The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.
If you are exceptional at one thing, chances are you are average or below average at most other things.
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they will never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won't matter. Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population sucks and is worthless. People who become great at something become great because they are mediocre and they could be so much better.
- Pleasure - is what is marketed to us 24/7, but it distracts us only.
- Wealth
Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. As Freud said: "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
We don't always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
Growth is an endlessly iterative process.
Manson's law of avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
Define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you.
Q1: What if I am wrong? Q2: What would it mean if I were wrong? Q3: Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
Rule: if it's down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I'm the one who's screwed up.
At some point, most of us reach a place where we're afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we're already good at.
If you are stuck on a problem, don't sit there and think about it; just start working on it.
Waiting for a motivation to take an action is wrong. It is an endless loop Inspiration -> Motivation -> Action -> Inspiration -> Motivation ...
With simply doing something as your only metric how to measure the success - well, then even the failure pushes you forward.