, as if by magic (explains why so many synchronicities happened in San Diego from Sept-Dec 2019)
• Few minutes of visualization every day better than once a week for an hour (same as exercise and meditation)
• The moment you love things the way they are, they are not the way they were any longer. Now they’ve been bathed in love
• If we are equal with all that is, we support the universe and the universe supports us. When we relax into the support that is happening all around us, we can be carried faster to our destination

Link (Amazon)

A well-written autobiographical account of Dan’s journey with meditation. The author’s job (newscaster) gave him the ability to talk directly to many high profile individuals – like the Dalai Lama, Paris Hilton, Eckert Tolle, Deepak Chopra, and Mark Epstein… among many others. The stories are worth the price of admission. Would recommend this to anyone who “doesn’t have time to meditate” or is skeptical of the practice in general. These notes won’t do the book justice.

• When you’re cut off from your emotions, they often manifest in your body (in the form of illness)
• Easy to be judgemental of religion if you’re not brought up in it – for example, I had sweeping, uninformed generalizations about religious people
• Buddhism = more of a philosophy than a religion
• The Buddha embraced the concept: “nothing lasts – including us. We and everyone we love will die. Fame fizzles, beauty fades, continents shift… We suffer because we get attached to people and possessions that ultimately evaporate.”
• We have three habitual responses to everything we experience: we want it, reject it, or zone out.
• Tara Brach method for applying mindfulness: RAIN. R = Recognize. A = Allow. I = Investigate. N = Non-identification
• “How often are we waiting for the next pleasant hit of… whatever? The next meal or the next relationship or the next latte or the next vacation, I don’t know. We just live in anticipation of the next enjoyable thing that we’ll experience. I mean, we’ve been, most of us, incredibly blessed with the number of pleasant experiences we’ve had in our lives. Yet when we look back, where are they now?” –Joseph Goldstein
• Hedonic adaptation – when we get accustomed to good things, we have a new baseline for normal (the rockstar who gets accustomed to the crazy life, the rich person who gets accustomed to the mansion, etc)
• Planning is helpful, but if you find yourself ruminating about a problem for the seventeenth time, ask… “Is this useful?”
• Until we look directly at our minds, we don’t really know “what our lives are about.”
• Benefits of meditation:
  • Reduced level of stress hormones
  • Boosted immune system
  • More awareness and compassion
• “Most of one’s own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.” –Dalai Lama
• Practicing compassion appears to help your body handle stress in a better way.
• The same pleasure centers light up in the brain when we receive a gift as when we donate to charity.
• Nonattachment is the key to balancing ambition and equanimity. Striving is fine as long as you understand the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t focus on variables you can’t control, you can focus on the ones you do.
• “The most important thing to me is probably, like, being kind and also trying to do something awesome.” –Robert Schneider

Link (Amazon)

A compilation of scientists, investors, psychologists, writers, and other geniuses were asked: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Their answers blew my mind. Thirty-eight concepts are listed in these notes, but there are close to 200 in the entire compilation. The book lives up to its title – by reading it, you actually will be smarter.

1. Science’s Marketing Problem: Science has succeeded in research. But they have failed when it comes to educating the public. In the United States, 40 percent believe our human species is less than 10,000 years old.

2. Uniquely Similar: If you’re reading this, you’re a human being. That makes you the same as every person who reads this. Yet, simultaneously, you have differences with the next person who reads this.

3. Multiple Causality: Our human brain works in a way we see one cause for an action. The ball hits the racket. But there are often multiple causes for a single action. When an apple falls, is it because its stem withers, it dries up, grows heavier, or because the wind shakes it?

4. Control Your Spotlight: There is more information than ever before. When information is abundant, the ability to focus on the important stuff is difficult. Can you effectively put your spotlight (or focus) on the important information? You’ll be far ahead of most.

5. The Focusing Illusion: We are awful at imagining future scenarios. We focus on the distinctive aspect. Example: we believe if we won the lottery we’d be happy. We would be, for a short time. But this extreme joy would likely subside.

6. Uncertainty of Science: “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.” “Scientifically proved” is an oxymoron. Science builds on previous knowledge. Newton improved Kepler, Einstein improved Newton.

7. The Nominal Fallacy: Just because something has a name, doesn’t mean we actually understand it. That word can then take on a life of its own. For example: a scientific “law” and “theory” do not mean what “laws” and “theories” typically mean.

8. Black Swans: People are bad at assessing probability. We overestimate rare but shocking events (terrorist attacks) but underestimate the quiet and insidious ones (eating a donut).

9. Distributed Systems: We often think of ourselves as one. We have one mind and one body. But we fail to think of the system we are a part of. Just like an ant contributes to the ant colony, what role do each of us play in a larger network (Internet, our corporation, society)?

10. Failure Creates Success: We can learn just as much from experiments that don’t work than ones that do. Embracing negative results leads to success.

11. Holism: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

12. Shifting Baseline Syndrome: We must make sure we’re taking inventory of when we begin measuring the data.

13. PERMA: Measure your life based on five qualities:

(1) Positive Emotion 

(2) Engagement 

(3) Positive Relationships

(4) Meaning and Purpose

(5) Accomplishment

14. Structured Serendipity: To cultivate curiosity, vary what you learn and vary where you learn it. New associations will leap out to you.

15. The Kaleidoscopic Discovery Engine: Many incredible inventions were invented simultaneously and independently. Newton and Leibniz invented calculus at the same time. Darwin and Wallace for evolution. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray for the telephone.

16. Cognitive Load: The modern world feeds us more information than ever. However, brain researchers believe our working memory has a maximum capacity of just three or four bits of information at a time.

17. Externalities: When you just go about your business, it may have unintended side effects. For example, due to busy roads during rush hour, London and Singapore implemented congestion charges.

18. Duality of Humans: We are both brilliant and stupid at the same time, capable of inventing wonders and still capable of forgetting what we’ve done.

19. The Only Constant Is Change: Change is the law. Stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in nature. When we want things to stay the same, we’ll always end up playing catch up. Go with the flow.

20. Different Lenses: We assume the way we see the world is the way everyone else does (or should). But everyone is looking at the same facts with a slightly different picture.

21. The Umwelt: Different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. The bloodhound has 200 million scent receptors in his nose. If the human swapped places with the bloodhound, we would be shocked at how rich the smells of the world actually are.

22. Bottom Up: Nobody created these with any idea of what they would eventually become. Examples: language and the Internet. 

23. Constraint Satisfaction: To be more creative, limit constraints. This is how detectives crack their cases (by treating each clue as a constraint). This is how you choose what to wear in the morning (using each piece of clothing as a constraint). A key to problem-solving.

24. The Flynn Effect: The world has gotten objectively smarter by as much as three IQ points per decade over successive decades since the early twentieth century.

25. The Pareto Principle: 20% of the actions are responsible for 80% of results. The richest or busiest or most connected participants in a system will account for much, much more wealth or activity or connectedness than average. 

26. The Personality/Insanity Continuum: We are all very far from optimal mental health and we are all more or less crazy in many ways.

27. Brain Fitness: We must workout to remain physically fit but how can we keep our brain fit? Extensive research shows that people can improve cognitive function and brain efficiency through simple lifestyle changes, like incorporating memory exercises.

28. Collective Intelligence: Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon. By each doing one thing and getting good at it, then sharing and combining the results through exchange, people become capable of doing things they do not even understand (like creating a pencil).

29. Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence: You cannot prove a new technology does no harm because if you fail to find the harm, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

30. Path Dependence: Something that seems normal today is often only a result of something that made sense at the time it was created. For example, the QWERTY keyboard was created in the 1890s to slow down the typists so the typewriter wouldn’t get stuck.

31. Duality (Physics): Two radically different theories may both be correct. Typically, we think: perhaps my argument is right and yours is wrong or vice-versa. However there’s also a third option: maybe our opposing arguments are true (dual) depending on our perspective.

32. Entanglement: In quantum physics, two particles are entangled when a change in one particle immediately reflects a change in the other – even though they are physically far apart.

33. Time Horizons: He who thinks the longest wins. Line workers focus on tasks that can be completed in a single shift, managers devote their energy to thinking in six month frames, CEOs think about goals on a yearly basis.

34. The Einstellung Effect: We attempt to solve problems based on pursuing solutions that have worked for us in the past instead of evaluating and addressing the new problem in its own terms.

35. Homo Sensus Sapiens: Human beings are animals that both feel and reason. We tend to be overconfident in our rational abilities and tend to underrate our instincts. But we have the capacity for both – natural responses as well as sophisticated planning.

36. Confabulation: When we use stories to explain why we take actions we do not understand. People named Dennis or Denise are more likely to be dentists. When asked why they became a dentist, it is unlikely they will say because it sounds like my name, but that might be the reason.

37. Life As A Side Effect: Birds do not have wings so they can fly. We do not have eyes so we can read. Instead, eyes and wings and the rest of life’s wonders come about as a side effect of life itself.

38. The Veeck Effect: Whenever someone adjusts the standards of evidence in order to favor a preferred outcome. Named after Bill Veeck, a baseball owner who would adjust the fences in the ballpark to favor his own team.

Link (Amazon)

For anyone who wants to become the greatest version of themselves. A classic. So many worthwhile examples. You’ll probably end up inspired after reading this book.

• If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes/quality of life that’s below what you deserve
• It is a choice to choose to be more joyful or more fun or more confident or have more peace of mind.
• Ultimate Success Formula: (1) Decide what you want, (2) Take action, (3) Notice what’s working or not and (4) Change your approach until you achieve what you want.
• The Niagara Syndrome: When you jump on the river without ever deciding where you want to end up. If you’re directed by your environment instead of your values… this describes you
• Success is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is often the result of experience. Experience is often the result of bad judgment.
  • When people succeed, they tend to party; when they fail, they tend to ponder… which leads them to make new insights that will help them succeed
• Remember that a truly committed decision is the force that changes your life. It’s a power available to any moment if you just decide to use it.
• What you link pain and pleasure to will shape your destiny.
• If you don’t have a plan for your life, someone else does. Everyone is trying to control your time and attention.
• Anything that you want that’s valuable requires you to break through some short term pain to get long term pleasure
• Kaizen – never-ending improvement
• Beliefs to have to change quickly:
  • I can change now.
  • I’m responsible for my own change, not anyone else.
• He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how (Nieztsche)
• One of the best ways to interrupt someone’s pattern is to do something they don’t expect (snaps us out of the automatic programming)
• Your brain can’t tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and reality.
• We can condition any behavior within ourselves if we do it with enough repetition and emotional intensity
• Focus on where you want to go, not what you fear
• If there are things you need to accomplish but you can’t get yourself to do it, it just means you need to change your state.
• Many of our beliefs are due to the words we have chosen… meaning our words hold incredible power (choose wisely!)
• Use words like “passionate,” “outrageous”, “spectacular”
• “I have to do this” can become “I get to do this”
• You’re never “stuck,” you may be a little frustrated but you’re never stuck.
• The metaphors we use shape how we feel. 
  • For example: “Mother Earth” makes it seem like the Earth is someone we should protect
• Associate common occurrences with positivity. Use linking.
• You don’t need a special reason to feel good. You can simply decide to feel good right now.
• Our imagination can make things ten times more intense than it actually is in real life
• All communication is either a loving response or a cry for help.
• The secret to living is giving
• Your current conditions do not reflect your ultimate potential but rather the size and quality of goals in which you are currently focusing 
• It’s not just setting a goal that matters, but the quality of life you experience along the way.
• People who succeed on a massive level have one thing in common: persistence
• You need to experience the feeling of achieving your top one year goals in each of the four categories at least once a day (personal development, career/business/economic, toys/adventure, contribution)
• Actionable advice from Tony: First, get your list of your top four one year goals. Second, get clear on your why. Third, develop a ritual of reviewing your goals and rehearsing the joy of their achievement daily for ten days. Fourth surround yourself with role models and those who can help you develop a plan that will guide you making it real.
• “Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters” –Nathaniel Emmons
• The leader’s path is one of balance (dichotomy of leadership, Jocko Willink)
• “Miss a meal, but don’t miss your reading” –Jim Rohn
• If someone is doing better than us, it’s simply because they have a better way of evaluation
• “Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance” –Bruce Barton
• The only way for us to have long-term happiness is to live by our highest ideals, to consistently act in accordance with what we believe our life is truly about.
• Nothing has to happen for you to feel good. You can choose to feel good right now for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
• Most of us have created numerous ways to feel bad, and only a few ways to truly feel good. It should be the opposite.
• Learned helplessness – when you feel like life is unfair so you just give up your power of creating a compelling future
• Tony’s rule for confidence: “If I decide to be confident, then I’ll feel that way toward anything and my confidence will help me succeed.”
• Tony’s rule for friendship: “If you’re a friend, then you absolutely love a person unconditionally, and you’ll do anything you can to support them.”
• “Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.” –Oliver Wiendall Holmes
• Reading expands your references for what is possible
• Stand guard at the doors of your mind to make sure what you’re allowing to enter it will enrich your life
• Tony visited many different churches to get an idea and appreciate all people’s spiritual beliefs
• Any limits you have in your life are the result of your limited references.
• “The best effect of fine persons is felt after we have left their presence.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters – one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.” – John F. Kennedy
• We are not our bodies.
  • Uses the example of visiting a morgue. Looking at people who have recently died. 
• “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” –Wayne Dyer
• Optimists Club Creed
  • To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. 
  • To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet. 
  • To make all your friends feel that there is something in them. 
  • To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true. 
  • To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best. 
  • To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. 
  • To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. 
  • To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile. 
  • To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others. 
  • To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.
• John Wooden’s Seven Point Creed
  • 1. Be true to yourself.
  • 2. Make each day your masterpiece.
  • 3. Help others.
  • 4. Drink deeply from good books.
  • 5. Make friendship a fine art.
  • 6. Build shelter against a rainy day.
  • 7. Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.
• Who is a hero? A hero is a person who courageously contributes under even the most trying circumstances; a hero is an individual who acts unselfishly and who demands more from himself or herself than others would expect; a hero is a man or woman who defies adversity by doing what he or she believes is right in spite of fear.
• Become a people builder – build up everyone you meet. Acknowledge strangers with a smile. Give sincere compliments to others.
• Strive for balance over perfection (similar to consistency over perfection)
• Live a life of positive expectancy, knowing that everything that happens in your life benefits you in some way. Know that you are guided along a path of never-ending growth and learning, and with it, the path of everlasting love.

Link (Amazon)

This book takes a novel approach: take the people who have lived the longest and ask them for advice on how to live. In sum, more than 1,200 elders (or “experts”, as the author calls them) were interviewed. Much of the advice in this book is intuitive. But the way the author weaves personal accounts with life lessons makes this piece a masterpiece. Also offers advice for interviewing the elders in your own life. Thoroughly enjoyed.

On Happiness

• “Young man, you will learn, I hope, that happiness is what you make it, where you are. Why in the world would I be unhappy? People here complain all the time, but not me. It’s my responsibility to be as happy as I can, right here, today.”
• Life on this Earth is but a nanosecond. “And believe me it came so quickly I couldn’t understand. It came so quickly I didn’t know it was happening.”
• Each day is a gift. Each day has love, joy, and beauty that we miss.
• Happiness is a choice, not a condition. “My single best piece of advice is to take responsibility for your own happiness throughout your life.”
• Worry is an unnecessary barrier to joy and contentment. Worry takes place when we have nothing to actually worry about.
• “What possible difference did it make that I kept my mind on every little thing that might go wrong? When I realized that it made no difference at all, I experienced a freedom that’s hard to describe.”
• A fulfilling life without faith is a contradiction.
• Belief in God and engaging in religious practice are seen as a path to greater happiness in life.
• “I guess the main thing is love. Give love, let your kids and grandkids know you love them and their families. If I could anything differently in my life, I would be more compassionate about people in general.”

On Marriage

• Choosing a partner is perhaps the most important decision you will make. Make this decision carefully (it is better to not marry than to marry the wrong person).
• You are much more likely to have a satisfying marriage for a lifetime when you and your mate are fundamentally similar.
• Qualities people look for: sense of humor, making good money, good looking. What we actually should be looking for: similar core values.
• Be friends.
• Unless you’re sure about it, don’t do it. (Reminds me of Derek Sivers ‘hell yes or no.’)
• Your spouse should be the kid you most wanted to play with in the playground
• The only way marriage works is if both parties give 100%
• When you wake up in the morning, think, “What can I do to make his or her day just a little bit happier?”
• On problems/disputes:
  • Go somewhere you can talk – maybe a park or restaurant. Don’t settle disputes in your own home.
  • If you become terribly upset, write a letter to your spouse. Read it the next day and throw it away. It helps to write it out.
  • Ask “to which one of us is this more important?” Good way to settle conflict.

On Work

• Is more than money. It is a primary source of meaning and purpose in life. The way we gain a sense of self-worth and achievement and it’s a way to make connections with others.
• The elders strongly advise against choosing a career based on money.
• Does your work align with your personal values?
• Eudaimonia – happiness derives from the activity itself
• Not one person (out of more than 1,000 elders) said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want.
• “But if I work principally for the pleasure or fulfillment it gives me, my success is assured. There are few blessings greater than finding such work and keeping it.”
• Learned more from failures than successes. Play the game, don’t sit on the sidelines.
• “If you can’t have the job you love, honey, find something worthwhile about the one you’re in.”
• No matter what the task is, whether you like it or not, it’s very important to learn everything you can about what’s happening around you. Be present.
• If you hate a job, get really good at it. You probably won’t hate it as much.
• You can learn from everyone – not just the successful people but also toxic colleagues.
• Getting along well with others is a key life trait (empathy!!).
• Peer relationships, not hierarchical (even from the boss). Elders reject the idea that leadership emanates from an overseeing boss who knows best, instead, they believe leadership is about learning from everyone
• One elder believes his success is due to the following principle: take yourself down a peg (or two).
• The mirror vs. the window. The mirror – you are looking at yourself. The window – you are looking out at others.
• Work can be a miserable burden without purpose and autonomy.
• You should ask yourself: do I wake up in the morning looking forward to work?

On Parenting

• You are only as happy as your unhappiest child.
• Time spent is more important than any other factor.
• Among the saddest elders were those whose children were so deeply estranged from them.
• When there is a serious argument, the parent has to compromise more than the child. Parents have more to lose than the child.
• Leave your door open when for their friends so you know who they’re playing with and you know where they are and what they’re doing.

On Aging

• Just because you can’t do all the things you used to do, doesn’t mean you can’t grow.
• “Find the magic. The world is a magical place in lots of ways. To enjoy getting up in the morning and watching the sun come up. And that’s something you can do when you are growing older.”
• Being old is much better than we think it is.
• Many elders report a sense of serenity, a lightness of being, a sense of calm and easiness in daily life that was both unexpected and difficult to describe. This is similar to a child.
• Every age, every situation, presents a new opportunity.
• What you do for your health is critically important for your future. However the motivator should be not how long you’re going to live but how you’re going to live.
• Lower death anxiety with advancing age. Many experts expressed comfort with their own death.
• “If you go to heaven, how wonderful. But if you go to sleep, what’s wrong with that?”
• Greater networks of social involvement helps promote health and happiness.
• Around 150 of the 1200 live in senior living communities. With very few exceptions, they described the move from their home as one of their best decisions of their lives.
• Even at old age, have something you can look forward to doing every day.
• “You are freer than you can ever imagine yourself being,” said one 77 year old.

On Living Without Regrets

• Be honest. “Just one price– one just price.”
• Embrace new challenges, say yes to every opportunity. According to the elders, the greatest reward you can receive in your career is the opportunity to do more.
• Life is looking for opportunities to expand you.
• Not deciding is a decision.
• Taking risks led to fulfillment; cautiousness led to regrets.
• “People in their twenties and thirties get stuck in professions they don’t like because the material rewards are so great. By the time you get to be forty or fifty, I think some of the brighter ones are having second thoughts.”
• Little man syndrome – imagine sitting out on the beach. The water washes up on you and it says, “Little man, what happened to you? Look up, the Big Dipper doesn’t care how much money you made working for JP Morgan. It just doesn’t matter.”
• Even in a globally connected world, we sometimes forget just how big it is.
• All elders wished they traveled more.
• When your traveling days are over, they wish they had taken one more trip.
• Do it now. “Send flowers to the living, the dead will never see them.”

Something happened on Christmas Eve in 1914 in the trenches.

World War I.

During the Battle of Ypres.

And World War I was the most sickening of wars as far as I can tell. A world of death and destruction and fire and pain and mud. And suffering.

And as the British prepared for an attack that Christmas Eve, they heard the Germans – their enemy – across the way. And they heard the Germans laughing, singing Christmas carols. And eventually, the Germans called out, “Come on over, Tommy!” which was slang for a British soldier. And they said, “We won’t fire at you.” 

Eventually, the British cautiously started to head over. And the Germans came out and started to head over. They head toward each other and eventually they all met in no man’s land. When they got there, they talked and they laughed and they sang and they joked and they told stories… and the legend is that they even played some soccer.

And most important, at that moment, they saw each other as humans. As fellow human beings. And eventually, as the morning came on, they all went back to their trenches and when they got back to their trenches they put down their weapons. They sat there and they yelled jokes back and forth. And they didn’t fight.

And for a couple of days, there was peace. And the soldiers thought to themselves, what are we even fighting for? How did we end up here and why are we killing each other?

And these soldiers on both sides – the Germans and the British – realized that their supposedly monstrous enemy… they were just other men. Other men with different backgrounds and different cultures and different languages, but they realized that their enemy was just men – like them.

They realized they were all people.

On the third day, the Germans were ordered from High Command to shoot their machine guns. And so the Germans told the British what time they were going to shoot. And they said they were going to shoot high so the British should get low and take cover around that certain time to make sure nobody got hurt. And that’s what happened. The Germans shot high and no one got hurt.

And another couple of days of peace went by. 

But then an order came from the British headquarters and it said that anyone found fraternizing with the enemy would be court-martialed. If they were not fighting the enemy and they were found guilty of that, they would be executed.

And the generals got their way. They got what they wanted.

And that night, the war – the horrendous war on that patch of land – commenced again.

And the bombs and the mortars and the fire and bullets… they all came to extract their toll and destroy and maim and kill these men – on both sides.

And that is an awful end to a beautiful story. It takes that beautiful story and turns it into a nightmare.

But in that story, there’s a glimpse of hope.

The hope is that we, as human beings, can see other people as human beings.

And I know we can. And I know it’s not always easy, but we need to do this, on both sides of the trenches. 

And if you’re a protester looking at a police officer or looking at a National Guard soldier, please take a moment to remember that that police officer or that soldier is a son or a father or a mother or a daughter or a brother or a sister. Remember that that soldier or that officer is a person.

And if you are a police officer or you’re a soldier and you’re looking at a protester or even a rioter, please, please remember the same thing. That you are looking at a person. A person like you. A person with a family, a person with aspirations, a person with hope, a person with pain and sadness and joy and misery, a person with hate, and a person with love. A person like you.

Look, it can be easy to dehumanize others. And when we dehumanize, we separate people from who we are. From what we are. And it becomes easy to hate them because they are different from us. Well, I’m telling you: they are not that different.

The person you are looking at? That is a person.

And yes, they’re angry, and yes, they’re frustrated, and yes, they’re scared and they’re tired and they’re fed up, and they’re aggravated, and they’re full of potential. And they are deeply flawed.

In other words, they are a person – just like you.

Please remember that. Be safe out there.

And try to take care of one another.

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Police. Protesters. People. was posted on June 5, 2020 by Jocko Willink.