Our most revolutionary changes in perspective often happen at the awful times in life. It's only when we feel serious pain that we're willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be ceasing to function.

Pain is part of the process.

It's important to feel it. Because if you just chase after thrills to cover up the pain, if you continue to indulge in entitlement and delusional optimistic thinking, if you continue to overfill in various substances or activities, then you'll never generate the requisite motivation to actually improve.

Rejection makes your life better. We need to dismiss something otherwise we stand for nothing. If nothing is better or more preferable than anything else, then we are empty and our life is meaningless. We are without values and therefore and without any purpose.

The avoidance of rejection (both allotting and gaining it) is often a way to make ourselves feel better. But averting rejection gives us short-term pleasure by making us rudderless and directionless in the long term.

Death frightens us. And because it terrifies us, we avoid thinking about it, speaking about it, occasionally even accepting it, even when it's happening to someone close to us.

Death is the only thing we can know with certainty. The only way to be comfortable with death is to realize and see yourself something larger than yourself; to select values that span beyond serving yourself, that are easy and timely and controllable and tolerant of the turbulent world around you.