Asking yourself, “What am I doing when I like who I am?” seems to me to be a more direct way to figure out what you need more of (and what you need less of) in life, regardless of what you think you should need. Often, the healthy, fulfilling things we’ve drifted away from are things whose significance probably wouldn’t occur to us, until we start doing them again and see how much they contributed to our well-being.
ego
Mindy Kaling’s Guide to Killer Confidence
Here’s how I think you can get your confidence back, kid: Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled.
What I learned from Prince and Muhammad Ali was that it’s possible to love yourself so much that everyone else does, too.
Fear and defensiveness, the architects of so many of our lowest moments.
How Do You Make Life-Changing Decisions? | RyanHoliday.net
Books. Books. Books. People have been doing [whatever it is your deciding about] for a while now. They’ve been moving West, leaving school, investing their savings, getting dumped or filing for divorce, starting businesses, quitting their jobs, fighting, dying and fucking for thousands of years. This is all written down, often in the first person. Read it. Stop pretending you’re breaking new ground.
The New Inquiry – Consider the Humblebrag
If you made a Venn diagram of self-promotion, the phenomenon of humblebragging sits in the overlap of two distinctly American pathologies — where manipulative self-consciousness meets our maniacal desire to succeed. What feels better than an ego boost? An ego boost everyone knows about.
Odds are good that you primarily know one sort of person: highly educated, high-achieving, extremely cerebral, etc. Odds are also good that you give too much weight to feedback and ideas from this sort of person, while discounting arguments and complaints from people who don’t know the right way to persuade you. Try to keep that in mind.
Ezra Klein – Common mistakes made by economists. (via) I’ve come across a lot of good posts about arguments and opinions.
Fully Validated Kanye West Retires To Quiet Farm In Iowa | The Onion. “My goal all along was to be praised and talked about until I reached a level of total contentment with who I am and where I belong in the world, and on Friday night of last week, I reached that level.”
Emotive conjugation – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Humans’ tendency to describe their own behavior more charitably than the behavior of others.”
Escalation « Cheap Talk
“You are invited to extrapolate this idea to all kinds of social interaction where you are being perfectly polite, reasonable, and accomodating, but he is being insensitive, abrasive, and stubborn.” (via)
http://videos.nymag.com/embed/player/?content=KWN4D022280LSM25&widget_type_cid=svp&title_height=24
Acting School With Will Arnett: His Video Tips for Playing an Arrogant Idiot. The Mickey Rourke look-away is brilliant.
(Source: http://videos.nymag.com/)
The Wrong Stuff : Those Three Little Words (“Honey, You’re Right”): Harville Hendrix on Being Wrong
Anger is an attempt to coerce a person into surrendering their reality, so that there’s only one reality in the relationship instead of two. And when the anger triggered by the anxiety doesn’t work, people experience depression. Depression is the experience of the loss of power: “I can’t make my world happen.”
Once they go into depression, couples—if they stay together—will then enter a bargaining stage. The bargaining goes like this: “Well, OK, I’m different and you’re different, so let’s make a deal about whose reality is going to be in the forefront.”
The Wrong Stuff : Those Three Little Words (“Honey, You’re Right”): Harville Hendrix on Being Wrong
Books Which Have Influenced Me – Robert Louis Stevenson
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change—that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out.
