Tag: 12rulesforlife
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27/365: On taking responsibility for your life
Imagine: you go to engineering school, because that’s what your parents desire – but it is not what you want. Working at cross-purposes to your own wishes, you find yourself unmotivated, and failing. You will struggle to concentrate and discipline yourself, but it will not work. Your soul will reject the tyranny of your will…
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23/365: Decluttter bad habits
Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is. You can know that something is wrong or right without knowing why. Your entire Being can tell you something that you can…
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22/365: Absent parenting
Parents who refuse to adopt the responsibility for disciplining their children think they can just opt out of the conflict necessary for proper child-rearing. They avoid being the bad guy (in the short term). But they do not at all rescue or protect their children from fear and pain. Quite the contrary: the judgemental and…
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21/365: Where you aim at determines what you see
Before, what was right, desirable, and worthy of pursuit was something narrow and concrete. But you became stuck there, tightly jammed and unhappy. So you let go. You make the necessary sacrifice, and allow a whole new world of possibility, hidden from you because of your previous ambition, to reveal itself. And there’s a lot…
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19/365: Adult friendships
Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. it’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It’s appropriate and…
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18/365: Be your own coach
To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want”. It is also not “what would make you happy.” … You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I…
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17/365: Dominance hierarchy
[Dominance hierarchy] is a near-eternal aspect of the environment. We have lived in a dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees. … There is an unspeakably primordial…
Frank Chen 