“We aren’t victims of life—we are life. We have power over our efforts, which gives us power to adjust our sails depending on which way things are blowing. Self-pity serves as a barrier to those sails and sets us on a one-way path downward. Our problems may not be our fault, but they are definitely our responsibility, so ask yourself how well excessive self-pity and seeking pity help with that responsibility. The more we exercise our power to turn our days around, the more the tools to help us will find us.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 261)
“Our problems aren’t always our fault, but they’re still our responsibility.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 247)
“Social media is a playground for our insecurities and self-pity. It not only makes us feel like we’re not enough, but it chips away at our confidence, encouraging us to lash out in uninspiring ways. I don’t want to feel insignificant in comparison to others, and I don’t want to belittle others to make myself feel better, so I took responsibility to reduce how often I expose myself to those triggers, which are highly addictive.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 225)
“Power and blame go hand in hand, so if we want to find the power to improve our situation, we’re going to have to take responsibility, no matter how much others did us dirty. Taking the time to see how we contribute to our unfortunate circumstances is the first step to turning things around. Comparing ourselves to others and spending excessive time on social media only fuels our self-pity, and the more aware we are of those triggers, the better off we’ll be. Pointing fingers and taking offense are also the language of self-victimization, and we need to recognize when theirs becomes a habit we can’t kick. The secret to dealing with much of the bullshit life throws us is self-sufficiency, which means finding ways to own the bullshit, even when there are plenty of other people who should be sharing the blame.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 220)
“We’re all going to make horrible choices, but that doesn’t make us horrible people. When we zoom in and look at a horrible choice in isolation, it may simply be an outlier, a lapse of judgment, because of many things. We weren’t born out of the box with the right tools to handle life’s challenges; we need to learn them, and we can’t demonize those who were never taught better ways of handling things.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 210)
“There is no absolute good and bad; everything is what we make of it. As we strive to understand more than we evaluate, we open up more possibilities and opportunities for things to improve and unfold the way we want them to. This requires paying attention, and allowing a situation to be complicated, and sorting through the details—zooming in—to find where all the magic is hiding.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 199)
Eckhart Tolle Quote on Taking Responsibility and Making the Present Moment Your Ally
“Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the activity you are engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close to you is dishonest, irritating, or unconscious, but all this is irrelevant. Whether your thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not makes no difference. The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating unhappiness, conflict between the inner and the outer. Your unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being and those around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an outward reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 77)
Beyond the Quote (82/365)
It’s easy to point fingers, to yell at a screen, to identify all of the faults in other people’s decisions and actions—it’s hard to take responsibility and make positive decisions yourself. What’s makes this harder is that you might even be right. The mess of the world might very well be the fault of another—or the fault of many others. But as Tolle points out, whether your thoughts and emotions about a given situation are justified or not makes no difference.
Read More »Eckhart Tolle Quote on Taking Responsibility and Making the Present Moment Your Ally“Zooming out helps us to think more in the long term and recognize patterns so we don’t overreact in the short term. Life isn’t what happens to us; it’s how we deal with it, and how we deal with it always depends on the perspectives we can find. Zooming out helps us realize that the story is still playing out, and we shouldn’t rush to any conclusions.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 140)
Tony Robbins Quote on Caring For Your Mind, Emotions, and Spirit Like A Garden—The Ultimate Garden
“Think of your mind, your emotions, and your spirit as the ultimate garden. The way to ensure a bountiful, nourishing harvest is to plant seeds like love, warmth, and appreciation, instead of seeds like disappointment, anger, and fear.”
Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within
Beyond the Quote (78/365)
What seeds are you planting today? Are you planting seeds of love, warmth, and appreciation in the garden of your mind? What about in the minds of those around you? Seeds don’t just plant themselves. They need you to produce them first. Some are easier to produce and plant than others. Some get planted and start growing without you even knowing it. Some take a ton of careful attention and hard work to cultivate and nurture to maturity. One thing is for sure though, the ultimate garden of the mind requires constant effort and refinement in order to flourish—and mindfulness is the tool we need to use in order to see what needs to be done.
Read More »Tony Robbins Quote on Caring For Your Mind, Emotions, and Spirit Like A Garden—The Ultimate Garden
“To live is to deal with challenges and setbacks. No one is immune to the bullshit life flings our way; but our actions can make that bullshit better or worse. If you look back at your life, the biggest lessons you learned didn’t come from a Tumblr quote or celebrity PSA; they came from harsh reality checks when the shit hit the fan. That process isn’t going to get any more enjoyable as you grow, but if you anticipate the learning, then the moments you have in life end up being that much more enriched.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 84)
“The decisions we can’t make with confidence end up being made for us.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 56)
“Nothing lasts forever, and that’s both tragic and comic, depending on how we look at it—so how we look at it, our perspective, is the thing we can, and should, control. We can give ourselves a facepalm when we look at that old outfit, or we can try it on and dance around the room summoning up the spirits and smiles of yesterday—a beautiful reminder of how far we’ve come.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 15)
“The more deeply we dive into our own stories, the more we feel like we’re going through it alone. But I’m here to remind you that you’re not alone, even though we each have to do the work ourselves. The deeper we dive, the more beauty we can discover as well. No on else shares our unique experiences, and therefore no one else can show us the light at the end of the tunnels we dig; we can only share our stories and remind ourselves that we already have everything we need to find that light. These are the things no one else can teach us.” ~ Humble the Poet, Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 6)
Albert Camus Quote on The Invincible Summer Inside
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Albert Camus, via Things No One Else Can Teach Us (Page 5)
Beyond the Quote (65/365)
Our world can be cold, harsh, and barren—there’s no doubt about that. Yet, even in the depth of winter when things feel like they’re at their worst there’s still one place that the outside world can’t touch—our inside world. The people around us might be despicable, we might be in an incredibly harsh and barren situation, and we might even be without a clear way out, but unless we let it, our inner world is ours only for the making. This is not to say that the outside world won’t have an influence over our inside world—because it certainly can—but the absolute most it can have is an influence. It has no direct access or authoritative power over our inner world. And what a profound revelation that is.
Read More »Albert Camus Quote on The Invincible Summer InsideThings No One Else Can Teach Us [Book]
Buy from Amazon! Listen on Audible!
Not enough time to read entire books? Check out Blinkist and get the key insights from popular nonfiction books in a fraction of the time. ‘Busy’ isn’t an excuse.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
- 17 Humble the Poet Quotes about Comparing Yourself to Others (and How To Stop)
- Humble the Poet Quote on Emotional Intelligence and How To Deal With “Less Desirable” Emotions (Beyond the Quote 237/365)
- Humble the Poet Quote on Reducing Social Media Usage (Beyond the Quote 86/365)
- Humble the Poet Quote on Managing Expectations and Going From “High” to “Low” to “None” (Beyond the Quote 79/365)
- Humble the Poet Quote on Comparing Ourselves To Others (and Why That Can Be Dangerous) (Beyond the Quote 77/365)
- Albert Camus Quote on The Invincible Summer Inside (Beyond the Quote 65/365)
- How To Separate Actions from Identity—An Important Excerpt from Things No One Else Can Teach Us.
Pema Chodron Quote on Suffering and What We Should Do To Alleviate It
“It’s not the things that happen to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening.”
Pema Chodron, via Essential Zen Habits (Page 106)
Beyond the Quote (59/365)
Think about your mind like a movie theater. What you say to yourself is what directs and creates the movie that plays in your mind. You can direct and play whatever type of movie you want—action, comedy, romance, horror, adventure, thriller, etc. What you don’t get to do, however, is choose how the events in your movie unfold. So, if you can’t control how the events unfold, how can you control how the movie plays out? It’s all in the director’s (your) creative interpretation and expression of how those events influence the main character to think, feel, speak, and act (also you). You get to take the expression, “Everything happens for a reason” and you get to determine why everything happened and for what reason and see to it that the movie plays out in a direction of your choosing.
Read More »Pema Chodron Quote on Suffering and What We Should Do To Alleviate ItQuote About How You Don’t Find What You Don’t Seek
“Take heed: you do not find what you do not seek.”
English Proverb
Beyond the Quote (56/365)
Obviously, right? Well… Maybe not so obvious. The concept is easily understood, of course. If you’re playing hide and seek with your kids, for example, and you send them off to hide, but you choose not to seek them out (that was mean of you), then they won’t be found. Until of course, they come out seeking you so that they can yell at you for not playing the game with them properly (and for being mean)! If you don’t seek, you won’t find. If you don’t go out looking for cars, you won’t find a car. If you don’t seek advice or help, you won’t find advice or help. If you don’t look for the good in people, you won’t find the good in people. Where this concept becomes, “not so obvious” is when you want to find but don’t know how to seek (or aren’t even aware that you’re not seeking).
Read More »Quote About How You Don’t Find What You Don’t Seek