“We see ourselves in the stories of others and can free ourselves by writing the story of our own lives.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 5)
“Instead of praising those people who happen to possess some piece of knowledge, we ought to praise those who have the right attitude towards it, since only this benchmark also includes those who strive for the truth and miss out on it for reasons not entirely under their control. Consider traits such as intellectual humility (a willingness to be wrong), intellectual courage (to pursue truths that make us uncomfortable), open-mindedness (to contemplate all sides of the argument, limiting preconceptions), and curiosity (to be continually seeking).” ~ Jonny Robinson, Aeon
“When you are arguing with someone, you want to be right, and you want the other person to be wrong. Then it’s them that has to sacrifice something and change, not you, and that’s much preferable. If it’s you that’s wrong and you that must change, then you have to reconsider yourself—your memories of the past, your manner of being in the present, and your plans for the future. Then you must resolve to improve and figure out how to do that. Then you actually have to do it. That’s exhausting. It takes repeated practice, to instantiate the new perceptions and make the new actions habitual. It’s much easier just not to realize, admit and engage. It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain wilfully blind.” ~ Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life (Page 357)
“Wish upon a star, and then act properly, in accordance with that aim. Once you are aligned with the heavens, you can concentrate on the day. Be careful. Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better. It is possible that you can manage, if you are careful. People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost.” ~ Jordan Peterson, via 12 Rules for Life (Page 351)
“When you love someone, it’s not despite their limitations. It’s because of their limitations. Of course, it’s complicated. You don’t have to be in love with every shortcoming, and merely accept. You shouldn’t stop trying to make life better, or let suffering just be. But there appear to be limits on the path to improvement beyond which we might not want to go, lest we sacrifice our humanity itself.”
Jordan Peterson, via 12 Rules for Life (Page 347)
“In the end, after letting go of my ideals of perfection, after letting go of my striving for goals, after wanting things to be a certain way… what am I left with? I’m left with Love. This feeling of boudless love, not for one specific person and not even limited to human beings, can motivate me to get up in the morning and write. It motivates me to be vegan, because my love extends to animals. It motivates me to work out, because my love extends to me, and to my kids for whom I’m setting this example of an active lifestyle. It motivates me to let go of attachments that lead to frustrations, because why fight with someone you love? Love can move you to be mindful, to appreciate the reality of this current moment, to appreciate and embrace impermanence as something beautiful, to be grateful, to make the most of this dewlike life. Love can move you to overcome struggles. Love can transform bitterness into softness, anger into kindness, self-hatred into self-compassion. Love is both the path, and the mover.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 204)
“The bad habits we’ve formed are often useful to us because they help us deal with stress and boredom. Consider some of the bad habits that fit this bill: smoking, procrastination by browsing the Internet, eating junk food, drinking, addiction to TV or video games, compulsive shopping, biting nails. All of these habits fill a strong need: they are ways to cope with stress and/ or boredom. We have formed them as coping mechanisms, and they stick around because we don’t have better ways of coping. So if we replace them with healthier ways of coping, we get rid of the problems of these bad habits, and start getting the benefits of better habits.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 152)
“Why quit cigarettes or all those sweets you’ve been eating? Isn’t life short and meant to be enjoyed? Don’t you deserve a treat? Yes, these are the justifications I gave myself too. And they’re a load of bull. Life is short, so why waste it on pure junk? Those things don’t make you happy—if anything, they made me less and less happy about myself. I’ve been happier once I gave up those habits and learned to be healthy and trustworthy to myself. Eating healthy food is a treat. Living smoke-free is pure bliss. But the biggest reason to change is that you love yourself. You don’t need to harm yourself to find happiness and contentment. Taking care of yourself is a form of self-compassion, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll feel good about how you’re loving yourself.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 148)
“If you plunge into really cold water, you’ll be shocked, and you’ll hate it. But if you go into water that’s only a little colder than room temperature, it won’t seem too bad. After awhile, it’ll feel pretty normal. Then if the water’s temperature drops a little more, it won’t seem too bad, and soon that will become normal. You adjust. When it comes to changing your life, don’t plunge into the freezing water. You’ll soon get out of the water and be afraid of going in again. Instead, take a dip in slightly cool water. Make a very small change. Adapt to that, then make another. Gradually, through a series of small changes, you’ll see amazing progress.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 126)
“All my attempts to control things should be abandoned, and I should just accept the ever changing, ever flowing nature of my life as a river. It turns out that this model can bring me peace no matter where I am, no matter what’s happening. If plans get disrupted, my day gets interrupted by a sudden crisis, information starts coming at me from everywhere, the pace of events starts quickening… I just picture myself as a river, with all of this stuff flowing through me. I don’t try to hold it, control it, freeze it, but I embrace the flow. I smile, I breathe, and I focus on one thing. Then the next. Not holding tightly to any of them, or wanting the river to be any certain way.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 120)
“When we procrastinate, it’s because we have an urge to run from the difficult, uncomfortable task. We don’t want to do the hard work, or be in confusion, or fail at something, so we get the urge to run. It stems from the fear of failure, of not being good enough. The urge comes up, and we follow it! But we don’t need to follow it. We can watch the urge to procrastinate, like a cloud, but not act on it. We can just let it float by, and get to work. Let the cloud float away, because it doesn’t control you. The cloud isn’t you. It’s just a passing phenomenon, one that arises and floats away.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 87)
“Resistance can be overcome by doing the smallest possible step. For meditation, I just had to get my butt on the cushion. For writing, I just had to open up a document and write a few words. For cooking healthy food, I just had to get out a knife and an onion. For studying a language, I just had to press ‘play’ on the audio lesson. For yoga, I just had to get into child’s pose. For blogging, I just had to open up the form for writing a new post. For flossing, I just had to floss one tooth. For reading, I just had to open up the book and read a sentence. I think you get the point. Find the minimum viable habit. The smallest increment of doing the activity. The least objectionable version. And the resistance is overcome.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 80)
“Never let your mood determine whether you should do something or not. Mood is a bad indicator of the worthiness of any activity.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 80)
“You don’t control the results of growing a plant—it will grow however it grows, because we don’t have god-like powers that can control how a plant will grow. You don’t control the outcome, but you do control the inputs. You can water it, give it more sunlight, feed it some nutrients, give it good soil, make sure bugs aren’t eating it. You control the inputs and environment, but not the outcome. So Grow a Plant when you’re making changes: you don’t control the outcome, so you can’t get fixated on it. Don’t attach too tightly to the results of a change. Instead, focus on creating a good environment. Focus mostly on the inputs: what are you bringing to the change? What is your intention? What is your effort? What is your enjoyment and mindfulness? If you do this with weight loss, then you don’t focus on the weight loss itself. You focus on the input: what kind of food are you eating? Are you eating mindfully? Do you have a compassionate intention when it comes to your eating? Are you exercising mindfully? Are you giving yourself a good environment to support these changes? If you focus on the inputs, you don’t know what the plant of your weight loss change will result in. Maybe it will mean a slimmer version of you, maybe a healthier one, maybe a stronger one with more muscle. You don’t know exactly, because you can’t sculpt your body like clay. What you can do is water it, give it sunlight and good nutrients, and see how it grows.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 57)
“Success is never due to one thing, but failure can be. Sleeping well won’t make you successful, but not sleeping enough will hold you back. Hard work is rarely enough without good strategy, but even the best strategy is useless without hard work. Many things are necessary, but not sufficient for success.” ~ James Clear, Blog
“What’s the typical feedback loop for someone who doesn’t exercise much? When she does the exercise, she gets discomfort, sweatiness, tiredness, maybe even soreness. That’s negative feedback for doing the exercise. Not doing the exercise is much more comfortable, because she’s on the Internet doing easy, mildly pleasurable tasks. That’s positive feedback for not doing the exercise. The combination of these two feedback loops is why—at first—it’s so hard to form the exercise habit. People are up against much more than they realize, because no amount of willpower can overcome a setup of feedback loops that go against the behavior they’re trying to create. And it works like that for every single habit: eating junk food and shopping and playing games are easy habits to create and hard to break, while exercise and mediation and eating vegetables and learning languages are much harder. All because of the feedback loops. So what are we to do? Reverse the feedback loops to get the behavior we want. We want positive feedback for the habit we’re creating: rewards, praise, physical pleasure, spending time with a friend, getting stars on a chart, continuing a streak, a feeling of accomplishment, enjoying the activity with a smile. We want negative feedback for not doing the habit: embarrassment of people knowing you didn’t do it, losing a bet, enduring some embarrassing consequence, losing the streak you’ve created, experiencing some kind of difficulty or loss. Grease the slope. Create public accountability. Set up rewards and consequences. The smarter you’ve set up your feedback loops, the better you’ll be at doing the habit.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 42)
“Imagine yourself as a kid who wakes up after a night of heavy snowfall. There’s a thick layer of snow on the ground, clean and without a path. The first time you walk through this snow, you have a very wide array of choices for what path to take. You can walk to the left, down the middle, to the right, zig zag, walk over that hill, and so on. Not only do you have many choices of paths to take, but each one will be very difficult, because there’s a foot of snow everywhere. Now picture walking to school the next day …the snow from the previous day is still there, but now there’s a bit of a path you created from yesterday’s walk. You can still create a new path, but the one you created yesterday will be a bit easier. So you take that one. Each day, you decide to take the path already created. This is a groove in the snow that gets easier over time, until you’re probably not going to take any other path. Creating a new habit is a lot like that: you’re creating a groove in the snow. At first, you can go anywhere, and it’s difficult going …but once you’ve created a groove, it’s much easier, and you don’t have to forget new paths anymore.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 28)
“You are only as mentally tough as your life demands you to be. An easy life fashions a mind that can only handle ease. A challenging life builds a mind that can handle challenge. Like a muscle that atrophies without use, mental strength fades unless it is tested. When life doesn’t challenge you, challenge yourself.” ~ James Clear, Blog
“You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply—though all the while that very day… may be your last.” ~ Seneca, via Essential Zen Habits (Page 22)