Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 393
spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people’s motivation to achieve them.
Location 445
What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.
Location 461
“Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”’
Location 469
Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.
Location 675
‘musturbation’. We elevate those things we want, those things we would prefer to have, into things we believe we must have; we feel we must perform well in certain circumstances or that other people must treat us well. Because we think these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not. No wonder we get so anxious: we’ve decided that if we failed to meet our goal it wouldn’t merely be bad, but completely bad – absolutely terrible.
Location 1012
‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’
Location 1023
Our life experience teaches that it is not necessary to change our feelings in order to take action … Once we learn to accept our feelings, we find that we can take action without changing our feeling-states.’ We can feel the fear and do it anyway.