Success And Existential Distress

From comparing our lives to others. Why do you think you look at things as a sacrifice? Compared to what? “Well, so and so is having an avocado salad at a rooftop bar in SoHo.” Who gives a shit. ⚠️

Keep in mind this question: How much are you supposed to enjoy what you do? If you underestimate your answer, you'll tend to stop searching too early.

Liking your work does not mean doing what makes you happiest in this second, but what will make you most satisfied over a more extended period, like a week or a month. Your work should be your favorite thing to do. It should be something you admire.

• Don't worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends.
• Don't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious.
• Don't be led astray by money, especially when money is combined with prestige.

A test of whether you love what you do is if you would do it even if you weren't paid for it. (Even if you had to work at another job to make a living.)

If we keep out a million distractions surrounding us and think about our goal day and night, we will succeed in our goal, no matter what. The key here is continued focus, and also making the right thing as our goal.

If the aim is only money, it may not help us much, but if we keep our aim towards learning or striving to become better at something, we achieve success in monetary terms as a bonus.

Emotional Intelligence, the ability to understand yourself and the people that you live and work with, is an excellent trait to balance and correct yourself.

Everything and everyone is connected to one another forming a huge ecosystem. Our endeavours, whether to get a job, to lose weight or to find a life partner is always related to others.

Focus on doing something you love.

When you’ve found what you’re passionate about, you get the motivation to keep you moving.

If people think their job will lead to success, they might spend too much time on it and neglect other areas of their life.

Keep a balance between work, rest, health and life. 

Decisions are a cost-benefit analysis of risking something small for the opportunity to gain something big.

• Good decisions can be: Exercising, meditating for 10 minutes daily, finding the courage and striking up a conversation with someone, applying for jobs that you may or may not get.
• Bad decisions can be: lying or pretending to someone, driving unsafely, sending angry text messages, or staying up late drinking before an important meeting or exam in the morning.

Trade-offs are not something as simple as flipping a coin. Our values guide us towards what we want in life, and it is not the same for all. Example: Buying a house has a trade-off of mortgage for the next ten or more years. This is subjective and depends on what we value in life.

Indecisive people suffer because they don’t know their inner values and what they care about.

• It ignores the market. Unless you have a trust fund waiting for you, you’ll have to feed yourself and others. 
• It will turn a passion into a job. 

1. Identify real needs in the market that are currently not being well met. 
2. Assess your strengths: Whatever is easy for you that most others have a harder time with, that’s a worthy option.
3. Match up these two in a constantly iterative process: This process takes many years if not decades.

To wean off the dependence on other people’s validation, we need to ask ourselves the following:

1. Can I be responsible for myself today?
2. If I was to complete only one task, what would I do?
3. What solid evidence would there be to prove my productivity for the day?
4. Can I strengthen an important relationship today?

We will continue to seek the help of other people to get overcome difficult times, and that's ok. But we shouldn’t let that overpower our ability to think for ourselves.

There is great ease in knowing that your life reflects what’s most important to you.

Wealthy people have sustainable access to money, often for a very long period of time. Their habits are now aligned with the wealth that they have incurred.

Pseudo affluence, on the other hand, is what people experience when they are currently earning lots of money and start to believe that they are rich. They pay for their expensive lifestyle with a high amount of borrowed money and are just a job-loss away from being poor again.

... is a ‘state of excess’ when the stuff we own makes us poor, as the debt we incur has trapped us to keep working our jobs to fund the expensive lifestyle and habits.

Many of us obsess over “rejections” and ruminate on what we could have done differently. It’s more productive to realize that every disappointment or poor interaction is not actually about us. 

Successful people realize that every little thing – bad or good – is not a reflection of them or their self-worth.

Smart people know that having a fulfilling life means having a life outside of work. And they make time for it. Obsessively checking work email at the dinner table is a good recipe for disaster. 

Set some time where your phone is off, and your attention is on the people right in front of you.

Some people are so thin-skinned that they think everyone is offending them when it's nothing personal. Other people are objectively treated like dirt everywhere because they're doing something to prompt that punishment.

We've got to take responsibility.

Mean-spirited people need someone in their life to tell them they're contemptible.

In the very short-term, it might seem to your advantage to let someone feel like dirt. However, in most situations, we actually need collaboration and should be givers rather than takers. By being an asshole, you might be destroying your organization by driving out the best people, undermining their productivity, creativity, and so on.