Fault and responsibility are different. You take responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, even if it was not your fault. In a relationship you cannot take responsibility for someone else (victims and saviours). Men like to feel needed.
TV + media gives us images from 99.999% - the tail end of the bell curve. Side effect of this is that if you don’t fit into that tail end you think your life is bad and not worth living.
Related question: why do you have to be great at something? When you get there, you won’t be happier.
Incidently, the process of getting great comes from
- doing something that you’re willing to put in the hours doing
doing something that you love, for the same of it, and not with money and success as the end goals.
- That’s what is so good about spending a good length of time pursuing excellence in a field. With excellence comes rewards, but the only way to reach excellence is to not do it for the reward. Similar themes in Chop Wood, Carry Water
We always have problems and always will have problems, and we get happiness from solving these problems. After that comes new problems. It’s a cycle. But at the point you have no problems, you are listless and unhappy. You need problems to work through. You just get to choose your problems.
You look back from today on you of five years ago and you feel like the you of today has progressed so much further than that person. In five years the same thing will happen on the you of today.
We don’t know what makes a good experience and what makes a bad experience when we are in one. Some of the best experiences sucked at the time. They were painful and not fun but you would never trade them out, or wish you hadn’t done them.
The most meaningful experiences involve struggle and aren’t easy, like raising a child, living in a strange land by yourself, doing a hard degree.
Action doesn’t come from motivation. It’s a loop where action leads to motivation that leads to action and so on. So if you are not motivated, start with something, then you will be motivated. (same principle as 1 pushup, 200 words of crap)
The people who become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they are obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. That they are mediocre. That they are average. And that they can be so much better.
identify yourself by as little as possible
there aren’t ‘gym people’. There are just people who go to the gym, and sometimes they make a habit of it. These people miss days too.
there aren’t ‘morning people’. There are people who usually get up early. But if you define yourself as a morning person, you restrict yourself to not working late becase “I’m not productive then”.