First, stay away from selfish people. By definition, selfish people only care about what they can get out of a particular situation. Do not kid yourself that they will care about you. Some of them rationalize their selfishness as “benign” by giving it a reason and a cause. How to tell who is selfish? The Indian monk Gaur Gopal Das observes that selfish people are those who are usually comfortable demanding. — “I” is the most selfish letter word. These are people who like to say “I should be treated like this,” “I should be respected like this,” “I should be given this” — I, I, I, I. When you are with selfish people, you are constantly “distracted” by their desire to make you feel as though you are responsible for things that go wrong.
Selfish people will remind you of what could have done better, what you could have done more, and so on. Usually, we are perfectly until someone urges us to compare ourselves to our expectations. When selfish people are able to play with your psyche like this, they will continue to make you feel as if you’re nor worth it — so that they can benefit from your self-doubt and weekly in that particular situation. Many of these selfish people will have no shame in doing all of these, sometimes in the name of friendship, occasionally in the name of good will, and sometimes in behalf of divinity. The $64,000 question here is: Do you actually need these people in your life?
We can’t always know who is and is not selfish. Most of time we only know that they are selfish after getting to know them. What should we do? I have a personal approach that , well, don’t always work with everyone and every situation. I don’t fight with them, and I do not run away from selfish people. I just cut them off — as in, cutting all forms of communication with them. I forgive, and forget (in that order) about their relevance existence in my being. Stay away from them and live in the “now.”
Second, be kind, not right. In the “now,” there’s neither right nor wrong. There are only kindness and empathy. When you’re living in the now, you are empathetic to the situation in which you are living. You won’t want to make any judgements. Judgements, as we have learned from psychology, are based either on our biases (be it confirmation or availability) or on moral principles that we believe to have guided our lives.
The idea of living by the biases from the past is neither pleasant nor meaningful; so is the idea of living by what you believe to have guided you toward the future. In a difficult situation, being in the “now” means to understand the very situation in which you are dealing. Putting yourself in the shoes of the others not only allow you to see things from a different perspective, but also to know that you may nor (or never) have enough information to make that value judgment.
Third, live your own life, and not the life others want you to live. I have seen so many people who simply could not take it when they do not get what they think they should get. These things range from physical objects, money, to symbolic awards, praises and, eventually, fame. Being praised and being criticized are two sides of the same coin — the evaluation of your labour. In life, you cannot choose to accept only one and not the other.
Awards and praises may reflect the hard work, but when you are expecting awards, you are not living in the “now.” You are living in the expected consequence of your hard work. In which case, you are not longer see your work as a end in itself, but as a means to an end. The director, writer, actor, comedian, and musician Woody Allen once said:
The whole concept of awards is silly. I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don’t.
The reverse of this is also true. If you are willing to accept what others think about you, you should be able accept, also, when the others think that your work isn’t as good. For me, I don’t like the idea of awards because, like Woody Allen, I do have my own standard which I would like to achieve.
I also recognize the fact that getting a award is nor always about how good you are. They are also many other factors, such as how good is your competitor, who are the members of the jury, etc. Instead of relying on what other people think of my work (and let my emotional freely swung by it), I stick to Dr Jordan B. Peterson’s fourth rule: “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”
Fourth, don’t compete senselessly, but always be ready for challenges. As we know about the impact of the improbable black swan events, we cannot really avoid them. All we can do is to be best prepared for them. These black swan events will have a much larger impact than any competitions in your life. Any competitions, any awards, anything, will be nothing compared to a black swan. So, why preparing for senseless competitions when you can actually focus on the “now” and prepare for the black swan.
Fifth, do not tolerate a bad boss. A society/community requires some form of structure. Unlike what radical poststructuralist think, structure and hierarchy is not all that bad. With limited knowledge, all of us are thrown into the world. How we have been able to survive is our constant and innate ability to look for some reasonable models to follow. Structure and hierarchy are also useful for the delegation of tasks, helping you to navigate how to live in the world. Generations of psychologists (such as Stanley Milgram and Robert Caildini) have shown us the danger of following a bad authority figure.
If we’re asked by an authority figure, we tend to rationalize and justify performing actions, even those that we do not agree with. How many times you did something you didn’t like because your boss/teacher/superior told you to?
Caildini’s research shows that these authority figures are not just your direct superiors. In fact, we would go as far as to easily believe those who wear uniforms, whose names follow by “PhD” or “MD,” and/or are simply famous. How many times have you bought a bad product because it’s recommended to you by a famous person? Following the wrong leader is allowing yourself to be robbed, again, from your potential to learn how to live well in the world.
A classic case of “appeal to authority” — just because a doctor (whose credentials in cardiovascular research was unknown) posed for an tobacco advertisement, does it mean that we should smoke to? Photo: Pinterest.
Sixth, get older and wiser. The truth (in case you have never thought about before) is that you have never been older than “now.” Really. Think about it. What is the point of evolution if the now means to be stupider than before? You want to be wiser because you know exactly that you don’t always need to always make a value judgement and care about everything (to save your “willpower” for what matters).
Seventh, do not give a fuck about everything (but give a fuck about something that matters to you). Focusing illusion, sounds familiar? The writer Mark Manson wittingly summarizes:
Look, this is how it works. You’re going to die one day. I know that’s kind of obvious, but I just wanted to remind you in case you’d forgotten. You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.
There’s an additional layer to it though. You only have a certain amount of cognitive capacity to deal with the present. In addition, in your entire life, you have a limited amount of your cognitive resources as a whole. Focus on the “now” and see things the way they are. As Manson writes, we are all going to die (yes, our time is running out as we speak) why allow our cognitive resources to do meaningful things to be robbed by people whom we don’t even like?
Eight, you do not need to have an opinion on everything. Many of us tend to “think” that, in order to be an individual in a society, you’d need to constantly cultivate your attention on just about everything. This can be due to the fear for being outcasted or seen/perceived/understood as “stupid.” With our limited capacity to know about gazillions of things, many of us feel the urge from the outside to have an opinion on everything. When you try to have an opinion on something based on what you do not have enough knowledge to know about, you resort to the worst enemy of clear thinking — the name of that enemy is “biases.” Here I quote the author Ryan Holiday from his The Daily Stoic book:
In other words, it is possible to hold no opinion about a negative thing. You just need to cultivate that power instead of wielding it accidentally. Especially when having an opinion is likely to make us aggravated. Practice the ability of having absolutely no thoughts about something—act as if you had no idea it ever occurred. Or that you’ve never heard of it before. Let it become irrelevant or nonexistent to you. It’ll be a lot less powerful this way.
In other words, follow Dr Peterson’s rule#6 and rule#9: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world” and “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” You don’t always have to fight with anything or run away from anyone. It’s an option to be where you are, dealing with the situation calmly.
Ninth, don’t be a victim to your own ability to think about something. “Focusing illusion” is an enemy. It’s actually the single most important enemy of your ability to see things clearly and in their own terms. The legal scholar and writer Cass R. Sunstein writes about this focusing illusion in his book The World According to Star Wars:
Some examples of human foibles: People are overconfident. We tend to focus on today and tomorrow, not next month or next year (“present bias”).
We display unrealistic optimism. (About 90 percent of drivers have been found to believe that they are better than the average driver. Or: “Everything is happening as I have foreseen.”) We suffer from inertia and so we procrastinate. Instead of examining statistics, we use simple heuristics, or rules of thumb, in assessing risks. (Did a crime occur in my neighborhood in the recent past?) Our judgments are systematically self-serving. (“What’s fair is what’s best for me!”) We dislike losses far more than we like equivalent gains (“loss aversion”).
So it shouldn’t be surprising that golfers do better putting for par than for birdie (a bogey is a loss, and people hate losses), or that if you want people to conserve energy, you’d do best to emphasize that they would lose money if they fail to use energy conservation techniques, rather than that they would gain money if they use such techniques.
Tenth, be distrustful of gossips. Gossip, by definition, are fabrication of stories based on an individual’s biased evaluation of a certain quality (or qualities) of person whose gossip are aiming to discredit. The danger is that gossip will sound “moralistic” and “socially responsible,” but the fact that matters is that which is not always the case. Gossip and rumors put in your head “biases” that make you feel as though you could already understand what you have yet to perceive, realize, and comprehend by yourself. Gossip, project the biased future of your interaction with the individual about whom the gossip is. Gossip, in other words, rob you of your ability to see things the way the are, and in the “now.”
Eleventh, don’t attach yourself to an image of anything — even if that thing used to be what you most revere and respect. Attaching yourself to an image of something, by definition, is an attachment to the particular moment and time in which the image of that things exists.
Twelve, don’t try to change the world — try to change yourself. Remember the epic collapse of the golfer Jean van de Velde?
Changing yourself is focusing on the immediate action that you are about to take. For van de Velde, that immediate moment would be the basic putting that he had practiced millions of time. He knew that he could do it well. Changing the world would be for him to look beyond that very putt — looking at the British Open Trophy that he would get, how to spend the prize money, what to do with all the fame and sponsorships coming his way, the grand dinner with his wife and family and so on. There’re so many things to think about!
Again, don’t fall into that trap. Before you can go and change the world, you need to be able breathed first. So, focus on every breath that you are still capable of taking in, and the the very action that you are about to do, whether that be walking in the park, making food for dinner, or sitting at a park’s bench. You can or can’t the world. Focus on the “now” — focus on prototyping yourself for a better you.
100 days of writing 