Beliefs are meant to point us or point from or be bidirectionally influenced with life. We are supposed to tell our beliefs by how we live our lives, not just the things we dictate to each other verbally.
Peter Attia, M.D. — Fasting, Metformin, Athletic Performance, and More (#398) (The Tim Ferriss Show)
And in the words of Terrence Real, who I just recently interviewed for my podcast, it’s taking that adaptive child in you and thanking them, but just moving them to the back seat, making sure their hands aren’t actually on the steering wheel and saying, “Hey, thank you. Thank you for the help you gave me during this period, but I need you to just sit back there now and just chill out, man. Just look out the window. We’re just going to go on a drive. But the adult has to drive now.”
When we are constrained, we give ourselves permission to use our resources in different ways.
Deadlines create urgency and they activate in us making connections between things that we have a hard time seeing.
We will be dissatisfied by what looks like freedom to us - which on the ego is having more options, more choices, being able to do whatever I want - which is, I call that loving my inner two year old. But real freedom is no longer being ruled by an inner two year old.
Another great idea from Winnicott is the concept of the good enough parent.
First of all, he told parents, no child needs a perfect parent. Indeed, a perfect parent is very dangerous. It’s a one way route to psychosis, a psychotic incident because essentially the job of a parent is to disappoint a child bit by bit and induct them into adult realities. If the parent is perfect, how can the child grow used to living in the world that we all have to live in, which is a deeply imperfect one?
Mindfulness advocates, perhaps unwittingly, are providing support for the status quo. Rather than discussing how attention is monetised and manipulated by corporations such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple, they locate the crisis in our minds. It is not the nature of the capitalist system that is inherently problematic; rather, it is the failure of individuals to be mindful and resilient in a precarious and uncertain economy. Then they sell us solutions that make us contented, mindful capitalists.
Odell emphasizes inefficiency by way of emphasizing what Cappello calls “wandering ways.” Both writers argue that intellectual meandering is key to real learning and, further, that the ability to take such detours is a skill that many of us must consciously nurture.
College is a place like Las Vegas is a place: a host for the lifestyle it provides.
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