The key to a good life is not giving an f about more; it’s giving an f about less, giving an f only about what is true and immediate and important.
Social media means that when you feel bad, you’re inundated with thousands of picture of people feeling good, which makes you feel bad that you’re feeling bad. → The feedback loop from hell
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
Alan Watts: The more you pursue feeing better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as chasing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Everything worthwhile is won’t through the associated suffering.
To try to avoid pain is to give too many fs about pain. If you’re able to not give an f about the pain, you become unstoppable.
Learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively—how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter yo you based on finely honed personal values
Not giving an f doesn’t mean being indifferent, it means being comfortable with being different.
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Say F it not to everything in life, but everything unimportant in life.
Happiness isn’t algorithmic. Happiness comes from achieving things, solving problems, doing things you care about.
”Happiness is therefore an activity.”
True happiness occurs only find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
”Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it’s bad."
"A more interesting question…”What pain do you want in your life?""
"Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems."
"And if you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself.”
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Goals vs Systems James Clear
What your problems mean is based on our values and standards.
”Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect.”
Good values
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Reality-based
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Socially constructive
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Immediate and controllable
”self-improvement is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give an f about. Because when you give better fs, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.”
You have to believe that you’re responsible for everything that happens in your life; good or bad. Responsibility doesn’t mean fault. You might not be at fault that you got a bad teacher, but how you deal with that is your responsibility, and your choice. Not doing anything is a choice.
”Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have.”
The best values are process oriented. If your values are based on goals, once you accomplish those goals you have no more problems.
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Goals vs Systems
”It’s growth that generates happiness, not a long list of arbitrary achievements.”
You never reach truth, you just get slightly less wrong. And that’s what growth is all about.
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Example: I used to not consume productivity stuff at all. Then I started doing a lot and got a lot of info. Then I lowered it because I realized I was wasting time. Then I lowered it more because I realized it was addicting. Then I lowered it to what I thought was a reasonable amount. But then reading this book made me re-analyze the time I spend on it, and I lowered it to basically zilch.
“Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. “
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Don’t wait around to take everything in and research and get motivated and be perfect.
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Being in Motion vs in Action James Clear
You have to give an f about something to value it. And to value something, you have to reject everything else. “To value X, we must reject non-X.”