Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”
This, in a nutshell, is what “self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.
We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable.
A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.