Don’t deal with people about whose character there is question. It keeps your mind uneasy. It is far better to lose the business.
Author: Alexander Brown | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Business, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Most conversations fall into one of three buckets: emotional, practical, and social. In emotional conversations, we want to talk about our feelings. In practical conversations, we want to solve a problem or create a plan together, and in social, we want to talk about how we relate to each other and how society relates to us.
Author: Charles Duhigg | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
All of us spend so much of our lives trying to make our future selves happy. We don’t stop to ask if it is possible that in 20 or 30 years our future selves are going to look back at us with bewilderment, with resentment, that our future selves will ask us, what made you think that is what I would want?
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I believe if … [ Read more ]
Author: Shankar Vedantam | Source: TED | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The self-limitation of control is the cage of howling loneliness that keeps us from the freedom necessary for love… That mysterious aspect of love — unreachable by logic and reason, impervious to will and control — is why our choice in love is largely an illusion, why our slender margin of choice contains only the courage and patience with which we face its trembling uncertainty … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior
Feeling is what gives valence and meaning to experience.
Author: William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
There’s a big optimism gap between how people feel about their own lives—which is about 6.5 out of 10, on average—and how they feel about the world, which is much more like 4 [out of 10]. And I think the antidote is [to realize] that 100,150 years ago, the average lifespan was in the 40s; now it’s in the low 80s. Malnourishment; access to clean … [ Read more ]
Author: Martin Seligman | Source: GQ | Subjects: Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Well-being can be broken into five elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment (PERMA). Improve those and you might find yourself closer to that vague idea of “happiness”.
Authors: Clay Skipper, Martin Seligman | Source: GQ | Subjects: Happiness, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
Author: John W. Gardner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
We build our own prisons and serve as our own jailkeepers… but clearly our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us — and self-images — that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past — the memory of earlier failures, the … [ Read more ]
Author: John W. Gardner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
When you know what’s coming, prepare. When you don’t know what’s coming, position.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
When one has let go of the projections and the great hidden agenda, then one can be enlarged by the otherness of the partner. One plus one does not equal One, as in the fusion model; it equals three — the two as separate beings whose relationship forms a third which obliges them to stretch beyond their individual limitations. Moreover, by relinquishing projections and placing … [ Read more ]
Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
How we are related to ourselves determines not only the choice of the Other but the quality of the relationship… All relationships… are symptomatic of the state of our inner life, and no relationship can be any better than our relationship to our own unconscious.
Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
What is so often mistaken for love of another is a projection of the unloved parts of oneself.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Relationships
Without some relationship to the cosmic drama, we are constrained to lives of transience, superficiality and aridity. Since the culture most of us have inherited offers little mythic mediation for the placement of self in a larger context, it is all the more imperative that the individual enlarge his or her vision.
Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
James Hollis writes, “we all live out, unconsciously, reflexes assembled from the past.” Carl Jung termed such reflexes personal complexes — largely unconscious and emotionally charged reactions operating autonomously. Most of life’s suffering stems from the unexamined workings of these complexes and the conditioned choices they lead us to, which further sever us from our true nature.
Authors: James Hollis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Perhaps the first step in making the Middle Passage meaningful is to acknowledge the partiality of the lens we were given by family and culture, and through which we have made our choices and suffered their consequences. If we had been born of another time and place, to different parents who held different values, we would have had an entirely different lens. The lens we … [ Read more ]
Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Experience, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
At its core, equity is fairness. Fair processes often result in a redistribution of outcomes because more people get opportunities to succeed.
Authors: Enrica N. Ruggs, Oscar Holmes IV | Source: Harvard Business Review (HBR) | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Being alive in any meaningful sense is a balance of feeling and staying safe, and taking and overcoming risks. In safety, we have a vital place to rest, be comfortable and build the foundations of a life, and through risk we are expanded and grown… It is through taking risks that we expand our safety – widening the boundaries and limitations of our existence into … [ Read more ]
Author: Ruth Allen | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Edges are, in some ways, an embodiment of the core dilemma about how to live, and how to live under the spectre of death. Boundaries say here is OK, but beyond is the insistent abyss, and I am curious about that. Limits give us a place to challenge ourselves and triumph over. They provide an opportunity for growth, where going beyond a limit can test … [ Read more ]
Author: Ruth Allen | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We cannot love whom we do not understand.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships