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
Our Merger Self… is the universal wish to be attached to another, to restore somehow the beatific closeness with mother, for in that fusion would lie perfect harmony, absolute safety, and endless time. The Merger Self is born of the frustration with our early discovery that we are indeed separate and distinct from our caregiver. It triggers a desire to totally incorporate the other, any … [ Read more ]
Author: Gail Sheehy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them.
Author: Brianna Wiest | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Talent and potential mean nothing if you can’t consistently do things when you don’t feel like doing them.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subject: Personal Improvement
When there is nothing to do, do nothing.
Author: Warren Buffett | Source: Inc. | Subject: Personal Improvement
You only get one mind and one body. And it’s got to last a lifetime. But if you don’t take care of that mind and that body, they’ll be a wreck 40 years later… It’s what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate 10, 20, and 30 years from now.
Author: Warren Buffett | Source: Inc. | Subjects: Health & Medicine, 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
Haunting this conditional life are our psychic reflexes — the coping mechanisms developed for the traumas of childhood, which James Hollis divides into two basic categories: “the experience of neglect or abandonment” or “the experience of being overwhelmed by life,” each with its particular prognosis. The overwhelmed child may become a passive and accommodating adult prone to codependence, while the abandoned child may spend a … [ Read more ]
Authors: James Hollis, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: 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
Happiness is a choice, not a result. Nothing will make you happy until you choose to be happy. No person will make you happy unless you decide to be happy. Your happiness will not come to you. It can only come from you.
Author: Ralph Marston | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
[Liberalism] refers … to the centuries-old philosophical tradition that sees politics as fundamentally oriented around the values of freedom and equality. Government, for liberals, exists to enable people to live according to their own vision for their lives; it has no business telling people what god to worship or giving certain groups of people more rights than others.
Author: Zack Beauchamp | Source: Vox | Subject: 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