Principles
1) Be Active, Not Passive
The prime principle is to be active, to act out of awareness: know yourself, then do what you want.
The following table outlines this principle in greater detail and shows what the alternative would be:
| Activity | Passivity |
|---|---|
| Awake, aware, mindful | Asleep, unaware, mindless |
| Doing what you truly want | Doing what you happen to be wanting |
| Driven by reason | Driven by emotion |
| Insight | Ignorance |
| Flourishing | Suffering |
| Agency, autonomy | Addiction, compulsion |
| Grounded in personal values | Directed by social pressures |
| Self-determined (maxims) | Culturally programmed (duties) |
| Taking responsibility | Being a victim |
| Able to detach | Involuntarily immersed |
| Freedom | Bondage |
You could also speak of being at the cause rather than the effect, but this would require a free will, which you do not have. What you can have, however, is strength and clarity of will.
2) Play the Right Game
Everything in life is a game. If you play with others, each party can either win or lose. This yields four possible games:
- In a positive-sum game, both parties win. This is successful cooperation, enabled by an abundance mindset, and the ideal situation to aim for whenever possible.
- In a win-lose zero-sum game, your gain is the other's loss. This is selfishness, motivated by the will to power, which pays off in the short term, but undermines your ability to play in the long term, as others become less willing to cooperate with you.
- In a lose-win zero-sum game, your loss is the other's gain. This is altruism, which appears noble in the short term, but defeats itself in the long term, as any real loss on your side diminishes your power to act.
- In a negative-sum game, both parties lose. This is a tragedy, played only by irrational, psychopathological actors.
A fifth game would be a win-zero game, where you benefit while the other is unaffected. This is egoism: pursuing your own self-interest, though not at the cost of others. Being a positive-sum game, egoism is objectively good, albeit not quite as good as a win-win situation.
3) Cherish Your Attention
Thinking many different thoughts while doing many different things at once makes you stressed and ineffective. Focus on one thing at a time to be productive and happy.
Your attention makes your life substantive, and it determines what your brain assimilates. So be deliberate about what you pay attention to.
4) Be an Optimist, a Realist, and a Pessimist
What happened
- With cheery eyes look back at the past, embracing with love that which cannot be undone—amor fati.
- With lucid eyes look back at the past, striving for accuracy in your memories, treating them as historical facts that ought to be true, not tinted emotionally.
- With gloomy eyes look back at the past, understanding that what you remember is bound to be distorted, bound to diverge from truth.
What will happen
- With cheery eyes look forth into the future, knowing that whatever you do will turn out for the best because it cannot be otherwise—win or learn.
- With lucid eyes look forth into the future, weighing risks and rewards, managing uncertainties, calculating expectations, and evaluating predictions.
- With gloomy eyes look forth into the future, imagining the worst that can happen, pondering whether to accept it in your heart or choose another path.
With your three pairs of eyes, be an optimist, a realist, and a pessimist all at once.
Besides, whether is the glass half full or half empty is practically irrelevant: a glass half full is identical to a glass half empty in terms of affordance—both afford the same options of what to do with it. Focus on what you can do, on what is in your control.
5) Take Things Personally, Sometimes
When someone behaves negatively towards you, perhaps displaying some kind of rudeness, there are three ways in which you can take it:
- Insecurity. You take it personally by default, even when you aren't attacked on a personal level. This is due to a lack of self-esteem, often accompanied by an oversensitivity to nonverbal cues. For all you know, the other person might just be in a bad mood for any of uncountably many reasons that have nothing to do with you—but since you don't know, you become insecure.
- Serenity. You don't take it personally because you understand that people behave not as a result of conscious intent and free will, but as a result of unconscious processes. This is a healthy response if you haven't done anything wrong; but have you?
- Responsibility. You consider whether you could in any way have affected the etiology of the person's behavior and thus take it personally to an appropriate degree. You realize that your actions and your current state can affect other people's states in the short term and that your character as well as how you actively condition others' behavior affects how they act towards you in the long term. So you don't take everything with total serenity, as this would rob you of the motivation to learn to communicate more assertively, to lead and influence people more effectively, and to change yourself if advisable.
6) Refrain From Judging Other People
The less you judge, the freer your mind. But don't you need to judge others sometimes?
No. Judging others is gossip, and even the most accurate moral assessment is still gossip. People don't need to be judged, but to be understood, communicated with, given feedback to, and perhaps conditioned.
As soon as you start judging, you have stopped understanding, because to understand you need an open mind. A judgment, however, is a closed statement: the verdict has already been reached. Obviously, this does not mean that judging is bad—for how then could you, besides the self-contradiction, hope to understand the nature of judging itself? What you judge you cannot understand.
Incidentally, when you draw boundaries, you are not limiting other people, but doing what you want based on the principles you have. If someone violates your boundaries, you draw the consequences. Why be judgmental?
Even people who commit heinous crimes,—why call them 'evil'? Would you judge a wild animal that attacks you? No. You tame it or kill it. The atrocities of terrorists, rapists, and serial killers are natural disasters: to be prevented and dealt with for harm reduction. Personal judgments are superfluous.
Finally, judging others for being hypocritical is just silly. When you criticize someone for doing something that you would do yourself, you are a hypocrite because your criticism implies the pretense that you wouldn't. The same glass house logic applies to judgments of hypocrisy, too. Unless you are absolutely certain that you would never be hypocritical, which you practically cannot be, your accusing someone of being hypocritical makes you meta-hypocritical, that is, hypocritical about your own hypocrisy.
7) Use Facts Prudently
Facts can be useful because the truth helps you to navigate the world better than falsehood, but:
- A fact used to argue does not solve a problem.
- A fact used to be right does not help anybody.
- A fact used to offend will not promote the discussion.
- A fact used to distract will not reach intelligent ears.
- A fact used to rationalize diminishes your character.
- A fact used to excuse weakness kills motivation.
Communicating effectively with others and yourself requires more than just speaking the truth.
8) Think Productively, Not Positively
What makes thoughts useful is that they can be structured by reason to make plans and decisions. Positive thinking is foolish, insofar as it is egocentric rather than focused on problems and their solutions.
The solution to the negative thought "I'm such a loser" is not to think positively about how you are actually a winner, but to think constructively about how to become a winner by setting a goal, making a plan, and implementing it.
While you cold try to affirm yourself and change your beliefs to feel better about who you are, why not work on yourself so that your self-perception naturally and accurately becomes more positive, without you having to talk yourself into positivity?
So don't turn your negative self-talk into positive self-talk, but empty your mind of all self-talk. Instead of thinking about how to change your mental state, think about what you want and how to achieve it.
9) Don't Be Yourself
Don't be yourself. Who are you anyway? A fabric of personality biases? Your body's twitching sensations? Your opinion of someone else's opinion of you? Your conviction that breath is the key to the universe?
You are nothing. So don't be yourself, and don't fool yourself. You are a shell at best, or a vessel. "Shape clay into a vessel; it is the space within that makes it useful," said Lao Tzu. "Let the true will exert its force through your brilliant vacantness," say I.
Be whoever you need to be to do what you truly want to do.
10) Forget Your Hope Lest You Forget Your Self
This very moment right here, right now is your life. Look at it. It's as good as it gets.
There's nothing to wish for, nothing to hope for. Your desires are distractions. They distract you from the simple truth that this is reality. Reality won't get any better. It will either stay reality or be gone. There's no room for hope, no need for hope, for all is well.
But perhaps you're suffering, sad, or frustrated? That's okay. Emotions are beside the point. The point is that this very moment is your life. It doesn't get any better than this. Your dreams aren't real, your feelings aren't you, and hope is just a euphemism for fear. This life is you, and you're as good as it gets.
"So can I not improve, can I not strive to be better?" You can do what you want, but you're forgetting your self. I want to remind you that this moment is your life, and that's it.
This is as good as it gets.