Five Quotes by Lao Tzu That Could Change The Way You Think

Helpful Quotes 

 

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”

 

Photo by Hester Qiang on Unsplash

Leo Zeballos

Jan 24 · 6 min read

Lao Tzu was an ancient Chinese philosopher founder of Taoism, an ancient Chinese philosophy. It emphasizes doing what is natural and going with the “flow”. Little is truly known about Lao Tzu, but what we do know is that he wrote some of his wisdom in the text Tao Te Ching, a sacred Taoist text with writings from other philosophers too.

What strikes me the most is how these people, who lived thousands of years ago, already had figured out the core principles to a happy life. They faced different problems and circumstances than we do today, but their wisdom can still be applied to our lives and it has the potential to change the way we think about the world and ourselves.

Lao Tzu offers some profound lessons on how to live a happier life and achieve our goals.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

This quote touches on a fundamental part of personal improvement and growth.

Often, fear holds us back from trying something new. You might come up with several excuses to not get out of your comfort zone, like “I don’t have time” or “I’m fine just the way I am”.

But deep within you, you know you are afraid to take action because you don’t want to fail.

I get it. I feel like that too, and in the past, fear has stopped me from doing things I really wanted to do. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you decide to take action and see the long road of improving your life that waits ahead.

The good thing is, you don’t have to think about that long road or make a radical change in your life to see improvements. Instead, start taking small steps.

How to apply it:

Take small steps towards your dream life. It doesn’t matter how small it is, the important thing is to get started and start building momentum.

The key to success is consistency, so start adopting healthy habits to improve your life. There are a variety of healthy habits you can choose and you’ll want to stick to them to reap their benefits.

How do you do that?

Start by performing the easiest version of your desired habit.

• Want to read more books? Start by reading 5 pages a day
• Want to journal? Write down your thoughts for 5 minutes every day
• Want to be fit and healthy? Start going to the gym once a week or do exercises that require the minimum effort at home

Start small, then gradually increase the amount of time you spend on those habits.

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them — that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

Whenever things don’t go our way, we get frustrated and sometimes angry. It’s totally normal to feel this way and is even expected from you.

Personally, I don’t like change, especially when those changes trigger negative emotions. But the crude reality is that our lives are constantly changing and evolving. We have little control over the external world, so it makes sense to stop resisting these changes.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

I resisted changes in my life by dwelling on the past and focusing only on the negative side of them. If you act like that, you are going to feel unhappy and lost in your life.

How to apply it:

Let reality be reality. Adapt to the new changes and try to see the positive side in the long term. It’s okay to feel mad and grieve at first, depending on the type of change.

But don’t stay there for too long because it will get harder to get out of that negative state of mind. Negative emotions are inevitable. We all feel sad or stressed at some point in our lives because of a certain situation or event.

But you can’t let those emotions define you, what you need to do is interpret those emotions into positive feelings.

Ask yourself:

“What did I learn from this situation?”

“How can it benefit me in the future?”

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

Practicing gratitude is one of the best ways to feel happy with yourself and your life.

You need to have a positive image of yourself if you want to achieve your goals. And you also need to feel content with the things you have in the present.

Some people have more than others, but the mere fact that you can read this because you have a computer and an internet connection is something you need to be truly grateful for.

Gratitude has many benefits. One that I really like is that it improves your mental health and gives you more clarity. When you have a consistent gratitude practice, toxic emotions like frustration or resentment start to affect you less and less over time.

How to apply it:

Adopt a gratitude habit. There are many ways to do that. For example, every evening I think about three things I’m grateful for that day.

It can be anything, the point is that you need to feel genuinely grateful for them. Maybe you feel grateful for a movie you watched, for reading a chapter of your book, watching the sunset, or taking a walk. It helps to remember how those situations made you feel. Try to recreate them in your mind.

If you want to upgrade that practice, you can think about three things you are grateful for about yourself.

Maybe you liked how engaged you were in a conversation you had with someone, or maybe you are content because you trusted yourself to make a decision. Again, it can be anything, just remember to feel genuinely grateful about them.

“Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”

We’ve been taught that talkative and outgoing people are the ones that are successful in life. That’s why people often speak and say things without thinking about them.

People prefer to talk over listening because it’s human nature. We feel we are contributing more when we talk. And who wouldn’t like to contribute more to the world?

The problem is, we do not listen to understand, we listen to reply. We are eager to share our thoughts and opinions as soon as the other person stops talking. But there is so much you can learn when you just listen intentionally.

Besides, when you are a good listener, it makes the person who is speaking to you feel loved and worthy of being heard. They’ll want to be around you more.

How to apply it:

You probably already know how to apply this one. Listen more and speak less.

Whenever you are having a conversation with someone, try to focus all your attention on what they are saying. Ask them questions about how they feel and their motivations.

Don’t interrupt. Wait until that person is done talking before you respond. Over time, you will realize how much more rewarding it is to listen rather than speaking whatever comes to your mind.

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”

For many years l cared too much about what other people thought about me. It’s normal to care about the opinion of other people. Sometimes, we need to care about what other people think, otherwise we’d do whatever we want and probably be disliked by everyone.

It becomes a problem when you start to obsessively care about what other people think about you.

You try to impress people, show them how amazing you are and before you know it, you’ll hide your authentic self, you’ll make decisions only to please others and you stop living your life in the way you want it.

How to apply it:

I know it might sound cliche, but be yourself.

Embrace your weirdness. That’s what makes you unique and stand out. Don’t be afraid to do things or think differently from others and take decisions most people won’t approve of.

As long as it doesn’t hurt you and other people and that’s what makes you happy, do it. No one knows you better than you do, so stop trying to please or caring what other people think about you.

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• Philosophy
• Personal Development
• Self Improvement
• Life Lessons
• Life

Written by

Leo Zeballos

A student of life. Writing about personal growth and mental clarity. Let's chat: leozeballos8@gmail.com

The Apeiron Blog

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8 Rules to Do Everything Better

Improving Your Life 

 

 

The most important principles to grow your body and mind.

Brad Stulberg

 

“Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life,” writes investor Ray Dalio in his bestselling book, Principles. Dalio focuses on skills like decision-making, investing, and managing organizations. While reading through it, I became inspired to put together my own list of principles that I’ve devised after more than five years of interviewing and coaching elite performers in sports, business, and beyond. Like Dalio’s, these principles are a foundation for a better you.

1. Stress + Rest = Growth

Whether you want to grow your body or mind or get better at a specific skill, you need to push to the outer limits of your current ability, and then follow that hard work with appropriate recovery and reflection. Decades of research in exercise science show that this is how you get stronger and faster, and the latest cognitive science shows that this is also how you get smarter and more creative.

2. Focus on the Process, Not Results

The best athletes and entrepreneurs aren’t focused on being the best; they’re focused on constant self-improvement. When you stop stressing about external outcomes — like whether you win or lose, attain a certain promotion, or achieve some other form of validation — a huge burden is lifted off your shoulders and you can focus your energy on the things you can control. As a result, you almost always end up performing better. Research shows that concentrating on the process is best for both performance and mental health.

3. Stay Humble

Humility is the key to growth. If you don’t maintain an open mind, you’ll severely limit your opportunities to learn and make progress. The best athletes trust their training programs but are also constantly looking for new ways to improve. Same goes for the best thinkers and creatives; they tend to be confident but not arrogant, and they check their egos at the door. Knowledge is always evolving and advancing — if you want to evolve and advance with it, you need to keep an open mind.

4. Build Your Tribe

There’s an old saying that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Turns out that’s true. A large and growing body of behavioral science research shows that motivation (or lack thereof) is contagious. One study, “Is Poor Fitness Contagious?Evidence from Randomly Assigned Friends,” found that up to 70 percent of your fitness level may be explained by the people you train with. Other research shows that if you work on mental tasks with people who are internally driven and love what they do, you’re more likely to end up the same way. If, on the other hand, you surround yourself with people who have a negative attitude and are focused solely on winning the rat race, you set yourself up for a less fulfilling experience.

5. Take Small, Consistent Steps to Achieve Big Gains

Habits build upon themselves. If you want to make any kind of significant change, you’d be wise to do so gradually and over time. In Stanford researcher BJ Fogg’s behavior model, whether someone takes action depends on both their motivation and their ability to complete a given task. If you regularly overshoot on the ability side of the equation, you’re liable to become discouraged and quickly flame out. But if you incrementally increase the challenge, what was hard last week will seem easier today. Put differently: Small and consistent victories compound over time, leading to massive gains.

6. Be a Minimalist to Be a Maximalist

You can’t be great at everything. Regularly reflect on what matters most to you and focus your efforts there. In the words of Mayo Clinic researcher and human performance expert Michael Joyner: “You’ve got to be a minimalist to be a maximalist; if you want to be really good at, master, and thoroughly enjoy one thing, you’ve got to say no to many others.”

7. Make the Hard Thing Easier

Willpower is overrated. Rather than relying completely on self-control, intentionally design your environment to make the hard thing easier. For example, if you (like everyone) are constantly distracted by your smartphone, don’t just turn it off — remove it altogether from where you’re trying to concentrate. If your challenge is eating healthy, instead of relying on your willpower at 9 p.m. after a glass of wine, simply keep the brownies out of the house. This applies to everything. Don’t just think about how you’re going to accomplish your goals; think about how you’re going to design for them.

8. Remember to Experience Joy

At first, this may sound crazy. Who doesn’t want to experience joy? But many Type A people are so driven to keep growing and progressing that sometimes they forget to be fully present for special moments or neglect to pause and celebrate their milestones. Don’t fall for this trap — it’s an especially dangerous one. “Moments of joy don’t just give us happiness — they also give us strength,” says Adam Grant, author of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. When things aren’t going well, we can fall back on happy memories to give us the resilience to move forward.

***

There is nothing fancy about any of these principles, though they do work best when all are applied together. Build them into your life and they will help you do it — whatever that is — better.

Brad Stulberg (@Bstulberg) writes about performance and wellbeing. He is the bestselling author of Peak Performance and The Passion Paradox, and co-creator of the TheGrowthEq.com.(

You Live the Life You’re Willing to Tolerate

The Life You Tolerate 

 

So stop tolerating less than you deserve

Ayodeji Awosika

When you put your hand on a hot stove accidentally, you remove it immediately. The pain is so unbearable that you don’t need to make a decision to move your hand. Imagine if you lived your life the same way. Imagine what your life would look like if subpar results hurt just as bad as touching your hand to that stove?

You’d live out Tony Robbin’s classic quote:

“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”

On some level, you’re okay with the results you have right now. Your life is tolerable. You start to live a life you tolerate because the things you’re willing to tolerate accumulate slowly over time. You’re like that frog who sits in a pot that slowly heats up until it eventually boils. But since it happened so slowly you don’t feel the need to act quickly like the hot stove.

How do you change this?

Instead of feeling a dull yet tolerable level of pain and anxiety your whole life, you find a way to rip the band-aid and make the changes you need to make now. This is something you logically understand but find it difficult to emotionally embrace. So is pretty much every other self-improvement concept. Let’s tackle this from every angle and see if we can find something that sticks.

Why Is a Life You Don’t Want Acceptable to You?

If you’re living an amazing life with no room for growth, no need to read further. If you’re someone who is just content with what they have, stop reading. I’m not here to add fuel to the fire of self-help that seeks to only criticize. I’m just talking to people who know deep down that this ain’t it.

Back to the question, if your life isn’t the way you want it to be, why do you tolerate it? You’re willing to tolerate certain realities you do so because on some level you think you deserve to live that way. I’ve had moments like that in my life like the time where I tolerated a bad relationship because I felt it was the best option I had and I was afraid to start over and be alone.

You feel like you deserve to live that way because of the way you see yourself. You see yourself a certain way because of your behavior, your experiences, and your interpretation of both. This leaves you in a catch 22 scenario. Which comes first if you want to change your situation? How do you change your identity to become someone who will no longer tolerate your current reality when you’re currently tolerating your reality because you’re unwilling to change?

In short, you fake it until you make it long enough to do the work it requires to make that identity change become real. You have to tap into that deeper understanding that you do deserve more deep down, but you just haven’t done what it takes to become that person yet. You know that person is the real one. The person you know you’re supposed to become.

You just keep it real with yourself. We live in this culture where you’re not supposed to feel bad about yourself for any reason whatsoever. This culture teaches you tolerance of everything when you definitely shouldn’t tolerate certain aspects of your life. There’s nothing wrong with looking at your situation and realizing you messed up — that the results you have right now are just objectively subpar. That maybe you should be upset with yourself for letting things get this bad. At this point, you’re on your way.

Understand What’s On the Other Side

Seems simple enough, right? Get fed up with your situation and do what it takes to change. But it’s hard. And you’ll have to go through a period of your life where you face massive levels of uncertainty. And I won’t lie to you, sometimes that period of your life will be brutal.

Using my relationship as an example again. After finally cutting things off and striking out on my own, I was depressed. Couldn’t leave my bed for days. It took a month for me to really get outside into the open world again. I had done the right thing by removing myself from an intolerable situation, but the rewards weren’t immediate.

It didn’t take too long to get back on my feet and the uncertainty I was afraid of wasn’t all that bad. The same will be true for you most likely. things will suck for a little bit when you try to start a new path for your life, but you’ll get over it.

Where are the areas in your life that you don’t like, but you’re willing to accept because at least you know what to expect? Where are the areas in your life where the fear of uncertainty keeps you stuck? Those tend to be the ones you need to attack most because they’ll lull you into a sense of complacency for years, decades at a time.

The best remedy for this involves looking forward and thinking about what your life will end up like if you let comfort and familiarity build a cage around you. If you want to escape, it just takes the simple realization that you just need to go through a period of challenge and struggle in your life to get to the other side. That’s it. You just have to deal with your emotions swinging up and down for a while. And then you’ll have changed.

You’re Much Better Than This

You tolerate a life you really don’t want to live because the story you tell yourself about life maps better with your insecurities. Think about it. How many times do you have doubtful thoughts vs confident ones? How many times are you beating yourself vs lifting yourself up?

If you constantly spend time focusing on the negative, of course, it makes sense that you should be willing to tolerate certain realities. It makes sense to have flawed areas of your life since you’re so flawed. In reality, though, you’re just telling yourself a story that’s blown way out of proportion and you know it.

You get over that story by repeatedly reminding yourself that it’s BS. When you remind yourself that it’s BS, and you believe it for just a tiny bit, it gives you a window of time where you actually do act like that person you’re supposed to be. The more you act like that person, the more your identity changes. As it changes, you’ll no longer tolerate certain things.

I have so many things from my past that I’d no longer tolerate at all now. I got there by slowly changing my story. I’d keep reminding myself that I didn’t have to live a certain way, that I was capable of much more, that I didn’t have to just lay down and watch the rest of my life go by.

Have that conversation with yourself. You’re better than this. You’re better than working some crappy corporate job you don’t really like so you can pay that $500 car payment. Screw that job and the car, go live your dream. You don’t have to settle for that person you know deep down isn’t the one. You don’t have to live in the shadows and be a wallflower on the world’s stage to fit in.

It’s okay to admit what you want from this life. Stop being afraid to ask for it. And don’t let people shame you out of asking for it because they’re afraid. Let them tolerate their existence. Consciously build your life exactly the way you want it and don’t stop until you fully make it happen.

Ayodeji is the author of You 2.0 — Stop Feeling Stuck, Reinvent Yourself, and Become a Brand New You. Want a free copy of my first book? Get it here.

Check out the latest episode of the 5 Mics Podcast here (video) (audio)

Ayodeji Awosika

Learn how to become a top Medium writer and make a living writing here — https://bit.ly/freemediumcourse4u

• Life Lessons
• Self Improvement
• Psychology
• Productivity
• Advice

 

Why Challenging Ourselves Is Essential to Sharpening Our Creativity

Creativity 

 

 

How undertaking a project of epic scope can strengthen you.

A. S. Deller

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

When I was in sixth grade, my first year in a new school, and also my first year in middle school, I went from being a pretty average kid who did very well in school and had a number of friends to becoming very introverted.

I left all those friends hundreds of miles behind. It was the year I experienced my first (and only, thank goodness) in bullying, perpetrated by an eighth-grade boy who would fit perfectly as a cast member named “Obnoxious Cruel Jackass Number 2” in any number of 80s movies.

That school year also began just a few months after the first really impactful death in my life, that of my maternal grandmother, who I was very close to and at whose home my little brother and I spent countless sleepovers.

Everything, all at once, seemed to pile on and suffocate me. It was the first time I told myself “I want to die”.

I don’t write this to make you feel bad for me. Please don’t. There are many people who had and have it far worse than I. Indeed, thirty-plus years later, I’m doing fine. This is just to set the stage.

If this perfect storm hadn’t all come together then, I might not be able to consider myself a writer now. It was because of these factors that I “retreated” into a fantasy world of my own creation. I wrote and drew the first page, of what would become thousands, of a sci-fi/fantasy/adventure comic strip I called “Protector”.

It brought together influences from comic books and movies I had seen and told the story of the last of a race of people who became a knight covered in a liquid metal armour that traversed space in search of people to help in a never-ending quest against various and sundry evil forces.

I continually added to this story for the next seven years, charting the course of the Protector’s life and battles. He saved millions, got married, and eventually had a son who took his father’s place as the Protector of the next generation.

I didn’t start that story with any idea on how it would end, or even an outline for how events would play out over the years. It just happened. And the more I did, the more it healed me and helped me come out of whatever cocoon I was in. By the time I reached high school, I felt normal again…

Whole.

Whatever I Did, it Healed Me

A few years ago, I had an idea for a novel that I knew would be tough. I knew it would mean a lot of hours of research, let alone actual writing and rewriting. To make it good, really good, I would need to essentially learn all I could about the world history of the past millennium, gothic and horror literature since the 18th century and a dozen exotic foreign locales.

I was accustomed to writing screenplays, short stories and poetry — generally, things involving processes measuring from one day to possibly four months at most. Now, I was preparing to jump into a novel that could take a year, maybe two.

It’s been three years now, and I’m almost done with the first draft.

The forward momentum and challenge of taking on something, to me, that is fairly grand in scope, propelled my creativity to new heights. I started and completed another new novel in 2016. I’ve also outlined and made serious headway on a new novel series.

All while in the midst of working on the mega-project.

I’ve argued with myself about doing this. Of course, I’ve used up precious time that I could have dedicated to the “big” book. Surely, I would have finished that one had I never zipped away on these other tangents!

But, throughout it all, my brain was in overdrive. I’ve probably had more ideas in the past 3 years than in the whole previous 40.

And I think I’ve figured it out:

The more we challenge ourselves as writers, the more our minds adapt to the challenge.

This has some scientific backing. We know that continued education throughout life, as well as continued reading and playing puzzle or “thinking” games in later life, tends to keep the mind nimble and promotes overall health.

And it makes sense, just like hitting the gym or going for a run. If you desire “gains”, you need to do a lot of reps or push yourself to greater distances.

So, don’t just accept the short, small, easy tasks. Don’t aim for the minimum level you can strive for.

And don’t just come up with a dream project to simply have one. Come up with that dream project with the full intent to finish it, even if you know could take years.

A. S. Deller

Startup product manager. Sci fi, Fantasy and Science writer. https://t.co/6Eny0CBdBD https://channillo.com/user/29057 https://twitter.com/deller_a

How to Make Your Regrets a Source of Strength | Nate Rifkin in The Ascent

Regrets 

 

Regret begets more regret, but gratitude also begets more gratitude.

 

Ever wish you could go back in time and slap yourself?

I do.

In between my first and second year of college, I languished at my mom’s house like a lump of Jell-O that refused to even wiggle.

Three days per week, I lifted weights at a nearby gym. Every evening, I boiled some spaghetti, dumped it on a plate without tomato sauce or cheese, retreated to my older brother’s former bedroom (because it still had a television), and watched a line-up of The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and some other shows mixed in between. On weekends, I anguished over what I’d watch without the usual weekday lineup and usually found some mediocre movie.

Why was I wasting my life?

I told myself I was waiting. My goal was to create how-to products about fitness and weight training. First, I decided, I had to get more muscular, which could take a few years, but I had the time. As I waited for my muscles to grow, I figured I didn’t have anything to do but work out, eat plain spaghetti, and wait.

My pasta routine didn’t produce the glamorous body I was anticipating. Years later, I’d think about the wasted potential — the wasted time — and wish I could go back to slap myself silly and awaken some semblance of sensibility.

For most of my late-twenties, I worked as a sign-spinner and stood on the corner of the street in front of a store, waving a sign.

Usually, I wore a smock that looked like a big $100 bill. It got so soaked and caked with exhaust fumes, sweat, and grime that it turned grey, peppered with questionable splotches of black. It looked like a billfold that had been shoved through too many vending machines, waved around at too many strip clubs, and rolled into too many straws for snorting coke.

Once, as I waved my sign wearing the nasty smock, a car rolled by and a woman shouted from inside, “You need to clean your uniform!”

I looked down. She was right. During my break, I said we needed a new smock and, the next morning, someone brought over a fresh one. As I pulled it out of the packaging, I marveled at its sheen, the subtle shades of green, and the detail of Ben Franklin’s face.

I strode outside, proud to look like a hundred bucks. The same car rolled by again. The woman looked at me and gave a thumbs-up.

I didn’t always wear the smock. During the holiday season, I wore a Santa Claus outfit.

One day, a woman with a missing tooth walked by and said, “Do you have any idea how many women want to sit on your lap?”

“How many?” I asked.

“A lot!”

Maybe some guys did too. One man in his sixties slinked beside me near the end of my shift and, as he darted glances back and forth, said, “Just about ready to go in?”

“Yup,” I said.

He said, “We’ve, uh, gotten to know each other pretty well, you know?” (We’d had one exchange a few days before.)

“Uh I guess so.”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What do you think of sex?” He gestured his hands out, palms up — the kind of motion someone would say while exclaiming picture this.

I had no idea how to respond so I said, “Could you be more specific?”

“Well…”

Our short conversation ended with him moseying onward up the street.

One more story:

I often did my sign-spinning barefoot (earthing, baby!) with my shoes sitting off to the side. For a few months, around two in the afternoon, a parade of junior high school kids shuffled down the sidewalk. They usually said nothing — thank heaven for small favors — but, one time, a kid grabbed one of my shoes.

I lunged toward him and reached to get it back. “Get the f*** off my shoe, kid!”

Just as I got my hand on my footwear, he pulled it to his face, took a giant whiff and said, “That smells good, man!”

He let my shoe go and walked on.

“Thank you,” I said, slack-jawed, and chuckled for the next hour or so.

More than once, I counted how many weird things happened to me during that job. Maybe two hundred. That’s two hundred stories. I made ten dollars and fifty cents an hour — and that was after two raises. I had a business I was trying to grow on the side.

Every week, I managed to scrape together $30 to fund my advertising campaigns. I was also trying — but not particularly hard — to get clients who wanted advertising copy written for their businesses.

Why am I saying all this? Because, just like with my spaghetti-eating phase, I look back on this time and I want to slap myself silly.

I was racking up all these stories…why didn’t I write about them?

I never blogged about my stories. It would have been fun, free, and I could have built up an audience. Every story could tie into a lesson about one’s spiritual path, especially the Daoist path (I’m still trying to figure out how to connect that to the retired guy asking me about sex). I could have been writing about my experiences for the past eight years.

Many times, I’ve thought about this and cringed. I regretted the lost opportunity that I just didn’t see.

Ever have regrets about a time when you could have put in just a little extra effort on a project and, as a result, could have transformed the trajectory of your life?

I thought about such regrets this morning while standing in the backyard of an Airbnb in Seaside, California, doing my daily routine of Daoist meditation. My wife and I had just attended a friend’s wedding.

As I trained, another thought popped into my head.

Would I regret not writing stories as a small child, when I was still learning how to draw the letters A, B, and C?

No.

Why not?

Because I couldn’t write stories. Scrawling out A, B, C was the best I could do. I was learning and working on the perfect things to master at that perfect moment, on a longer journey.

Was my time as a sign-spinner any different? Sure, I could berate myself with a big list of things I should have done. I could mentally roll the list into a tube and smack myself as if it were a newspaper and I’d just piddled on the carpet. But what if my time as a sign-spinner was another A, B, C time of growth?

I could hate myself for the years I spent watching hours of television every day.

I wasted time, my youth, and my health. But I learned to value time and train my body in a way that preserves my feeling of youth and health.

So, what’s the proper way to judge my past? Where are the cosmic compasses I can jab into my decision points, twist to draw circles, and measure my life’s worth? Where’s the AI-driven data-aggregator I can feed my moments of arrogance, awkwardness, and dereliction of duty, so it can produce a report of how I can best disparage myself and measure my worth. Is the AI still in development? Has the start-up behind it gone public? Maybe I can invest.

Until the tech is available as an app, I’ll stick to something provocative.

What if I thought of my life’s trajectory as perfect?

What if I thought that, like a cocooned caterpillar, I was developing perfectly for my next stage?

As I stood barefoot in the backyard of my Airbnb, bits of mulch poking between my toes and sun shining on my face and chest, I thought about timing. If I hadn’t done everything just as I had, what breakthroughs would I have later missed?

I continued my morning practice, rhythmically moving my body and feeling energy go through certain organs in my body. I thought about the three things I cherish today — my wife, the Daoist training I practice, and my (now-published and available here) book that I had been putting the finishing touches on.

What if I hadn’t gone through that multi-year rut as a sign spinner? What if I hadn’t screwed up my life before and, as a result, never needed to take that goofy job? What if I hadn’t cocooned myself in front of the television?

Maybe I wouldn’t have met my wife. Maybe I wouldn’t have met my current teachers. Maybe my book, something I’ve nurtured for the past three years, wouldn’t exist.

Now, my time parked in front of a television set didn’t seem so bad.

What if my biggest regrets today were how I avoided being alone? How I avoided getting lost on my spiritual path? What if they were how I avoided getting stuck with a career or business that drained the life out of me? What if going back and “doing things better” would be my undoing?

As I thought about this, I finished my morning practice, stood still for a minute, then stepped through the mulch to the back door. After I settled in the dining room, I wrote this article.

Think of a regret you have — a big, juicy one that makes you shake your head from the anguish you feel.

Now picture yourself as a child, giggling and drooling as you push one of your arms forward, drag a leg behind you, and make little thumps on the floor as you learn to crawl.

Would you yell at that child for not running full speed? Would you be that cruel? No? Then, why do you punish yourself for what you did — or what you didn’t do — when you were still learning and growing?

You still are learning and growing, by the way.

Now think of three things you cherish in your life, right now.

What if your deepest regrets actually helped you create what you now cherish? Let’s say you could wave a magic wand, re-write the past, and remove your regret. What if that also removed that which you cherish? Would you really want to mess with your past, Marty McFly-style? Maybe the result wouldn’t be as dramatic as making you and your siblings disappear but you might be surprised by what you’d lose.

Maybe this isn’t logical. Because of the way life’s actions ripple and crash into each other, splintering possibilities beyond what we can consciously perceive, we can never know what was best for us. Then again, is it logical to steep yourself in regret? Sure, it’s good to learn from mistakes but when we’re feeling crushed by what could have been, are we in learning mode?

When you’re not chained by regret, it’s like finally being able to push your head above the water’s surface, breathe, and see. You’re more likely to make decisions you’ll be proud of. Regret begets more regret, but gratitude also begets more gratitude. Even about our regrets.

After dropping out of college, Nate Rifkin had dedicated himself to self-help and pursuing his entrepreneurial dreams. Yet he failed to achieve any of his goals. Worse, he spiraled into debt, drank every morning, felt lonely, lost, and hated himself.A few years later – after a brutal bankruptcy and a stint spinning signs on a street corner – Nate Rifkin had quadrupled his income, married the woman of his dreams, and found happiness and contentment. He's published a book on how he did it, titled The Standing Meditation. It's now available here.

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Written by

Nate Rifkin

Was bankrupt. Now financially free. Was depressed. Now happy and fulfilled. Was figuring out how to change his life. Now writing how he did it.

Why It’s So Hard to Learn From Our Mistakes

Errors

Here’s how to stop your ego from getting in the way

Kate Morgan

Dec 2, 2019 · 3 min read

You’re in the shower, lying in bed, or huffing along on the treadmill, and suddenly, like someone just snapped their fingers, you’re overcome with embarrassment. For reasons beyond your understanding, your brain has decided it’s time to relive your most egregious botch-job, dumbest blunder, or most humiliating gaffe.

Our failures stick with us. In theory, that can be a good thing, unpleasant as it sometimes feels, because remembering helps us avoid repeating our past missteps. But that only works if we actually improve post-failure.

A new study from the University of Chicago found that we often don’t learn from our mistakes at all. In fact, mistakes can actually undermine learning: Over the course of five different experiments, when participants were told they got something wrong, they shut down and did worse on subsequent tasks.

According to Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s Center for Decision Research and the study’s co-author, that willful blindness is an act of self-preservation. “Often, people find failure ego-threatening, and they tune out,” she says. “As a result, they stop learning.”

In the paper, published in the journal Psychological Science, Eskreis-Winkler and her co-author further explained this phenomenon: “According to several motivational theories, negative feedback lowers people’s confidence in their overall ability to pursue their goals, as well as their general expectations of success.”

“When you fail, it adds anxiety and distraction,” says Sean Duffy, an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers University, Camden, who was not involved with the study. “Athletes can crack under pressure, especially if they’ve made mistakes already. Look at free throws: Often, when someone misses the first one, they clam up and miss the second one, too.”

That’s not to say you should totally put your mistakes out of mind. As the study authors say, “If people are motivated to ignore their failures, then they will not attend to them and will not learn.”

But there are tricks you can use to make sure you’re not closing yourself off to the lessons of failure. Chief among them: Pretend it’s happening to someone else.

“Maybe you start compartmentalizing, because you don’t want the loss to affect you,” Duffy says. Compartmentalization isn’t typically the healthiest of psychological concepts, but in this case, it can keep you moving forward.

In their experiments, Eskreis-Winkler and her co-author found that people did learn from the mistakes of others. “Other people’s failures are not our own,” Eskreis-Winkler says. “As a result, they are not ego-threatening. One way to get people to learn from failure is to dissociate failure from the self.”

Another way to maintain a more open mindset about your failure is to intentionally cushion potential screwups with things you know you’ll ace. For example, if you have a complex project to tackle, but there’s a part of it you’re not super confident about, “give yourself tasks you know you’ll succeed at first,” Duffy says. Those easy wins will put you in the right mindset to learn from a later failure, should you need to.

If you’re doing a postmortem on a professional failing, Duffy continues, “Chop it up into parts. You can say, ‘Aha! I was great at collecting data but not great at the writing.’ List parts of complex tasks you are good at. Often, when people criticize you, you think you failed entirely.”

But if you can keep your ego in check, you’ll ensure that you can think about your failure constructively, whether that criticism is coming from others or from your own mind.

Written by

Kate Morgan

Kate is a freelance journalist who’s been published by Popular Science, The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, and many more. Read more at bykatemorgan.com.

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