101 essays that will change your life - Brianna Wiest
Summary
- Various unrelated essays that had a lot of interesting and useful applications
- The thoughts in this book are not necessarily connected to each other, so it doesn't necessarily have a direct theme
- I do recommend it because a lot of the ideas are genuinely useful (maybe not necessarily 'change your life') but definitely lots of thought provoking ideas
Details
A few highlights:
- Good reminder for me: Dont directly accuse someone of being wrong. Better to engage in conversation
- Validate others feelings without trying to use logic to dismiss or deny or change their minds
- This can also help in the ministry! It is pointless arguing with people who only want to win and not to learn, connect or grow
- Discomfort is what happens when we are about to change
- Questioning yourself means you are open to growth
- When it comes to friends, quality is better than quantity
- I enjoyed this idea a lot: The happiness that comes from the pursuit of excellence
- Appreciate little bits of human connection that happen to us in a day
- Help people in small ways
- Everything is hard, the question is what do we think is worth the effort
- Express disagreement eloquently, deepend connection instead of putting people on the defensive
- You cannot control what people think of you
- Defensiveness never precedes growth, it stunts it
- Social media makes us more emotionally disconnected
- Judgement of others reflects more about how I view myself than how I view them
- Appreciate people for who they are not how you want them to be
- Find joy in what you do not in what you wish you did
- Everything you own should have a specific place in your home
- Fall in love with the unknown
- I have to remind myself of this: You don't know what others are thinking, so don't pretend that you do
- I feel this is soo true:Success is a result of habit more than skill
- I love this story: The Diderot effect - beware the contamination of sudden wealth
- If you miss someone call them
- I am grateful for this book pointing me towards this Study where people prefer to administer an electric shock to themselves rather than sit and think for just 15 minutes.
- Find joy in the small things
- Competing with others only exists in our head
- If social media didnt exist, how would you live your life?
- Be able to enjoy companionable silence
- Give your full attention when you listen to someone
- Any idiot can enjoy positive things, but what about when something negative happens
- I am always interested in cognitive biases (or fallacies):
- Filtering out positive aspects of an experience and focussing only on good aspects
- Polarization: everything is black and white, nothing in between
- Overgeneralization: basing our opinion on one single data point
- Thinking you know what other people are thinking
- Thinking the worst will happen
- Thinking its all about us
- Everything is not your fault, and you are not always a victim
- Thinking your assesment of fair and just is always right
- Always trying to prove you are right
- Thinking someone is keeping score of everything good and bad
- Make decisions based on imagining what my future self will be like
- What you read will affect you for the rest of your life