Emily

Just that you do something

Life / /

A few weeks ago, my mom bought a frameless glass cabinet on Amazon and I offered to help assemble it. I’m not the best at putting things together, but it looked straightforward enough. Plus, the older my parents get, the more impressed they are by my capabilities. “Let’s see what we got here,” I smiled as I mimed pushing up my sleeves.

I spent the next two hours trying to interpret the instructions. Is this the rubber peg or the neoprene knob? I jumped online to find a YouTube tutorial—or at least a more helpful guide—and got nowhere. I went back to the instructions that came in the box and read them all the way through, hoping to get an idea of where to start by understanding the overall picture. Still nothing. 

I told my parents I was sorry, that I didn’t know where to begin—but Courtney would (my wife can put together anything). So, the following weekend, Court and I went to their house, determined to assemble the cabinet. She looked at the directions and admitted they were vague. But sure enough, an hour later, she had it put together. “How did you know to put that screw there to start?” I asked. “That’s the only thing I could make sense of,” she replied. “If I don’t know what the next step is, I just start doing something. Eventually, it all comes together.”

How to handle insults

Philosophy / /

Situations, circumstances, what other people say and think—these things cannot inherently affect you. You’re made no different by them. By themselves, they’re powerless. They need your interpretation to have any effect.

Ryan Holiday put it like this: if someone sends you a scathing email, but you never see it, it wouldn’t affect you, right? That’s because the power of an external thing, like an email or contentious remark, depends entirely on your awareness of it and your opinion about it.

Epictetus said that your impression of an external thing is a value judgment. So if you blame someone for being rude to you, realize you’re blaming your own judgment.

Whoa.

Epictetus also kept a sense of humor about it. If someone insulted him, he’d say, ‘Well, thank goodness they don’t know about my other faults, or they’d really have something to say!’

When a man collided with Marcus Cato (a senator of the first century BC and Stoic Philosopher, revered as the most ethically wise philosopher since Socrates) in a public bath, he apologized afterward for his insolence. Cato replied that he didn’t remember being bumped. “It is the mark of a great mind,” Seneca said, “to disregard injuries.”

This is similar to another (and perhaps better) technique Epictetus used to handle an insult: he would forget about it—because it didn’t concern him. It concerned the person who said it.

“Choose not to be harmed,” said Marcus Aurelius, “and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.”

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.

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