Emily

10 things I learned, found interesting, or used this month

Monthly Top 10 / /

1. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. This month I read The Choice—the incredible true story of Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a Holocaust survivor who’s now a practicing psychologist. Her mission: to show people that there is hope, light, and kindness, even in the darkest times. The motto she used to survive the horrors of Auschwitz: If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

2. Love is not about the other person. It’s about you. This was one of my favorite takeaways from Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy. Love is not about the other person. It’s about you. It’s a choice. It’s a way of being.

3. Think beyond your ego

4. That One Should Disdain Hardships by Musonius Rufus. I recently wrote a blog on this idea. The basic idea: people struggle for money, for their opinions to be heard, for fame and recognition—things that are not inherently good. Yet, Musonius says, they’re not nearly as willing to struggle to acquire things like courage, discipline, kindness, or wisdom–things that are inherently good and would, without a doubt, improve the quality of their life.

5. Consistency over intensity.  “You don’t get in shape by going to the gym for 8 hours a few times a year. You get in shape by going to the gym for 30 minutes four or five or six days a week,” says Simon Sinek in the video “Leadership Explained in 5 Minutes”. “It’s little things adding up over time. Your teeth don’t not rot because you go to the dentist twice a year. They don’t rot because you brush them for a couple minutes every day. It’s the little things adding up over time.” (Source: Billy Oppenhiemer’s Six at Six Newsletter)

6. Stop letting yourself be distracted by things that don’t matter. I got this idea on my sixth reading of Meditations. I’ve written this affirmation every morning this month in my journal: I am not distracted by things that don’t matter.

7. How to be sure you’re living life to the fullest: Be present, right now.

8. The power of responsibility. We all know the quote from Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility”. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, Mark Manson says, if you switch the nouns around, the quote becomes even better: “With great responsibility comes great power.”

9. The greater the difficulty, the greater the meaning. In Yes to Life, Viktor E. Frankl says that the meaning of life is found in suffering. The greater the suffering, he says, the greater the meaning. “Life no longer appears to us as a given, but as something given over to us, it is a task in every moment. This, therefore, means that it can only become more meaningful the more difficult it becomes.”

10. Many mickles make a muckle. “We overestimate what we can do in one year, and underestimate what we can do in ten years.” This quote is attributed to Bill Gates. I think of it often. Keep going, even if it doesn’t seem like you’re making progress. You are. It’s slowly adding up. Keep going.

What are you getting for your work?

Philosophy / /

“Would not anyone admit how much better it is, in place of exerting oneself to win someone else’s wife, to exert oneself to discipline one’s desires; in place of enduring hardships for the sake of money, to train oneself to want little?”

-Musonius Rufus

Last month I read That One Should Disdain Hardships by Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic. I got so much out of it. The book’s title chapter struck me the most.

Living virtuously is hard work. To more cheerfully and readily endure the hardships that go with pursuing the worthy aim of virtue, Musonius Rufus reminds us of the hardships people willingly endure for much less worthy aims.

Think about how people exert themselves to make a profit, the toil and pain they inflict on themselves pursuing fame, or the sweat they pour into achieving a different kind of pleasure. “Is it not then monstrous,” asks Musonius Rufus, “that they for no honorable reward endure such things, while we for the sake of the ideal good—that is, not only the avoidance of evil. . . .but also the acquisition of virtue—are not ready to bear every hardship?”

Why is it that, to pursue virtue (the key to happiness and contentment), we are so much less willing to exert ourselves than those who pursue empty things? People will argue until their veins pop, but when it comes to attempting to understand a different perspective, it’s too hard. They’ll work and scheme their entire lives to find ways to make more money, instead of training themselves to know when enough is enough. They’ll study every way in which they’re different from others, instead of holding fast to the truth that we’re all the same.

“People strive in this world,” said Leo Tolstoy, “not for those things which are truly good, but for the possession of many things which they can call their property.”

Musonius uses acrobats to demonstrate his point:

“When we see acrobats face without concern their difficult tasks and risk their lives in performing them, turning somersaults over ruptured swords or walking ropes set at a great height or flying through the air like birds, where one misstep means death, all of which they do for a miserable small recompense, shall we not be ready to endure hardship for the sake of complete happiness? For surely there is no other end in becoming good than to become happy and live happily for the remainder of our lives.”


We’re going to struggle either way. Why not struggle for something that’s actually good?

“Understand that while the pursuit of such indifferent objectives [money, fame] is natural,” said Epictetus, “neither failure nor success in attaining them has the slightest bearing on your happiness.”

“Not ‘some way to sleep with her’— but a way to stop wanting to. Not ‘some way to get rid of him’— but a way to stop trying. . . .Redirect your prayers like that, and watch what happens,” Marcus Aurelius said.

What are you really working for?

What are you getting for all of your hard work?

Think beyond your ego

Philosophy / /

When Theodore Roosevelt faced a problem, he would look at the painting of Abraham Lincoln on his office wall and ask himself, If Lincoln were in this situation, what would he do? Stepping outside himself, he gained clarity.

But this can seem daunting. How are we supposed to know what someone as wise as Abraham Lincoln, or Cyrus the Great, or Marcus Aurelius would do in situations similar to ours? First, we can read great books. We can immerse ourselves in the lives and thoughts of some of the best leaders and thinkers who have ever lived.

Second, we can be humble. We can stop thinking with our egos. We can allow a higher intelligence to act through us. But most of the time, says yogi Sadhguru, we don’t do this. “Instead of trying to tap into this all-powerful intelligence that pulsates within each of us, we opt to use our logical intellect, which is useful in certain situations, but essentially limited.”

In The Authentic Swing, bestselling author Steven Pressfield found himself stumped by a question similar to Roosevelt’s: How can I write the thoughts and actions of a fictional character who’s smarter and wiser than me? He realized he had to think beyond his ego. He had to be “tapped into a source whose wisdom far exceeds our own. All we have to do is trust it.”

Don’t be a donkey

Life / /

A few years ago, I was chronically distracted. I won’t bore you with the details, but I remember having a list of all the things I wanted to do—earn my degree, start a blog, change careers, change myself, buy a house—and feeling completely overwhelmed because I thought I had to do all of them immediately. I was focusing on everything, so I wasn’t progressing in anything.

Then I read the advice Derek Sivers said he would give his 30-year-old self: Don’t be a donkey. I realized I didn’t have to (and couldn’t possibly) do everything at once. All I had to do was focus on one thing at a time.

In Tools of Titans he explains,

“Don’t be a donkey . . . I meet a lot of 30-year-olds who are trying to pursue many different directions at once, but not making progress in any, right? They get frustrated that the world wants them to pick one thing, because they want to do them all: ‘Why do I have to choose? I don’t know what to choose!’ But the problem is, if you’re thinking short-term, then [you act as though] if you don’t do them all this week, they won’t happen. The solution is to think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another . . . don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.”

10 things I learned, found interesting, or used this month

Monthly Top 10 / /

1. We don’t procrastinate indiscriminately. Read my super short blog about this here.

2. How to guarantee you have a good day: do good, unselfish things.

3. Put each day up for review: “Anger, [or any vice], will abate and become more temperate if it knows that it must come before a judge every day.” -Seneca

4. More doubt and curiosity, less rigidity and certainty. “Cling to certainty, if it makes you feel better. Just be aware that what you’re clinging to is the opposite of life.” -Neil Strauss

5. It’s all temporary, no need to stress. “It would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.”

6. The world paradoxically expands when you narrow your focus.

7. Reading and thinking are useless without application. This sounds obvious, but for someone like me who loves to read, I need a reminder that reading is for life, not the other way around. A reminder to take the best ideas from what I’ve read and use them—not mull them over endlessly in my head.

8. Have a schedule when you’re not busy. When you have a schedule for when you’re not busy, you don’t waste your free time trying to figure out what to do. Or worse, waste it on easy defaults like checking social media.

9. Develop pathological empathy for your audience. As Ann Handley talks about in Everybody Writes, you must have pathological empathy for your audience and users. Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource. We should be highly aware—pathologically empathetic—of our user’s time and attention. (An idea I use in my newsletters).

10. Keep your mind clear. In warfare, one side would overwhelm the other with information—trivial, anything—because it caused confusion. When we watch one TikTik video after another, view one status after another, read one headline after another…our minds become confused. Clear thinking goes out the window.

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