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Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy by Mo Gawdat
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What I realized was that I would never get to happiness as long as I held on to the idea that as soon as I do this or get that or reach this benchmark I’ll become happy.
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We do the same thing when we struggle to find happiness “out there,” when, in fact, happiness is right where it’s always been: inside us, a basic design feature of our species.
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For human beings, simply put, the default state is happiness. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time with a human fresh from the factory, an infant or toddler.
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they live in the moment, perfectly happy.
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Summon up a time when nothing annoyed you, nothing worried you, nothing upset you. You were happy, calm, and relaxed. The point is, you didn’t need a reason to be happy.
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Happiness is the absence of unhappiness. It’s our resting state when nothing clouds the picture or causes interference. Happiness is your default state.
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Parental or societal pressure, belief systems, and unwarranted expectations come along and overwrite some of the original programming. The “you” who started out happily cooing in your crib, playing with your toes, gets caught up in a flurry of misconceptions and illusions.
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If we were to picture it, the times when you’re unhappy are like being buried under a pile of rocks made up of illusions, social pressures, and false beliefs. To reach happiness, you need to remove those rocks one by one, starting with some of your most fundamental beliefs.
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Instead, we have the ability to unlearn and reverse the effects of what went wrong along our path.
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How did we let go of our birthright to be happy? The answer may surprise you: Perhaps that’s what we’ve always been trained to do.
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Success is not an essential prerequisite to happiness.
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being happy made people roughly 12 percent more productive and, accordingly, more likely to get ahead.2 And so: While success doesn’t lead to happiness, happiness does contribute to success.
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Many successful athletes, musicians, and entrepreneurs have achieved their success because they love what they do so much they become experts at it just because the activity itself makes them happy.
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At work, in our personal life, relationships or love life, whatever it is that we do, we should directly: Solve for Happy.
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Here’s some good news already: the very act of creating your Happy List makes for a very happy experience, so much so that, when you’re finished, you should feel energetic and refreshed.
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Happiness happens when life seems to be going your way. You feel happy when life behaves the way you want it to.
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Unhappiness happens when your reality does not match your hopes and expectations.
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Happiness Equation. Which means that if you perceive the events as equal to or greater than your expectations, you’re happy—or at least not unhappy.
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But here’s the tricky bit: it’s not the event that make us unhappy; it’s the way we think about it that does.
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Once the thought goes, the suffering disappears! When a rude person offends you, he can’t really make you unhappy, unless you turn the event into a thought, then allow it to linger in your brain, and then allow it to distress you.
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It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy.
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So here’s the $50 million question: If events remain as they are, but changing the way we think about them changes our experience of them, could we become happy simply by changing our thoughts? Of course! This is what happens all the time already.
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As much as we hate it, pain and the discomforts of life are useful!
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Once the pain is no longer needed, it naturally fades away. But that’s not the case with suffering.
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When we let it, emotional pain, even the most trivial kind, has the capacity to linger or resurface again and again, while our imaginations endlessly replay the reason for the pain. When we choose to let that happen, that’s when we overwrite our default for happiness and reset the preference for needless suffering. The vividness of imagination also allows us to magnify the suffering, if we choose to, by adding our own simulated pain: “I’m an idiot for hurting my friend. I’m not good for anything. I deserve to be punished and suffer.” The incremental layer of internal dialogue only leads to deeper and longer suffering by brooding over the story until it makes us miserable.
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We let our suffering linger as a form of self-generated pain.
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All the thinking in the world, until converted into action, has no impact on the reality of our lives. It does not change the events in any way. The only impact it has is inside us, in the form of needless suffering and sadness.
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Anticipating awful things in the future or ruminating about awful moments from the past is not the useful, instructive, and unavoidable experience of everyday pain. This prolonged extension of pain is a serious bug in our system because: Suffering offers no benefit whatsoever. None!
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Happiness starts with a conscious choice.
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Allow your thoughts to be affected by illusions and you’ll be stuck in the state of confusion. • Think negative thoughts and you’ll end up in the state of suffering (unhappiness). • Suspend your thoughts by having fun and you’ll find yourself in the state of escape. • Think positive thoughts and agree with the events of life and you’ll reach the state of happiness. • Rise above the clutter of thought, grasp life for what it truly is, and you’ll perpetually live in a state of joy.
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When you feel that life is against you and that you deserve to be miserable, you’re in the state of confusion.
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The endless cycles of incessant thoughts are there to serve our most basic instinct: survival.
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In the hostile environments our ancestors inhabited, they needed fight-or-flight responses to survive. The basic rules were these: It’s safer to mark something as a threat when it isn’t than to mark something as safe when it’s a threat. And it’s best to do that fast.
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Humanity’s original survival programming lingers today. When we assess an event, our brains tend to err on the side of caution.
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The original design of the human brain included features that ensured the survival of our species. Those same features have turned into blind spots that delude the way our brain operates today. Distracted, our brain rarely ever tells us the truth, and that constantly ruins our Happiness Equation.
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Often what feels like happiness actually isn’t!
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Biologically speaking, feeling good plays an important role as part of our survival machine.
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With no thoughts, we return to our default, childlike, state: happiness!
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By resorting to fun as an escape, we leave our Happiness Equation unresolved and ignore the core issues that make us unhappy. Fun, then, despite its short jolts of elation, truly becomes an inhibitor to genuine happiness.
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A wise use for fun is as an emergency off switch to allow for momentary intervals of peace so that you can get the voice in your head to chill, meanwhile interjecting some reason into the endless stream of chatter.
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An even wiser use for fun is when you actively schedule regular doses of healthy pleasures, which I define as pleasures that do not lead to hurting others or hurting you eventually.
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Happiness is all in a thought—the right thought—one that aligns with reality and solves the Happiness Equation positively.
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Those who reach joy are not only accepting of life as it actually is but are utterly immersed in it.
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They reach a state of uninterrupted happiness that I’ve come to call joy.1 I use the term joy loosely here because unfortunately the English language is not equipped with a term that describes this state accurately. Inner peace, stillness, calm—these are all close. Perhaps a mixture of all of them is the closest, but none of them alone captures the true meaning.
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If fun suspends your thoughts, and happiness arises when your brain agrees with the events of your life, then joy is when thoughts are no longer even needed because the analysis has ended, and the equation has permanently been solved.
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True joy is to be in harmony with life exactly as it is.
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You should never settle for anything less than joy.
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All you need to do is remember three numbers: 6-7-5. Here’s how this works. There are six grand illusions that keep you in confusion. When you use these illusions to try to make sense of life, nothing seems to compute. The suffering runs deep and lasts long.
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Next, seven blind spots delude your judgment of the reality of life. The resulting distorted picture makes you unhappy. Eliminate the six illusions, fix the seven blind spots—and stop trying to escape—and you’ll reach happiness more often than not.
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Put it all together and you have the Happiness Model: Bust the Grand Illusions Fix the Blind Spots Hang on to the Ultimate Truths
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But if you want your happiness to last, you must hang on to five ultimate truths.
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Part Two Grand Illusions 6 grand Illusions submerge us in confusion and hinder our ability to make sense of the world. Life becomes a struggle. Most attempts to solve the Happiness Equation fail because we use illusions as inputs, unable to see the world for what it is, and we wonder why life has to be so cruel. When we see through those illusions a weight is lifted, our vision clears, and happiness becomes a frequent visitor.
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Chapter Three That Little Voice in Your Head
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The Voice Is Not You If there is one thing that will change your life forever, it is recognizing that the voice talking to you is not you!
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vantage point is a prerequisite to perception; to observe something you need to be outside of it.
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When you believe that you are your thoughts, you identify with them. In other words, if you have a thought that seems naughty, you might think that you are naughty.
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What you do with those thoughts is up to you. You don’t have to obey.
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We start to narrate what we observe to help us make sense of things. As infants, we do that out loud; then, when it becomes socially awkward, we start moving the narration inside. From then on, it never stops.
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In the 1930s, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky observed that inner speech is accompanied by tiny muscular movements in the larynx. Based on this, he argued that inner speech developed through the internalization of out-loud speech. In the 1990s, neuroscientists confirmed his view;
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That voice inside your head truly is your brain talking, even though you’re the only one who can hear it.
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Thought engages to add an extra layer of protection when the brain plans ahead to keep you away from possible danger.
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decisions. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, explains this process brilliantly in his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He discusses the dichotomy between two modes of thought: “System 1” is a fast, instinctive, and emotional mode of thought; “System 2” is a slower, more deliberative, and more logical mode. Often in his book he cites examples of mistakes or quick inaccurate judgments made by System 1 that are corrected by System 2. The presence of these two systems is what leads to your sometimes having two voices in your head. They’re simply two modes of thought looking at the issue at hand from different perspectives and with varying skill sets, discussing it on the center stage of your head.
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The more something matters, the more incessant thought will be left out of it.
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Who is working for whom? You are the boss. You get to choose. This means you tell your brain what to do, not the other way around. Just as you are now instructing your brain to focus on the words on this page, you can always tell it what to focus on. You just need to take charge
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There are three types of thought that our brains produce: insightful (used for problem solving), experiential (focused on the task at hand), and narrative (chatter).
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both regions where this kind of useful thinking happens are very different from the regions where incessant thought occurs.
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Your brain produces thoughts, as a biological function, to serve you. And discovering that each of those types of thoughts happens in completely separate brain regions means that we can be trained to use one type more than the other.
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As per the Happiness Equation, the repetitive loop of thinking of an event, comparing it unfavorably to our expectations, leads to suffering. Our inability to take action triggers the recall of the thought over and over in an endless Suffering Cycle.
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Taking the best possible action, regardless of the result, is an obvious way to disrupt the cycle. Once an action is taken, our minds focus on the executional elements of what needs to be done, a different part of our brains is engaged, and our thoughts shift to monitor the result of the action rather than incessantly focusing on the same thought.
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Another way is to stop the thought from turning into suffering. This can be achieved by fixing our blind spots to ensure that the events are seen for what they really are, not what our brain makes them appear to be.
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Observe the Dialogue First, take your time to become very familiar with the beast you are taming. The best way to do that is to sit quietly and observe what is going on up there as often as you can. This technique is called “observing the dialogue.”
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Here’s the best part: as soon as you master the art of observing an idea and letting it go, your mind will quickly run out of topics to bring up.
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Observe the Drama No one’s able to let go of every thought. Occasionally an idea will stick. You’ll recognize the signs: you’ll be fully absorbed in thought and less aware of the rest of the world around you. When you notice this happening, this is your chance to learn to observe the drama.
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The more my thoughts lingered, the angrier I became, until one day I learned to observe the drama. Instead of focusing on the noisy kids, I learned to observe the thought that triggered my anger. Then I asked myself, Why am I having these heated emotions? Why do I get this angry? Why do the screams of children annoy me where loud music doesn’t? (I’m a serious heavy metal fan. It doesn’t get any noisier than that.)
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Start observing the drama. The simple act of trying to trace the emotion to the thought that caused it gives you the breather you need in order to cool down.
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Bring Me a Better Thought Once a negative thought takes hold, it can become hard to dispatch. An untamed brain needs a thought to cling to. And often enough, removing a thought leaves behind a vacuum that gets quickly filled by a thought from the same mood spectrum—another negative thought. This is why when you are in a dark place it can seem like the whole world is going to collapse. You tend to be consumed by one negative thought after another. If only you could manage to break the cycle! Filling that vacuum with a happy thought ensures that there is no room for another negative one to come in.
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Your brain can be primed!
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You can prime your brain to focus on anything you want just by bringing it into consciousness.
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to just be happy. Remove the unhappy thought, replace it with a happy one, and let the rest take care of itself.
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As far as your unconscious mind goes, you can’t think of no suffering; you can think only of happiness. Instead of trying to think about not being at a job you dislike, think about being in another job altogether.
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Happiness is always found in the positive side of every concept.
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The easiest way to have a full arsenal of happy thoughts is to use your Happy List (from chapter
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A better way to utilize your Happy List is to use it proactively instead of defensively. Take your list out several times a day and focus right there.
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With practice, you can take this process a step further. You can learn to prime your brain with happy thoughts related to the topic it has been thinking negatively about. All you need to do is prearrange a set of questions that probe the positive side of any issue.
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Shut the Duck Up If you’ve been observing the dialogue for a while now you’ll anticipate what I’m about to say.
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This is also the case with your internal dialogue. One thing at a time is all that this magnificent machine can do.
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For the brain, multitasking is a myth!
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My recommended technique to shut up that quacking duck is to flood it with things that it can’t think about, evaluate, or judge—things it can only observe. Here’s how: Direct your attention outside yourself. Observe the light in the room, pay attention to whatever is on your desk, catch that smell of coffee percolating in the kitchen, notice the wood grain on the table, or listen to the distant sounds of cars in the street. Don’t let anything go unobserved.
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Alternatively, you can borrow from meditation techniques and turn your attention within.
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So much of your happiness depends not on the conditions of the world around you but on the thoughts you create about them.
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Chapter Four Who Are You?
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The illusion starts with a belief that you are your physical form. A layer deeper, you identify with a persona that is nothing like you (your ego), and then, at the deepest layer, you get deluded about your place in the world. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, who you really are is hidden beneath layers of illusions that should be uncovered, one by one.
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Then you’ll keep shedding layers until you reach the one that’s solid and real, the one that will withstand the tests of perception and permanence.
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The perception test is based on a simple subject-object relationship. If you are the subject able to observe objects around you, then you are not the objects you are observing.
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The permanence test, on the other hand, relies on a simple question of continuity. If a quality or a description that you can associate with yourself changes while you otherwise remain unchanged, then that quality isn’t you. If you were once a teacher and now you are a writer, then those are changing states and neither is the permanent you.
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You are not your body!
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Maybe you are your emotions, as in I am “in love.” That’s a funny one. Who were you before you fell in love? What if your love grows? Will there be more you? What if it stops? Do you vanish? You’re not your emotions.
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Who were you when you were two years old, before your belief systems developed? You’re not your beliefs.
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Our names change into nicknames and married names, but we remain unchanged. You’re not your name.
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fan of a certain football club. But those temporary states change too. You’re not the tribe you belong to.
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Okay, but who were you before you met Tom? You’re not your family tree.
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What if all the money were lost, would the former self-made millionaire not be you? You’re not your achievements.
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If the Rolls-Royce gets stolen, does the thief become you? You’re not your possessions.
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You are none of what you just observed. You are the observer. You are the one aware of all that is happening around you. I know it may sound disappointing, but you have never seen you. You are not to be seen. You are the one who sees.
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To reach the state of uninterrupted joy, you need to accept that everything in the physical world will eventually vanish and decay, but the real self will remain calm and unaffected.
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In trying to establish who we are not, we uncovered a lot of masks that we wear to create an identity. Those masks represent the next layer of the Illusion of Self. They can all be summed up in one word that has tormented mankind since the day we became a society. That word is ego.
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Those identity crises intensify in our teenage years, when our insecurities and pressure to fit in are at their peak. We get further and further away from our true nature and closer to the accepted nature of our peer group.
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Once we start wearing masks to reinforce our egos, we spend the rest of our lives playing roles.
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Many of us go down a sad path when we let our egos make us suffer.
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A Losing Battle Trying constantly to get approval for your chosen image is a losing battle because the real you isn’t what the ego pretends to be.
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First, others will rarely ever approve of your ego because they are more concerned with their own ego than with yours. The survival of their ego depends on comparing it with yours. For them to be right, you should be seen as wrong; when you’re less, they become more. Disapproving of someone else is the easiest way to feel superior. It doesn’t require the hard work needed to become better. It just requires thinking less of someone else.
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The second reason trying to get others’ approval will always fail is because they won’t be approving of you. They’ll be approving of your persona.
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They were all drawn in by the light of his genuine pure self shining through. You’ll never please everyone. Find those who like the real you and invite them closer. All others don’t matter to you.
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Be yourself no matter what they say.
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More important, Love who you are. The real you is wonderful and calm, just like Pooki.
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Undress. Drop all the other copies and love the real you. Bravo, Pooki!
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You live in a complex web of connections. Every single day, every step you take and every move you make impacts—even if in small ways—the life of everyone around you and perhaps occasionally the life of everything on this planet. This happens while every step
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This very intricate web of lives forces you to confront an unfamiliar concept: good is never all good, and bad is never all bad. The vantage point of the story may render a very different impression. And as we’ve just found out, there are countless vantage points.
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Everything is both good and bad. Or perhaps everything is neither.
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Good and bad are just labels we apply when our minds fail to grasp the comprehensive, never-ending movie spanning across the billions of lives and extending over all of time.
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Get real. You are not the star of the movie. Most of what happens around you isn’t about you at all.
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You are not the star of the movie!
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Chapter Five What You Know
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The Depth of Knowledge What matters most isn’t what you know, but how accurate your knowledge is. To know the wrong thing is worse than not to know at all. Correct?
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Every question you’ll ever ask will be governed by a refinement cycle that I call DDAA: Discovery, Debate, Acceptance, Arrogance.
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It’s all an endless loop of DDAA! Discovery leads to debate, then to acceptance, and on to arrogance—which is then diminished by new discoveries.
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The Breadth of Knowledge Even in the few instances in which we know something accurately, all that we know is truly insignificant compared to all that is out there to know.
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How much do you know about what’s going on in your friend’s life before you feel upset that he didn’t return your call? How much do you know about the hardship a shop attendant is enduring before you judge her for not smiling back at you?
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What’s Missing? It’s not just arrogance. Sometimes our knowledge is restricted at the most fundamental level, at the level of our senses and by the basic building blocks we use to form thoughts and concepts. Our Own Senses Are Limiting Even when it comes to our own senses, we’re arrogantly certain of what we observe, though it’s clear how little we can rely on our perceptions.
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Our Words Are Crippling Another fundamental limitation on our knowledge is to be found in the very building blocks we use to think and communicate. We use words to define concepts, but there’s no way words can encompass them fully.
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We truly don’t know that much after all.
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“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
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Be Wise to Be Happy Knowledge is the illusion that keeps us from seeing the reality behind all the other illusions because it makes us think, If we managed to get so far in life, then our knowledge can’t be all wrong.
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Your default state before you had any knowledge was happiness. As a matter of fact, false knowledge is the underlying reason for most unhappiness.
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Hanging on to false concepts is a bit like ostrich behavior: hiding your head in the sand, believing that you are safe while leaving yourself vulnerable to suffering. Not a clever strategy. So why do we do it? Because of ego.
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Life, however, sometimes needs to give you a nudge in order to alter your path. It uses a bit of hardship to lead you to something good.
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Sometimes when you stray off your track, life nudges you hard . . . and that’s not bad!
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Every moment of your life is neither all good nor all bad. When you clear your thoughts and see beyond the Illusion of Knowledge, you will realize that what Shakespeare wisely said is true: “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it
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Chapter Six Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?
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The first key to the Illusion of Time that I became fascinated by was that it’s so subjective on a personal level. Its passage feels different depending on the situation you’re
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It gets even more bizarre. The math indicates that in space-time, past, present, and future are all part of an integrated four-dimensional structure in which all of space and all of time exist perpetually
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So we are always positioned to experience the current slice of now, but even that is relative. According to Einstein, the speed at which you move affects your experience of time.
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Time isn’t moving; you’re the one who is moving through time.
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the more you know about time, the more you’ll appreciate that in reality it’s nothing like we think it is.
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Nothing about the way we individually experience time is absolute. Time changes for everyone.
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Time completely fails the test of permanence. Time is an illusion because, in an interesting way: Time completely fails the test of time!
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While I surely don’t advocate being late, slack, or lazy, I would ask you to consider the merits of being the master of the task instead of being the slave of the clock.
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Time is experienced very differently across human cultures. There may be a better way to deal with time than what we’re used to.
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Time as we understand it plays a big role in creating—and perpetuating—unhappiness.
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When you scrutinize the thoughts themselves, you’ll notice that very few of them have anything to do with the present moment. They’re almost always entangled in the past or busy predicting the future. That’s particularly true of unhappy thoughts. Almost all emotions anchored in the present moment, though, are happy (note that physical pain is not an emotion). Interesting, isn’t it?
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Happy emotions are mostly anchored in the present.
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Unfortunately for happiness, your brain is sold on the idea that the next moment is more important than the one we’re in. On the other hand, the moment that already passed by is more familiar—and therefore perhaps more comfortable—than this one right now. These biases of the brain are what move us all too easily into a state of confusion, ruminating on the past or bracing for an imagined future while neglecting to pause and live in the present, even though the present is all there really is.
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When we’re focused on the past or the future, we’re living in our thoughts, and not in reality.
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If you’re not in the here and now, then you’re simply in your head.
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Your Brain Is Addicted to Time If past and future thoughts make you unhappy and can lead you into wasting big parts of your life, then why is it so difficult to focus on the now? What is the defect in our design that makes it so hard to escape our preoccupation with the past and the future, even though it increases our suffering? It’s this: time is the ground from which thought itself is grown.
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Are you noticing that it might take you several minutes to describe what you observed in just a few seconds? The act of observation requires only simple awareness, but describing it introduces much lengthier thought processes. Still, because you’re limiting those thoughts to describing what you’ve just seen, they’re always in the present tense. They have no past or future timestamps, and as a result they’re smoother and calmer than they would otherwise be.
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two important features of awareness: we don’t need thoughts to be aware, just presence; and even when we do introduce thoughts, by focusing them on the present moment we become much less stressed.
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Events totally match your expectations when you observe the world as it is. How peaceful!
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Without time, the Suffering Cycle is interrupted at its inception. Remove time, and the original thought fails to arise.
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If you want to be happy, live in the here and now.
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Use Time: Don’t Let It Use You
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For the purposes of this conversation, let’s say that there are two types of time: clock time, which has some practical uses, and brain time, which doesn’t. Clock time has to do with a specific event positioned at specific coordinates in mechanical time. Thoughts associated with clock time are practical, actionable thoughts, such as I wonder how long it will take me to get to my doctor’s appointment. They lead to precise answers, such as That usually takes twenty-five minutes, but I’d better add another fifteen to account for rush-hour traffic. They don’t get complicated or layered with emotion, and they don’t linger.
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Brain time, however, tends to get caught up in thoughts about the past and the future. It gets lost in endless—and unlikely—scenarios of how an event in the future might turn out.
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As long as your thoughts are describing events in the present moment or are oriented toward clock time as a way of meeting your practical needs, you’re fine.
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But What if Now Isn’t Happy?
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Every time you examine your thoughts you’ll notice that whatever you’re upset about is rooted in a past you cannot change or a future that may turn out to be completely different from what you expect.
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In this very moment there is absolutely nothing wrong at all.
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Life is now and now is amazing.
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Chapter Seven Houston, We Have a Problem
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Taleb argues that our blindness with respect to randomness, particularly to large deviations, extends much further than our conscious awareness can even comprehend.
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Between black swans and butterfly effects, nothing is under your control.
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The Span of Your Control Before we jump into deeper water, I should highlight that it’s not my intention here to depress you. As any successful businessman will tell you, success (which in our case is happiness) doesn’t come from ignoring unpleasant realities. It comes from realism and objectivity in understanding life with all of its imperfections. Happiness comes from our ability to navigate such reality based on facts, not illusions.
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Which has to leave you thinking: is there anything ever under our total control? Yes, two things are: your actions and your attitude.
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was in a state of constant suffering, and it took me years of rejection, anger, and frustration to see the light and accept the truth: I wasn’t in control. When I realized that, I felt a ton of weight removed from my shoulders. My actions remained committed, but my attachment to outcomes completely vanished.
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Hindu concept of detachment, when you strive to achieve your goals knowing that the results are impossible to predict. When something unexpected happens, the detachment concept tells us to accept the new direction and try again. There is no sadness or regret, and no grief over the loss of control.
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That’s when I learned what I came to call committed acceptance. Take the responsible action first, then release the need to control.
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The beauty of committed acceptance is that it doesn’t take away from your chances of success. Quite the opposite: it’s not your expectation of success that drives results; it’s your diligent action that delivers them.
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In my personal life I make it even simpler: I plan, but I don’t attempt control beyond the span of the present moment.
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Your Attitude While actions are the visible levers of achievement, attitude is the true game changer.
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Through it all, arm yourself with the right attitude. As Oscar Wilde said: “It is all going to be fine in the end. If it is not yet fine, then it is not yet the end.”
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Thriving Out of Control There is nothing wrong with planning and trying to assume control.
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In algebra, when a parameter is irrelevant to the solution of an equation, we cancel it out. For example, If A+C=2B+C, it doesn’t really matter when solving the equation what the value of C is. A will always be equal to 2B regardless, so we treat C as if it doesn’t exist and solve the rest of the equation. C represents the parameters you can’t control.
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From time to time we may all face a hardship that is inescapable. If there’s nothing you can do to change your current circumstance, then cancel the surrounding environment out of your Happiness Equation and solve the equation by using the rest of your life. When life gets tough, some of us feel that we’ve lost the game and life has won. But life isn’t trying to defeat you. Life isn’t even a participant—the game is yours.
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Chapter Eight Might as Well Jump
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Admit That You’re Afraid Many people don’t realize the true extent of their fears, how deep and how wide they are. No problem can ever be solved until it is precisely identified, so the first step to dealing with your fear is to admit that you’re afraid.
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When you find it difficult to admit your fears, ask yourself a different question: Are you free? This question helped me uncover my fears one by one.
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Understand What Fear Is Every fear originates from a conditioned response.
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What are your fears? If you find it hard to admit them, that may be due to another overarching fear: the fear of facing your fears.
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In its purist form, fear is a defense mechanism that is triggered to warn you of proximity to harm. Fear alerts you so that you can take the actions necessary to avoid the potential of suffering pain, physical or psychological. But pain itself is just a mechanism also controlled by your brain.
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When you put your mind to it, you can overcome pain.
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With more to fear, your brain tries harder to keep you safe. As a result, the vicious cycle continues: more fear calls for more layers of protection.
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a hopeless attempt to keep you as far from harm as possible, your brain builds what it believes to be a safe model, an elaborate structure with a large number of scary scenarios to worry about and more barriers—fears—to defend you against them.
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The more we build it up, the more threatened we feel and the more weak spots we expose.
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There is no safe model. The harder you try, the more you will fail.
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Yoda, the wise Jedi master of Star Wars, sums it all up in one statement: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.”
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No! There are none. What keeps us alive and propels us forward are our actions, not our fears. Fear, if anything, paralyzes us. It blurs our judgment and blocks us from making the best possible decisions.
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There are no positive aspects to fear. It’s your actions and not your fears that keep you safe.
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The only thing life wants is to be experienced.
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The future will be better than you expect it to be. It always has been. You would not have been here if your present matched your past fears, would you?
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If you can afford the brain cycles to worry about the future, then by definition, you have nothing to worry about right now. Right now, you’re okay.
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The easiest way to short-circuit all of your brain’s fear games is this: Once you know what your fear is, commit yourself to facing it.
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Your brain’s inclination is to think about what might go wrong. That way it can plan ahead for threats and ensure your survival. Two more questions can help you shift your thoughts away from all the bad things that scare you to all the good things that await you, so you can take the big leap from your fear.
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What Is the Best-Case Scenario?
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The cost of doing nothing is often higher than the cost of facing your fear. And when things work out, the upside is absolutely worth the risk.
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Enough of your brain’s doomsday scenarios! Refuse to take them anymore. Live every minute of your life totally optimistic about the next moment. Face your fears, one by one, and wipe them out of existence. They were never real anyway.
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Learn to die before you die. It is time to face your fears.
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Part Three Blind Spots 7 blind spots affect the way our brain processes information and blur our perception of reality. To ensure our survival, the seven blind spots are combined with the brain’s tendency to be pessimistic. This interferes with our ability to solve the Happiness Equation, thus making us suffer needlessly.
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Chapter Nine Is It True?
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For millennia, our brains have been equipped with the seven incredible features I’ve just highlighted: filters, assumptions, predictions, memories, labels, emotions, and exaggeration.
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A Tendency to Be Grumpy
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On top of the blind spots, however, an overarching tendency persists: the tendency to be grumpy and push most of our thoughts way out of balance.
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The Inspection of Your Brain Let’s run your brain up on the lift and do two quick tests, Check and Track. Check
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Try to play Check as part of your daily life. In any situation you’ll notice that your brain has a tendency to spot what’s wrong and what can represent a threat.
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Only a lot less frequently will your brain pick up on what’s going right or what’s mundane. It’s a bit like our hunter friend translating the movement of a branch on a bush as tigers rather than birds.
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thoughts that get a tick mark on the positive side are Life is good to me; She’ll love me forever; I’m beautiful. Examples of thoughts that get a tick on the other side are I don’t like this job; Bad things always happen to me; He’s such an idiot; I’m fat. Now count the marks. Is your brain producing primarily optimistic thoughts or pessimistic, judgmental, or critical (negative) thoughts?
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Ample research has shown that we tend to think negative—self-critical, pessimistic, and fearful—thoughts more often than positive thoughts. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi uses the term “psychic entropy” to indicate that worrying is the brain’s default position.1
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But our bias to negativity isn’t limited to the sheer number of thoughts. We also tend to give greater weight to negative thoughts when we make decisions.
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people are more likely to make choices based on the need to avoid a negative experience rather than the desire to attain positive outcomes, a phenomenon known as “prospect theory.”
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We also dedicate more of our brain resources to negative information.
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This implies that we tend to remember negative traits more easily. As a result, we tend to recall negatives more often.
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Socially, we tend to offer more respect to those who are negative than to positive folk.
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We even have more negative words in our vocabulary (the building block we use to construct our thoughts)—62 percent of all emotional words in the English dictionary being negative.
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They’re clearly reflected in the design of the brain. For instance, the amygdala uses approximately two-thirds of its neurons to detect negative experiences, and once the brain starts looking for bad news, it stores it into the long-term memory immediately, while positive experiences have to be held in our awareness for more than twelve seconds in order for the transfer from short-term to long-term memory to occur.
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Most of us tend to be negative most of the time.
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Your brain isn’t there to encourage you; it’s trying to protect you.
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Our brains tend to criticize, judge, and complain more often than not.
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With your brain’s blind obsession to keep you alive, it conveniently ignores what’s blatantly obvious: that the negatives we face are the exception that interrupts a norm of constantly flowing positives.
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Life is almost entirely made of positives.
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Focus on the white of the page, not the black of the ink.
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How much of the constant stream of thoughts in my head is true?
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Filters The picture we see of the world is always incomplete because our brain omits parts of the truth in order to focus on what it deems a priority. What we perceive is mostly filtered, leaving us only a tiny sliver of the truth.
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While crossing the street, you’ll not pay any attention at all to the smells surrounding you. You’ll be listening for horns and sirens but muting most other irrelevant sounds, such as the chirping of the birds on the tree around the corner and the crying of a baby far behind you.
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Try the test yourself before reading further; you can simply search for “selective awareness test” on YouTube.
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When we push filtering to the extreme, our ability to focus works against us. We sometimes obsess about one thing that makes us unhappy, and we filter out any positive signals that could change our frame of mind.
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The story your brain tells you is always incomplete.
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Assumptions To make its decisions, the brain needs a coherent, comprehensible set of information.
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Unfortunately, since the grumpy brain is designed to prioritize your survival, more often than not it will make up a grumpy story that’s bound to make you sad or worried. But remember, those stories are not true because: An assumption is nothing more than a brain-generated story. It’s not the truth!
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Predictions Our brain makes assumptions to fill in the gaps. And what’s the biggest gap? The future.
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Predicting something will happen often lays the path to make it happen.
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Your predictions are nothing more than brain-generated future possibilities. They have not happened. They’re not the truth!
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Memories Our brains then look back to intermix our perceptions of current events with memories from our past. At work, for example, we assume that something won’t work just because we’ve tried it before and failed. Such bias ignores the possibility that the circumstances of the previous attempt may have differed drastically.
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We view memories as archives of past events—of what has actually happened. But in reality, memories are nothing more than descriptions of what we think happened. And because what we think is always distorted by our brain’s blind spots, it’s often not true.
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Don’t contaminate your perception of current realities. Your memories are nothing more than a record of what you think happened. They’re often not the truth!
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Labels Memories augment the truth with a series of events from the past. Labels also come from the past, but are more potent. They take the form of a simple tag without the memory of a specific event attached. Our brains judge and label everything, then turn the results of such analysis into short codes by removing context and details. They use those labels to enable prompt decisions, but in so doing they sacrifice accuracy.
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Labeling is so instinctive even monkeys do it.
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Labels preempt further analysis, which causes us to miss out on the context.
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And whenever we use false inputs into our Happiness Equation, we fail to solve it correctly and we suffer.
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When we label, we dampen the richness that life has to offer.
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In the absence of context, labels very often cover up the truth.
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Emotions Emotions make us human, but when we blend them with logic, they can impair our judgment.
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Today, despite the absence of physical threats, our modern brains still won’t allow themselves to sit idle. They keep busy by engaging emotions around imaginary threats.
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The tiger, on the other hand, won’t linger if the prey escapes. It won’t blame itself for being too slow on that last left turn, and it won’t feel ashamed in front of the other tigers. Once the prey escapes, the tiger also goes back to its calm state and sits quietly, unbothered by the flies on its face. Inspiring!
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We’re often engaged in some kind of emotion and, frequently, several—sometimes contradictory ones—at the same time. Many of those emotions keep us in a state of unhappiness.
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We’re not as rational as we think. Our perception of the truth is often distracted by our irrational emotions.
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Exaggeration You have to admire the amazing persistence of our brain. Its firmest principle is You can never be too careful. If the truth isn’t enough to convince us to take action and run for cover, our brains will exaggerate perception to grab our attention.
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The exaggeration deceives us, but more important, when the negative is exaggerated, it causes us to suffer.
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When a negative event is exaggerated, we worry about it even if it’s statistically unlikely to harm us.
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On the other hand, events that are not exaggerated are ignored despite their true magnitude.
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In a modern world that’s too noisy, the exaggeration goes overboard, inflating a sizable proportion of what our brains present as truth.
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Exaggeration in all its forms inflates our expectations and destroys our satisfaction with life, regardless of how pleasant life may actually be.
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What’s more than the truth is less than true.
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In “brain law” your brain is guilty until proven innocent!
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Shawn Achor, a professor of positive psychology at Harvard, says, “What we’re finding is that it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. If I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness. Ninety percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world but by the way your brain processes the world.”
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Teach your brain to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
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When you notice that your brain is summing up a complex set of events in a short sentence or is obsessively looping around one specific thought, ask it, “What part of the story are you filtering out, Brain? Is there something more I should know before I make a decision?” Your brain is just a tool. Ask those questions and it will respond. “Oh, I forgot to tell you this,” it’ll say. Ask again and again until you see as much of the truth as you need for an objective view.
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An easy way to spot the assumptions is to understand that true events in our life are described with verbs such as I saw, I heard, I was informed, and I noticed, while the stories we make up use verbs such as I guess, I feel, I assume, I think, and even I’m sure.
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This kind of linguistic alertness also helps you spot the memories bug. Those show up in your head in the past tense. Thoughts like This is how it used to be, and I knew him when, and Those were the days are examples of thoughts anchored in the past.
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If it didn’t happen yet, it’s just a forecast, not the truth, regardless of how convinced you are that it will happen.
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Labels normally come in the form of short, snappy, yet confident judgments: He’s an idiot or This place is a dump.
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Removing all emotion from your thought process is neither possible nor desirable. But as you observe the dialogue in your head, look for signs of emotion tinting your perception. Verbs like I feel, I love, and I hate and phrases of heightened emotional engagement such as She’s a pain, He’s unbearable, and They’re annoying are indicators of an emotion weighing in. Once you spot them it’ll be easier to parse out the truth.
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Exaggerated thoughts are normally marked with blanket statements that tend to generalize: huge, tiny, never, always, and so on.
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Keep asking the question “Is it true?” as many times as you need until you realize how ridiculous the statements our brain offers us really are. Keep
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The Truths Most of the time the only thing wrong with our lives is the way we think about them. When you see the world for what it really is, you solve the Happiness Equation correctly.
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So is the nature of every truth. We reject it and wish it wasn’t true, but it overpowers us. We dwell on the past and worry about the future, while we can influence nothing but the present because now is real. We try to stay in control and make our life predictable, but eventually we get taken over by black swans and butterflies because change is real. We resist and disbelieve to no avail because: Every truth happens exactly as expected, even when you least expect it. And that’s a good thing because when your reality matches your expectations, your Happiness Equation is solved.
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The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
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The truth—always—is just a single dot on a long line of infinite possibilities, of which every other point is an illusion.
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Golden Rule for Happiness: Choose to believe in the side that makes you happy. That side is more likely closer to the truth.
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When nothing is certain—and nothing ever is—choose to be happy.
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Chapter Ten Right Here, Right Now
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All of life is here and now. So why do most of us live there and then instead? Why do we live in our head, outside the present moment, fully absorbed in the Illusion of Thought, unaware of the beauty of the unfolding life all around us? Why do we let our absence from the present cause us so much suffering? Because that’s how we were trained to be.
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It didn’t matter if it was a pleasant, a neutral, or an unpleasant thought; when they were focused outside the present, people were less happy. Period.1
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Being fully aware of the present moment considerably increases your chances of being happy.
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What Is Awareness? Awareness—a sense of knowledge or perception of a situation—is our ability to grasp the world at any given moment. Presence—the state of existing, occurring, or being attentive—is what enables this awareness.
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Without the intent to be aware, there’s only reception without awareness—a state all too familiar in our modern world.
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Awareness starts to emerge when you pay attention. In this state you’re interested in what’s happening. The interest tunes you in, and you understand the waves hitting your eardrums as words and concepts. This is perception.
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This is awareness—when you’re fully immersed in the moment, fully aware of what’s happening.
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Awareness isn’t an on/off switch. It’s a dimmer switch. When you choose to crank it up, you become more aware.
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Doing removes your intention to pay attention. If you just stop doing, you will default to being. And being is the only state in which you’re fully aware. The Full Awareness Test simply gives you two seconds to stop doing. Those two seconds are all you need to find your true self and become fully aware.
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You don’t need to do anything to be aware. Your default status is awareness. To reach it you need to stop doing!
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Most of us do more than be. It’s what the modern world expects of us. We
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You don’t do aware. You be aware. Stop doing and just be.
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The Taoist tradition captures this in a concept called wu wei, which translates as “nondoing.”
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The result of awareness is a net positive especially when there’s nothing to do.
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space.” Direct your attention to any corner and you will find an endless spectrum of subjects worthy of your full awareness. Those four corners are: The world outside. Through sensory input you can grasp the world around you. Perceive the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings of touch. Inside your body. By directing your attention inward, you can become aware of your own body. Become aware of your pains, sensations, breaths, heartbeat, and so on. You can direct your attention to different parts of your body and feel the life in them. Your thoughts and emotions. When you are aware enough, you can start to observe the dialogue and observe the drama. You can watch your thoughts and emotions as they flow through you and then freely let them go. Your connection to the rest of being. At the highest level of pure awareness, you invite the connection you have with the rest of being: the love you have for the waves of the ocean, the admiration you have for butterflies, and the sympathy you have for your fellow humans who suffer around the world. Those connections aren’t sensory perceptions of the external world; they aren’t feelings of your own body, and they aren’t thoughts or emotions. They are pure connections that make you feel you’re part of a bigger community that extends way beyond your individual experience of the world.
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Be an Awareness Fanatic It all starts with making awareness your priority. Be crazy about finding out everything happening around you and inside you. Be curious. Be an explorer. Be a fanatic.
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Start a “positive events journal.” Stay alert all day looking for the good parts. Write them down. As soon you make them your target, they’ll start popping up all over your day, making it a positive, happy day.
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The black belt of presence is to notice when you’re not aware.
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Reduce the Distractions It’s hard to stay aware in the modern world because we don’t allow ourselves the space. We’re often distracted with phones, email, Facebook, and all of today’s immersive modern technology.
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Add “me time” appointments to your calendar, short breaks that give you the time to be alone with you. Stick to those appointments.
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Switch off your data connection, at least on the weekend. When on the web searching, stay focused on what you need, then log out. Dedicate only ten minutes in the morning and ten in the evening for social networks. Get rid of the distractions to free up the space you need to be fully present. Less is more.
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Stop Yes, that’s right. Just stop. Whenever you feel your mind racing or the day rushing by, just stop.
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Make a Totem In Inception, my favorite movie of all time, the dream world and the real world become entangled. The dreamers use a totem to distinguish between being in a dream and being awake. You can too.
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It’s time for an awareness break.
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Timeless Time Give yourself the luxury of a timeless experience at least once a week. I mean “timeless” literally. At the end of the day, take yourself to a quiet spot where you have no access to any time instruments. Go to the ocean or to the woods—or just stay in a quiet room.
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You will be fully present once you remove the connection with time.
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Whatever You Do, Do It Well Awareness is a state of being, remember. But obviously, we can’t just be all day. We need to alternate between being and doing to be a productive member of society.
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Be aware of the journey. This is where all of life happens.
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Here’s one final tip: Do only one thing at a time. Don’t watch TV while you eat dinner. Don’t spend time with your daughter while “quickly checking your email.” Multitasking is a myth. Be fully present.
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Whatever you do, give it your undivided attention.
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Live your life in the here and now, not inside your head.
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Chapter Eleven The Pendulum Swing
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scientists have been advocating exactly that in a theory known as the multiverse. You smile to a stranger—a new universe. You frown—a different one. A rock falls—different still. Each of those universes in turn will spawn an endless number of other universes with an endless number of copies of you.
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You don’t need a cockpit with a million switches. All you need is a couple of simple lifestyle changes. Find the path, and then look down.
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Every factor that affects your life behaves like the swing of a pendulum. As a physical system, a pendulum seeks its point of equilibrium—the point of balance where the pendulum is effortlessly still. You need to exert an effort, apply a force, to take a pendulum out of equilibrium. Once the force is removed, the pendulum will rush back to its natural state, swinging back and forth until it finally settles at the zero point. There, where no effort is needed, the pendulum can peacefully stay in balance forever.
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No effort is needed to keep any system at its equilibrium. When everything you do feels effortless, you’ll have found your path.
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Extremes exhaust us. Work too much, and you lose the joy of living; work too little, and you suffer from a feeling of worthlessness.
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Let everything seek its natural balance.
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In Chinese philosophy, the duo yin and yang describes how apparently opposite forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent. Everything has both a yin, the feminine or negative principle (characterized by darkness, wetness, cold, passivity, disintegration, etc.), and a yang, the masculine or positive principle (characterized by light, warmth, dryness, activity, etc.). For example, a shadow cannot exist without light, and vice versa.
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Live on the line where the yin meets the yang.
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In Greek philosophy, this approach to balance was described as “the golden mean,” the desirable middle between one extreme of excess and another of deficiency.
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Seek the path of least resistance.
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The balance we should be seeking surely lies somewhere in between our hectic modern lives and Forrest’s. Live on the Path.
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But as we obsessively compare, we set ourselves up for disappointment because there will always be someone who’s gone farther or done better.
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Here’s a challenge: Try reframing ambition so the focus is on the goal of becoming a better person regardless of how you compare to others. Even better, Look down. Work hard, grow, and make a difference in the world, but please feel good about yourself. Please stop looking at what you don’t have.
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Only when we look down do we realize how fortunate we really are!
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Looking down helps you appreciate the good things in your life. And it’s not a secret that the feeling of gratitude makes us happy.
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Gratitude is a sure path to happiness.
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Instead of feeling resentful that he died, I feel grateful that he lived.
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Chapter Twelve Love Is All You Need
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Conditional love is driven by the thought “I love because . . . ,” and like everything that is based on a thought, it’s an illusion, it’s impermanent, and, as the thought evolves, it will eventually and inevitably lead to suffering.
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In contrast, unconditional love is felt but not understood. It’s genuinely built upon “I love” and nothing more—no reasons or preconditions, no expectations and no demands, and consequently no disappointments. No thoughts! This is the only form of true love. It’s rare to find, but it’s real. Unconditional love is real. It’s the only emotion that’s not generated by a thought in your head.
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A Feeling without a Thought The true essence of what makes unconditional love real is that it lives outside the realm of thought. All other emotions are based on a thought.
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As long as the reason persists, the conditional love lingers, but once the reason goes, the thought pattern changes, and the feeling fades away.
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“No expectation” never turns into a missed expectation. Of all there is to know about unconditional love, its impact on your happiness is surprisingly simple: The true joy of true love is in giving it.
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The more love you give, the more you get back.
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Love never goes to waste. The more you give it away, the more loved you will feel.
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Love’s Instruction Manual Here are my secrets for how to benefit from the spectacular economics of love. Love Everything and Everyone
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Gently remove the mask of ego and love what you see underneath.
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Love Yourself How can you love anything, or expect anything to love you, if you don’t love yourself?
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Love yourself for doing your best.
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If a friend shows any sign of that negativity, do as Ali taught me and give them three chances. Tell them: What you just said made me feel bad about myself, and I don’t like being around people who make me feel bad, so, don’t do it again.
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If they continue to be negative, draw that boundary again clearly, and if they do it a third time, pack up and leave! Tell them directly: You make me feel bad about myself. I deserve better!
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You—apart from your ego—are truly lovable.
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Be Kind What do you do when you truly love? You willingly give. Giving something to the one you love feels as good as keeping it for yourself. It often feels even better.
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To love is to give all you can.
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Let life flow. Keep what you use and give the rest away.
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Giving never takes away from the sack. More always comes back.
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Giving is the good side of selfish! It makes the giver happy.
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Last but not least, the ultimate form of giving is forgiving those whose behavior doesn’t seem to warrant it.
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Choose to be kind instead of right!
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Love is all you need. Chapter Thirteen L.I.P.
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Death is not an event—it’s a process. There’s nothing special about the day we go. We die a little every day.
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Without death, there wouldn’t be life.
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Sooner or later, we all become ready to die.
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painful death is one of our biggest fears, but should it be? There is no painful death, only a painful life in its last moments before death. Think about that. When we go, there is no more pain. As Woody Allen said, “I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” He won’t. When it’s our time to die, none of us will be there. Death will never hurt you.
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So many things can go wrong and often do. As the Arabic proverb puts it, “The reasons are infinite, but death is one and the same.”
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There’s no cheating death. We all go someday!
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This is how I refer to the combined duration of life and whatever your definition is for what happens after death. This equals (Life) + (Eternal Life) if you are religious, (Life)*(Cycles of Reincarnation) if you believe in nonduality, or just (Life) if you are secular.
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When unobserved by life, the physical world ceases to exist!
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This is the Observer’s Paradox: the observation creates the outcome, and the outcome doesn’t exist unless the measurement is made.
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Without an observer, in other words, everything would remain a wave of endless probabilities. You and I and every other life-form are not a product of the physical world; it is a product of us, because by observing it, we make the physical world what it is.
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the physical self is an illusion; life is not the body that is subject to the limitations of space-time. When you think of yourself as the observer, think of the real you, not the physical form that represents you. That’s what life really is.
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Life observes the physical. It resides outside of it, where there is no before or after. In this lies the source of the peace I’ve experienced since Ali’s departure. I know we will meet again.
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While our physical form decays, we never really die.
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Accepting death will set you free, but first it will really piss you off.
Location 3361:
The first lesson death teaches is to accept it. Surrender!
Location 3363:
Lesson Two: Life Is Now The start and end of your life are like the covers of a book. Significant as they might feel, neither event really matters as much as the story that fills the pages in between.
Location 3371:
Live this moment as if it were your last.
Location 3377:
everyone you love dies. They leave and never return. Please don’t let any of them pass unappreciated. We rush through life and delay living it. We keep adding to our bucket list, forgetting that the time to live that list may never come. Life is one long bucket list. Live it while you still can. Live before you die.
Location 3388:
Nothing can be gained that will not eventually be lost.
Location 3391:
If nothing is mine, then nothing can be lost.
Location 3396:
Rent a full and happy life.
Location 3481:
Chapter Fourteen Who Made Who?
Location 3493:
The question with the most bearing on our search for happiness is this: Is life and our universe the product of randomness or design?
Location 3570:
There’s no scientific way to prove that something does not exist!
Location 3579:
Absence of a proof that something exists does not prove that it doesn’t.
Location 3587:
Absence of a proof that something does not exist should be seen as a probability that it does.
Location 3717:
“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
Location 3720:
Design is not the opposite of evolution. Evolution can very well be a method of deliberate design.
Location 3786:
We are all part of a grand design.
Location 3865:
Well, I actually believe the designer isn’t running the show at all! The equations he created do. Within that lies the beauty of the grand design and the ultimate truth—and happiness.
Location 3885:
The design is just functional.
Location 3891:
The results of our own acts should not be blamed on the design.
Location 3898:
Our universe is the product of masterful design. The designer doesn’t run the show; the equations he designed do. Focus on your Happiness Equation. It’s the only one you can fully control. When you compare the events of your life to the expectations you set, please remember that what happens is what’s supposed to happen. Instead of dreading the event, perhaps you should start by doubting the expectations you set because, harsh as that is sometimes:
Location 3902:
Life always meets realistic expectations.
Location 3911:
Live the truth. Finding joy truly is that simple!
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