The mindset cheat sheet part three: happiness
Tools for productivity, confidence and happiness from over 50 books.
Brief Introduction
Welcome to the final post in my three-part series on Mindset. In many ways, this last piece was the easiest to summarize because the topic of happiness seems to have brought the most consensus among the authors I researched.
If you missed the previous posts, you can read part one on productivity here, and part two on confidence here. As a reminder, this is a collection of learnings I have summarized after reading over 50 books from different fields such as mindfulness, neuroscience and sports psychology.
Finally, all the information is organized in bullet-point format with direct quotations from each author and a brief “practical steps” summary at the end of each category. The most often quoted authors include: Oliver Burkeman, Sam Harris, Gary Keller, James Clear, Josh Kaufman, Nat Zinsser, Nicole LePera, Tara Brach, Brad Stulberg, Adam Grant, Naval Ravikant, Michael Easter, Brad Stulberg, Tim Grover, Tim Pychyl.
Part three: Happiness
Meaning ✨
There is no meaning. We make our own meaning.
Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and existentialism all teach that a good, deep, and meaningful life is possible, even probable, if we can learn to accept and work with the inevitability of unrelenting change.
Embrace death. If you fully acknowledge the futility of what you’re doing, then I think it can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game. But it’s a fun game. All that matters is you experience your reality as you go through life. Why not interpret it in the most positive possible way?
Becoming more engaged in what we do is the surest way to finding lasting happiness.
Don’t base your happiness or your self-worth on being the smartest, the most successful, the richest. Defining yourself by the things you do each day (the process) will get you to where you want to be quicker and more joyfully than measuring yourself against others.
Humans evolved an over-the-top obsession with what others thought of them—a craving for social approval and admiration, and a paralyzing fear of being disliked. No one really cares that much about what you’re doing. People are highly self-absorbed. Don’t ascribe too much of your intrinsic meaning to the way-too-good feelings you get from feeling accepted or on a pedestal over other people.
Happiness in any given moment is a function of our reality minus our expectations.
Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace.
Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
Practical steps ✅
The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/ 7, all day long. Be happy now.
Values 💎
Following your passion is a luxury. Passion is a fickle magnet: it pulls you toward your current interests. Values are a steady compass: they point you toward a future purpose. Passion bring immediate joy, values provide lasting meaning.
When you feel the ground shifting underneath you, when you don’t know your next move, you can ask yourself, How might I move in the direction of my core values? Or, if that isn’t possible, you might consider, How might I protect them?
Even (and perhaps especially) if we don’t know where the path ahead is going, we’d be wise to adopt an attitude of simply doing the next right (i.e., values-driven) thing.
Having high personal standards, not pursuing perfection, that fuels growth.
Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.
One evening an elder Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us. One is Fear. It carries anxiety, concern, uncertainty, hesitancy, indecision and inaction. The other is Faith. It brings calm, conviction, confidence, enthusiasm, decisiveness, excitement and action." The grandson thought about it for a moment and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" The old Cherokee replied, "The one you feed.”
Practical steps ✅
Spend time figuring out what your top three-five values are. You can use this list as a starting point.
Purpose/ finding your path 🛣️
A sense of purpose doesn’t come from thinking about it. It comes from taking action that moves you toward the future.
No one knows their ultimate ceiling for achievement, so worrying about it is a waste of time - think BIG.
Figure out which things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.
The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. If you love to do it, be authentic, and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants.
You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.
When you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.
Immediate doesn’t work. There is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before success actually arrives.
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.
Practical steps ✅
Favor action, keep momentum going
What is your specific knowledge? Figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed.
Make a list of the top 25 things you want out of life and then arrange them in order from the most important to the least. Warren Buffet says the top five should be those around which you organize your time, but contrary to what you might have been expecting to hear, the remaining 20 aren’t the second tier priorities to which you should turn when you get the chance. Far from it. In fact, they're the ones you should actively avoid at all costs, because they're the ambitions insufficiently important to you to form the core of your life, yet seductive enough to distract you from the ones that matter most.
Be present 😀
Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum with everything to which you pay attention.
As long as you believe, that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future - that one day all of your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems - you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn't leading towards a moment of truth that hasn't yet arrived.
It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas.
In bullfighting there is an interesting parallel to the pause as a place of refuge and renewal. It is believed that in the midst of a fight, a bull can find his own particular area of safety in the arena. There he can reclaim his strength and power. This place and inner state are called his querencia. As long as the bull remains enraged and reactive, the matador is in charge. Yet when he finds querencia, he gathers his strength and loses his fear. From the matador’s perspective, at this point the bull is truly dangerous, for he has tapped into his power.
The great Tibetan yogi Milarepa spent many years living in isolation in a mountain cave. As part of his spiritual practice, Milarepa began to see the contents of his mind as visible projections. His inner demons of lust, passion and aversion would appear before him Through his years of intensive training, Milarepa learns that suffering only comes from being seduced by the demons or from trying to fight them. In one story of his feats, Milarepa’s cave becomes filled with demons. Facing the most persistent, domineering demon in the crowd, Milarepa makes a brilliant move—he puts his head into the demon’s mouth. In that moment of full surrender, all the demons vanish. All that remains is the brilliant light of pure awareness. As Pema Chödrön puts it: “When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone.”
When you move toward it, pain shrinks. When you move away from it, pain grows.
Practical steps ✅
Practice mindfulness.
When we react, we panic and pummel ahead; when we respond, we pause, process, plan, and only then proceed. Pause by labeling your emotions. Process by practicing non-identification, viewing your situation with remove. Plan by self-distancing and gaining even greater perspective as you evaluate your options. Proceed by taking micro-steps, treating each as an experiment and adjusting as you go.
Bonus exercise 🎁 - use these five questions from Oliver Burkeman’s book as a journaling prompt to help you get anchored in the present moment:
Where in your life or your work are you currently pursuing comfort when what's called for is a little discomfort?
We naturally tend to make decisions about our daily use of the time that prioritize anxiety avoidance. James Hollis recommends asking for of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me or enlarge me?”
Are you holding yourself to, and judging yourself by, standards of productivity or performance that are impossible to meet?
What would you do differently with your time, today, if you knew in your bones, that salvation was never coming, that your standards had been unreachable all along and that you’ll therefor never manage to make time for all your hoped you might?
In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?
At a certain age, it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. Once you no longer feel the stifling pressure to become a particular kind of person, you can confront of the personality, the strengths and weaknesses, the talents and enthusiasms you find yourself with here and now, and follow where they lead.
In which areas of life are you still holding back until you feel like you know what you're doing?
It's alarming to face the prospect that you might never truly feel as though you know what you're doing in work, marriage parenting, or anything else; but it's liberating too, because it removes the central reason for feeling self-conscious or inhibited about your performance in those domains in the present moment: if the feeling of total authority is never going to arrive, you might as well not wait any longer to give such activities your all
How would you spend your days differently if you didn't care so much about seeing your actions reach fruition?
What actions, what acts of generosity or care for the world, what ambitious schemes or investments in the distant future - might it be meaningful to undertake today if you could come to terms with never seeing the results.
I hope you enjoyed this series and I would love to hear your feedback, so drop me a line or DM and let me know whether you found these posts useful or interesting.