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

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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