Protocols 2 by DeYtH Banger (dark academia books to read txt) 📕

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

June 5, 2017 – page 117

51.09% "And as you put it... One more self-help book please."

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...Honesty is a natural human craving. But part of having honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word “no.” In this way, rejection actually makes our relationships better and our emotional lives healthier...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...And because they refuse to reject anything, they live a valueless, pleasure-driven, and self-absorbed life. All they give a fuck about is sustaining the high a little bit longer, to avoid the inevitable failures of their life, to pretend the suffering away...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...The desire to avoid rejection at all costs, to avoid confrontation and conflict, the desire to attempt to accept everything equally and to make everything cohere and harmonize, is a deep and subtle form of entitlement. Entitled people, because they feel as though they deserve to feel great all the time, avoid rejecting anything because doing so might make them or someone else feel bad...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""... If I’m choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I’m rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...You can become your own source of inspiration. You can become your own source of motivation. Action is always within reach. And with simply doing something as your only metric for success—well, then even failure pushes you forward...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...Or promise

yourself that you will assume that you are the root of your problems next time you get upset. Just try on the idea and see how it feels.

That’s often all that’s necessary to get the snowball rolling, the action needed to inspire the motivation to keep going...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...Recognize that you’ve been an entitled prick in all of your relationships and want to start developing more compassion for others? Do something. Start simple. Make it a goal to listen to someone’s problem and give some of your time to helping that person. Just do it once...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...if you know that you’ve been hurting yourself chasing false dreams, or if you know that there’s some better metric you should be measuring yourself with but you don’t know how—the answer is the same:

Do something.

That “something” can be the smallest viable action toward something else. It can be anything...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...The “do something” principle not only helps us overcome procrastination, but it’s also the process by which we adopt new values. If you’re in the midst of an existential shitstorm and everything feels meaningless—if all the ways you used to measure yourself have come up short and you have no idea what’s next,...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...The idea was that

if he forced himself to write two hundred crappy words, more often than not the act of writing would inspire him; and before he knew it, he’d have thousands of words down on the page...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...The author Tim Ferriss relates a story he once heard about a novelist who had written over seventy novels. Someone asked the novelist how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated. He replied, “Two hundred crappy words per day, that’s it.”...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...I had all sorts of screwed-up beliefs about this, like that you weren’t allowed to speak to someone unless you had some practical reason to, or that women would think I was a creepy rapist if I so much as said, “Hello.”

The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...These are VCR questions. From the outside, the answer is simple: just shut up and do it.

But from the inside, from the perspective of each of these people, these questions feel impossibly complex and opaque—existential riddles wrapped in enigmas packed in a KFC bucket full of Rubik’s Cubes...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""... Or the single mother whose now-adult kids have finished school and are loafing around on her couch, eating her food, spending her money, not respecting her space or her desire for privacy. She wants them to move on with their lives. She wants to move on with her life. Yet she’s scared to death of pushing her children away, scared to the point of asking, “How do I ask them to move out?”...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...Or the college guy who has a crush on his tutor. So he agonizes over every sign, every laugh, every smile, every diversion into small talk, and emails me a twenty-eight-page novella that concludes with the question, “How do I ask her out?”...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...But the further I get into adulthood, the more I realize that we all have areas of our lives where we’re like my parents with the new VCR: we sit and stare and shake our heads and say, “But how?” When really, it’s as simple as just doing it...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...As is the case for many millennial children, my parents looked on as if I were some sort of prodigy. To them, the fact that I could program the VCR without looking at the instruction manual made me the Second Coming of Tesla.

It’s easy to look back at my parents’ generation and chuckle at their technophobia...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.

You could call it “hitting bottom” or “having an existential crisis.” I prefer to call it “weathering the shitstorm.” Choose what suits you...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. It’s only when we feel intense pain that we’re willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...The answer was no. Instead of a broke and unemployed twenty-two-year-old with no experience, I’d be a broke and unemployed twenty-five-year-old with no experience. Who cares?

With this value, to not pursue my own projects became the failure—not a lack of money, not sleeping on friends’ and family’s couches (which I continued to do for most of the next two years), and not an empty résumé...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...I asked myself a simple question: “Would I rather make decent money and work a job I hated, or play at Internet entrepreneur and be broke for a while?” The answer was immediate and clear for me: the latter. I then asked myself, “If I try this thing and fail in a few years and have to go get a job anyway, will I have really lost anything?”...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""... This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you’ve been sustaining yourself on for years. Like a junkie giving up the needle, you’re going to go through withdrawal when you start giving these things up. But you’ll come out the other side so much better...""

June 5, 2017 – page 110

48.03% ""...This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world...""

June 4, 2017 – page 110

48.03%

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...This is narcissism, pure and simple. You feel as though your problems deserve to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that doesn’t obey the laws of the physical universe.

My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...She has no identity to protect by staying in a miserable, crappy marriage just to prove something to herself.

When the student admits to himself, “You know, maybe I’m not a rebel; maybe I’m just scared,” then he’s free to be ambitious again. He has no reason to feel threatened by pursuing his academic dreams and maybe failing..""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...It sounds wonky, but there are some psychological benefits to this approach to life. When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.

When someone admits to herself, “You know, maybe I’m not good at relationships,” then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""Buddhism argues that your idea of who “you” are is an arbitrary mental construction and that you should let go of the idea that “you” exist at all; that the arbitrary metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus you’re better off letting go of everything. In a sense, you could say that Buddhism encourages you to not give a fuck...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...If I believe I’m a nice guy, I’ll avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I’m an awesome cook, I’ll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. The belief always takes precedence. Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to them and we justify them and maintain them. Even if we don’t mean to, that’s how our brain is wired. As noted before, we’re unfairly biased toward what we already know, what we believe to be certain...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...You avoid telling your friend that you don’t want to see him

anymore because ending the friendship would conflict with your identity as a nice, forgiving person...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...You avoid writing that screenplay you’ve always dreamed of because doing so would call into question your identity as a practical insurance adjuster. You avoid talking to your husband about being more adventurous in the bedroom because that conversation would challenge your identity as a good, moral woman...""

June 4, 2017 – page 106

46.29% ""...is inherently scary.

Manson’s law applies to both good and bad things in life. Making a million dollars could threaten your identity just as much as losing all your money; becoming a famous rock star could threaten your identity just as much as losing your job. This is why people are often so afraid of success—for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure: