Books

The School of Life

Quotes

• Socrates said,

"I am wise not because I know, but because I know I don't know."

• We interpret what is happenning in here and now [...] through expectations fostered in long years whose nature we have forgotten.
• "We dont's fall in love first and foremost with those who care for us best and most devotedly; we fall in love with those who care for us in ways that we expect."
  Relationships - Choosing a partner (Para 2, Page 134)
• "The good listener is, paradoxically, a skilled interrupter"
  Charm - The good listener (Para 2, Page 111)

Points

• Akrasia (/əˈkreɪziə/; Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command"), occasionally transliterated as acrasia or Anglicised as acrasy or acracy, is described as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgment. #words
• We prefer to view the past as happy nostalgia rather than to challenge it.
• There are no solutions in life that remove the problems altogether. There can only be consolation. A word sorely lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation is to give up on cures. To believe that life is a hospice rather than a hospital. That our efforts are better spent in trying to make it as comfortable, interesting and loving as possible instead of trying to fix it. (Para 2, Page 18)
• Sane insane is a person who knows (or tries to) and accepts his/er shortcomings and flaws and does not try to hide it. S/he knows the meaning of being human and is not just simply insane, which all human beings are. Insanity in this sense refers to the myriad of quirks of a person that are cause for stress and anxiety.
• Plight of a child - Because a child cannot leave an offending situation, they are prey to a powerful, limitless longing to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend all the anger, Addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop the wisdom to feel sad about, rather than eternally responsible for, those we cannot change. (Para 4, Page 37)
• Shyness Page 101 para 3 #todo
• **Specialization - **

Topics

Self Evaluation

As children, when someone asked our age, we might have said, ‘I’m four,’ and added, with great solemnity, ‘and a half ’. We didn’t want anyone to think we were only four. We had travelled so far in those few months, but then again we were modest enough to sense that the huge dignity of turning five was still quite far away. In other words, as children, we were hugely conscious of the rapidity and intensity of human development and wanted clearly to signal to others and ourselves what dramatic metamorphoses we might undergo in the course of our ordinary days and nights.

It would nowadays sound comic or a touch mad for an adult to say proudly, ‘I’m twenty-five and a half ’ or ‘forty-one and three-quarters’ – because, without particularly noticing, we’ve drifted away from the notion that adults, too, are capable of evolutions.

But emotional growth still continues. There won’t be a simple outward measure: we’re no taller, we’ve not boosted our seniority at work and we’ve received no new title to confirm our matriculation to the world. Yet there have been changes nevertheless. We may, over two sleepless nights, have entirely rethought our attitude to envy or come to an important insight about the way we behave when someone compliments us. We may have made a momentous step in self-forgiveness or resolved one of the riddles of a romantic relationship.

These quiet but very real milestones don’t get marked. We’re not given a cake or a present to mark the moment of growth. We’re not congratulated by others or viewed with enhanced respect. No one cares or even knows how caring might work. But inside, privately, we might harbour a muffled hope that some of our evolutions will be properly prized.

(Para 4, Page 8)

• Markers of emotional maturity

  • Self love - dictates how we feel about ourselves. It's also tied to our self-worth, such as how likely we are to feel that we deserve poor treatment, or that everything is our fault.
  • Candor - is the ability to accept that we're flawed without needing to defend our normalcy.
  • Communication - allows us to put our feelings into words rather than internalizing the pain, lashing out, or giving others the silent treatment.
  • Trust - How much risk we are willing to take. Do we find the world to be a terrifying place - or does it feel relatively safe?

  By evaluating these markers,we get a sense of our wounds and as a result, what sort of treatment we need for them.
  Blinkist summary

Self Deception

• Addiction: How we get hooked on certain types of behaviour, or things, or people is not just a result of our lack of will or a blindness to its downsides; it's a harmful measure we take to avoid coming face to face with the uncomfortable truths about ourselves.
• Relentless cheerfulness: While it may seem very similar to actual happiness. The forceful nature of this kind of jolliness is an attempt to avoid any circumstance of sad or uncomfortable situation. It's as if we cannot handle any upsetting situation and worse be the reason for them. Maybe we really do want the environment to be happy but that's not the only reason.
• Attacking what we (used to) love: The story of sour grapes. When are unable to get or do what we have wanted for a long time, we play down it's importance to us so as to not feel the disappointment and even hurt.

We dismiss the people we once wanted as friends, the careers we hoped at the start one day to have, the lives we tried to emulate.

• Generalized cynicism:

We say that all humans are terrible and every activity compromised, so that specific causes of our pain do not attract scrutiny or shame.

• Filler knowledge: We try to fill our heads with all types of knowledge which makes us look smart in front of other people, but are left with no energy or space for any emotional understanding about ourselves. We hide behind the guise of "expertise" to avoid knowing the real truths about ourselves.
• Wanting simplicity: We like to believe that our emotional world is simpler than it actually is. We think any time spend on thinking about our problems is a waste and all psychology (applied to us) is unnecessary, at best, and nonsense at worst. We could try and remember that our moments of radical disquiet can actually be occasions of true insight.

Politeness

Difference between frank and polite people

Stub sentences

1. If someone shows me huge kindness and consideration, I .......
2. If someone isn't entirely convinced by me, I .......
3. When someone tells me they really need me, I .......

1-3 (Page 134)

Diagrams

• The journey to emotional maturity
  [[7ef5d226-9520-492d-9959-db190e91193a.jpg]]

tags: #psychology #life #self #mind
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