One of the best book I read on living a good life by giving fucks to only what matters. Yes, this book uses part of hard language many a times but it forces you to ask yourself questions that we are afraid of asking ourselves. Personally, it helped me becoming more aware about my thoughts.
Following are the few snippets I took from the book:
We are living in the feedback loop from hell. Sometimes, we become anxious about something and then that anxiety cripples you and we start wondering why we are so anxious. Now we are becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh!, Doubly anxious. Now we are anxious about our anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Similar things happen with anger, feeling guilty, worrying. We feel bad about getting bad, guilty for feeling guilty, angry about getting angry, anxious about feeling anxious.
Only way to save it is by accepting that world is totally focused and that’s all right, because it’s always been that way and will always be.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. Avoidance of struggle is a struggle. Denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
What does not giving a F*ck mean:
- It means being comfortable with being different.
- To not give a fuck about adversity, you must give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
- Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuck-worthy.
It’s okay for things to suck sometimes. Practical enlightenment is becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable – no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets and even death. Because once you before comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you, you will become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way.
Close your eyes and trust that you can fall backwards and still be okay. Just give fewer fucks.
The idea of not giving a fuck is simple way reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not.
Life itself is a form of suffering.
Pain & loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.
Suffering is biological useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.
Don’t hope for a life without problems. There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.
Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.
Happiness comes from solving problems. The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.
Emotions are overrated. These are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of been beneficial change.
Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something.
Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action. Just enjoy it.
Decision making based on emotional Intuition, without the reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks because emotions never last.
Choose your struggle because happiness requires struggle.
Want good physique, struggle in gym.
Want good relationships, have tough conversation.
You are not special. Merely feeling good about yourself doesn’t really mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself.
Actually, entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
- I’m awesome and rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
- I suck and rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
Construing everything in life so as to make yourself to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as opposite.
If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in future. It doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t hurt, it just means that you’re not special.
Just realize, that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain.
The rare people who become truely exceptional at something do because they’re obsessed with improvement which seems from belief they’re not already great, they are mediocre, they are average and they could be so much better.
The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.
Self-awareness is like a onion having multiple layers. More you peel, more likely you start crying at inappropriate times.
First layer of self awareness is understanding of one’s emotions. When I feel happy, what makes me feel sad, this gives me hope..
Unfortunately, most of suck at even this most basic level of level self awareness.
Second layer of self awareness is ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. They illuminate what we consider success or failure, why do we feel angry? Why we feel uninspired? This helps us understand root cause of emotions that overwhelm us.
Third level is our personal values: why do I consider this success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself?
Honest self-questioning is difficult. More uncomfortable the answer, more likely it is to be true.
There are handful of common shitty values that creates poor problems for people- that can hardly be solved. These values are like:
- Pleasure: it’s great, but it’s horrible value to prioritize your life around. It is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and so easier to obtain and easier to lose. It is not the cause of happiness, rather it is the effect.
- Material success: After certain threshold, correlation between happiness & material success quickly approaches zero.
- Always being right: As human, we’re wrong pretty much constantly and people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes, lack ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others.
- Staying positive: Staying on the sunny side of life is good but sometimes life sucks,and healthiest thing you can do is admit it.
Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problem.
One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.
With great power comes great responsibility.. and with great responsibility comes great power. The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, more power we will exercise over our lives.
Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you, nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things.
Sometimes, it’s not your fault, but still it’s your responsibility.
E.g. You can resent your ex for what she had done, but at-least take responsibility for your own emotions.
Author wrote that something I personally love to quote as well “My ex leaving me, while one of the most painful experience I’ve ever had, was also one of the most important & influential experience of my life. I credit it with inspiring a significant amount of personal growth. I learned more from that single problem than dozens of my successes combined.”
We’re wrong about everything:
As writer put his thoughts
I told everybody that I didn’t care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much. Other people ruled my world without me even knowing. I thought happiness was a destiny not a choice. I thought love was just happened, not something you worked for. When I was with my first girlfriend, I thought we would be together forever. And then, when that relationship ended, I thought I’d never feel the same way about a woman again. Every step of the way I was wrong. About everything, and I hope that will continue to be the case for the rest of life.
Just as we now in present can look back on our past’s flaw & mistake, one day in future we will look back on today’s assumptions and notice similar flaws. And that will be good thing, which means we have grown.
Michael Jordan quotes ‘ Well, I’m always wrong about everything, over and over and over again, and that’s why my life improves.’
I try to live with few rules, but one that I’ve adopted over sometime is ‘If it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up.’
Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion and generally happier life.
Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments.
That’s good, that’s the beginning. Pain is part of the process.
If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.
Just do something, the answers will follow.
Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust, you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology.
The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. The point is: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To call X, we must reject non-X.
It’s not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it’s about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives. That’s unconditional love, baby.
Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for benefits.
For a relationship to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to say no and hear no.
If there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything.
Sometimes, worst moment of life comes out as most transformational.
The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something, a population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it.
You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived. You may not feel this. But go stand on a cliff sometime, and maybe you will. We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus!. That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t.
Acceptance of our death, understanding of our own fragility, can make everything easier – identifying and confronting own entitlement, accepting responsibility for our own problems, suffering through our fears and uncertainties, accepting our failure and embracing rejections – it all been made lighter by thought of own death.