Bad things will happen to you - losing a job, breaking up with a partner or the death of a loved one. Worse: they will happen to the people you love. Even worse: nobody prepares us how to be there for our loved ones when times are rough. Here are a few things I've learned...
So, refuse to waste time mindlessly highlighting the 6 tactics on how to communicate or the 12 strategies for leadership. Instead, seek what it is like to be an effective, inspiring communicator or how a great leader sees the world.
Seek to be vulnerable but impenetrable... Trust that, on net, the value in a deeper connection to the world is worth the risk. Ensure that should your vulnerability be taken advantage of, your self is resilient and robust enough to withstand the storm.
Maybe after hundreds of hours of reflection and experience, then you can set yourself goals. But, at that point, you are probably already the kind of person who embodies that value. And at that point, of what use is setting a goal to do something to get you to express a value, if the behaviours downstream of that value are already the default ones?
Whether we want it or not, we are constantly thinking about the future and preparing accordingly. Our currents thoughts and actions are tightly intertwined with the conclusions we draw based on the predictions about our own future selves. Hence, sharpening the quality of our future-predictions can save us hours, days, or even decades of suffering and instead make our current – and future – selves more effective in the world.
Going regularly outside your zone of comfort is necessary to expand your being, experience positive emotions and prevent stagnation. But it is not sufficient – you also need to ensure that going into the realm of chaos prepared, with a sword, on which your values are inscribed. Indeed, going into the zone of discomfort should be in service of a value you hold and the time and effort you spend in that zone should be proportional to the value’s importance in your life – that way you avoid going into the realm of chaos, where anxiety awaits, without a chance for acquiring anything of lasting worth.
...starting from the observations that experientially we are quickly and enigmatically able to ‘click’ with and relate to specific people, I argue that it’s possible to have that experience with any one and any experience. In the case of people with whom we resonate deeply, the experiences are already well-matched, while in other circumstances we have to scale our own experiences to match theirs. This scaling inevitably introduces noise in our capacity to effectively empathize but with patience and perseverance, we can better calibrate our scaling ability and thus become better at empathizing with one another.
One distinctive feature we have as a species is that we know of the existence of the future and can plan accordingly. It was obvious to me from the start of my degree that there would be a lot of pressure to find a career after graduating, so I took steps to alleviate that. I explored different career paths to find my spark and adopted a proactive and humble attitude. These steps facilitated the process of developing key skills that would increase my career capital in the long term. For me, this is a liberating conclusion: adopting a mindset, based on the three lessons highlighted in this meditation, can make my future self's life just a little bit easier.
Hence, within a broader view of books and reading, book summaries find their place. This renders reading purists’ militant rejection of book summaries as a source of knowledge equivalent to throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
This summary is done as a slideshow as it's easier to follow and reference.
