Tag Archives: philosophy

Your mentality is everything

mentality

Your mentality is everything

Your mentality matters more than you think. Your mentality is everything.

It determines how you interact with others and it determines how you view your goals. It determines how you go through life.

I’ve been realizing that a little anger towards your current situation is not a bad thing. It adds fuel. It adds urgency. Those two ingredients equate to immense action taking that matters.

Ed Latimore says it best.

You need to be pissed off at how your life is going. I clearly remember the day that I got so pissed at my life I almost cried. I was getting ready to close the cell phone store I worked in before I headed home to the room in my friend’s house I was renting for $200/month. Someone came in to buy a phone with 2 minutes left until closing. I couldn’t kick them out because of company policy. Instead, I had to put on the fake customer service personality until they left an hour later without even buying anything. At that moment, I had enough.

I felt like I should have better in my life. I barely had enough money to do anything besides work, go to the gym, and drink. I didn’t feel proud of the person I was. I was 27 and had to be on some customer’s time schedule for $10/hr. I sat angrily in my car for almost an hour. Then I decided I was going to start doing whatever it took to make more money.

This was before I knew anything about making money online, so I enlisted in the Army so they’d pay for school. I was willing to suffer and risk the possibility of being sent to a combat theatre so I could be worth more. This is when I stopped drinking because I wanted to give myself the best shot of getting my shit together. When I got back from basic training and AIT, I lived across the street from my gym so I didn’t risk falling into any BS that screwed my life up.


The only mindset that matters is wanting it bad enough. My only motivation was not being the same person at age 33 that I was at age 27. I didn’t care how long it took to get my money right. That’s the only real mindset you need.

For the longest, I adopted the mentality of being patient. I got into reading philosophy and studying stoicism. It was great. The downside was that it made me too laid back. I didn’t wake up every morning with a fire to take action.

All that changed when I adopted a different mentality. I call it the pissed off mentality.

Meaning, you’re pissed off at your current life situation. That includes your finances, home, love life, and friendships. You’re simply pissed off. You’re tired of it all and ready to do whatever it takes to change your circumstances.

I recently adopted this mentality and it seems to be more effective for accomplishing important goals in life.

Thoughts On 48 Laws Of Power

The dark side of human nature, 48 laws of power

Human nature has a dark side.

I finally got around to reading 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene (actually, I listened to the audio version). It’s one of those books that gets recommended by a lot different people. All types of entrepreneurs, writers, thinkers and influencers recommend it. That’s why I’m surprised it took me this long to read it.

It’s the type of book you might hesitate to finish once you begin. Why? Because it’s massive and it has a negative/ dark vibe. I would imagine a lot of the readers who hear about 48 Laws are on the positive end of the spectrum, so this book certainly extends past their comfort zone.

I felt the uneasiness myself when I started it, but decided I wanted to find out what it was all about, regardless of the dark vibe. It’s definitely a good book.

The book deals a lot with the dark side of humans. Meaning, manipulation, deception, greed, ego, and lying. It might sound negative to you, but it’s a reality. Humans act in these types of manners all the time. If you choose to remain ignorant about manipulation tactics, then that will come back to haunt you.

If you can’t recognize these 48 Laws of Power, then you won’t point them out when they’re being used against you. You’re not immune to human deception. It has probably happened to you plenty of times already, and will likely continue to happen. It’s simply part of the deal when it comes to interacting with others throughout our lives. Everyone has their own secret agenda. You do too!

If you’re interested in human psychology, then 48 Laws is a must read. It’s important to get the full picture, not simply the picture you prefer. My cousin told me he was hesitant to listen to the book because it had a dark vibe. He didn’t want to know about the laws, because he didn’t want to use them against others. I get it, but that’s not how this works.

We use these laws whether we know them, or not. These laws will get used against us whether we like it or not. So, you might as well be aware of them.

I’ve been manipulated before, and taken advantage of. It’s likely to happen many more times. But, if I study 48 Laws of Power, the number of times I get manipulated in the future is likely to decrease. Knowing what to look out for is going to help you avoid troublesome situations, and deceptive characters. If you want to climb up the ladder of life, then knowing what people are capable of is a must.

Sam Harris On Death

Sam Harris, on death flowers

Flowers for a death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a transcription of Sam Harris talking about death. Check out the audio version on Sam’s YouTube channel

“Death is really an ever present reality for us. It’s always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of others, in our concerns about our own health.

Death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend out lives doing, because the truth is none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things.

You’ve got this moment of life. This beautiful moment. This moment where your consciousness is bright. It’s not dimmed by morphine, in the hospital, on your last day among the living.

This is your life. The only one you’ve got and you’ll never get this moment back again. And you don’t know how many more moments you have. You’ve had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them, in a way that they feel it, and in a way that you feel it. And you’ve missed most of them.

No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You’ve got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence, so why not relax and enjoy your life?

You’re in a game right now and you can’t see the clock. And yet you’re free to make the game as interesting as possible. You can even change the rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. You can literally build a rocket to go to mars, so that you can start a colony there.

But whatever you do. However seemingly ordinary. You can feel the preciousness of life. An awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world.” – Sam Harris

When breath becomes air

What would you do if you had been working to become a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, right after getting your undergraduates degree, only to be diagnosed with a deadly lung cancer? You’re married, childless, in your mid-thirties and less than a year away from achieving your ultimate career goal. A career goal that not many have EVER accomplished.

Well, the above scenario is the life story of a brilliant man named Paul Kalanithi. I’ve been reading his amazing story/ book titled When Breath Becomes Air and it’s great, sad, enlightening, eye opening and amazingly written. Sadly, Paul passed away in March 2015 but his wisdom definitely lives on.

If you haven’t heard of this book, then you should buy it and read it. I’m 50 pages away from finishing it, and it’s one of those books that are very difficult to put down.

I found out that he has some additional essays that were published. I plan to read them soon. Check them out if you’re interested. I’m sure they’re good.

My Last Day As A Surgeon

How Long Have I Got Left?

Before I Go

Terra Incognita

Paul spent most of life reading literature about death and the meaning of life. He read all the great philosophers, writers and scientists who had written on the subject. He, then, went on to dive deeper into the question by working with patients who were actually faced with death. This was his goal all along, to answer the question of what’s the meaning of life.

Suddenly, faced with his own death, he gets the chance to see yet another perspective. That’s what his book is. He knows what the literature says, he knows how others react when death comes knocking on their door, and now he, himself, knows what it feels like to know that death is arriving at his doorstep.

And it did arrive. He died two years after his diagnoses.

Read the book. You won’t regret it.

“Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning – to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge.

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.” -Paul Kalanithi