As I read the book “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.” I am coming across a few common themes that I’ve learned before, which makes me think that these principles and practices have some validity to them. If something works consistently, it must be worth keeping them in mind.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about simplicity and philosophy, I’ve noticed that every now and then it does me good to slow down and think about where I am headed in life and what I want to get out of it. Philosophy helps us to think, to learn how to live, and stoicism – a particular school of philosophy – does this in a way that resonates deeply with me. In addition to stoicism, I’ve also been relating to the teachings of Eastern religion, particularly Buddhism, which I’ve been reading about quite intensely over the past couple of months. Add to this my passion for personal development and my tendency to spend a lot of time listening to modern-day thinkers like Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, Jordan Peterson, Ryan Holiday, and Tim Ferriss, I’ve gathered quite a lot of information from many different places.
Interestingly, as I live my life, learn and consolidate my knowledge, I’ve been noticing the re-appearance of certain subjects and principles, and in this blog post that’s exactly what I’ll try to highlight. I want to highlight a few areas/ideas that I see shared by modern-day thinkers, Buddhism, and Stoicism.
Firstly: Self-Mastery
One of the things that the author mentions in the book is the importance of self-mastery and self-discovery. As someone who reads a lot of personal development, philosophy, and spiritual books, it is not the first time I read about the importance of knowing oneself. Self-mastery is a broad concept and can be interpreted in many different ways. I will use it in the sense of self-awareness. Self-awareness is being aware of what you like, and don’t like, what works for you, your history, your talents, your mission, and your weaknesses. It simply means knowing yourself. Learning about the importance of self-awareness made immense sense to me, and I have started to see its importance as I grow up, make mistakes and learn from them.
In a world surrounded by social media, we are always looking at what other people have, their accomplishments, and their highlights, and this causes us immense suffering. At least that’s the effect it has on me. If we don’t know ourselves well, we are easily manipulated into walking down various paths. If we don’t know what we value, what we truly enjoy, our talents and weaknesses, we will not be able to make wise decisions in our lives and the consequence is that we end up regretting them. Let me give an example, imagine you are talking to a friend who is trading stocks and he is telling you how great he is doing, how he loves his job, how he is making great money, and how his life is going great. So you think “Hmm, trading stocks is sounding really good, maybe that’s what I should do. Maybe that will fill the hole I’m feeling.” However, what you might be missing is that perhaps your friend has the perfect personality traits to be a trader, and his goals for the future will be met through that path. However, let’s say you are someone who is very risk-averse, wants a more stable job, and wants to have a more community-oriented job. With this personality and goals, you will be miserable as a stock trader. The solution is that you have to take stock of yourself (no pun intended).
We have to know our values and our principles because that will help us make choices that will bring us joy and meaning. This problem is elevated with social media since people use it to talk about the highlights of their jobs, they sell you the dream without the work. “Hey everyone, I make £200K a month on my ECommerce business. With this amount of money, I don’t stress about paying bills, I provide for my family and I can provide my children the best experiences the world has to offer.” Even if I’m a risk-averse person and want to have a community-oriented job, this still feels like a great opportunity. But it’s a trap, an illusion.
We’re all looking for different things and we all enjoy different environments. Some people love jobs that involve a lot of talking and presentations while others would much rather stay behind a desk in a comfortable chair coding software and have only minimal conversations.
This is what I’ve done to take stock of myself: Write down what you enjoy doing, what you are good at, and things you don’t like doing. Think about past experiences or job positions where you felt stressed and overworked and write down why so you can keep them astray.
Jordan Peterson talks about this at length, he is a big proponent of knowing our personality and thinking about what would make our lives meaningful. The stoics were also big on self-mastery, particularly on being able to control our emotions – Seneca has a whole essay on anger. Buddhists also aim to achieve this clarity through meditation, where we sit still and observe our minds at work. There are even some times of meditation that are all about improving our knowledge of ourselves, where we meditate on what brings us joy, and what brings us frustration, and that clarity is critical to moving forward in life.
Secondly: The quality of your thoughts determines the quality of your life.
I don’t remember when I first learned about this but this is something I often forget to act on and every time I re-read about it I practice it (in a way that I’ll show you in a second) and it works – I immediately feel more joyful. In the book, the author compares our minds to a garden. Our positive thoughts are beautiful flowers, and our negative thoughts are weeds that try to take over the garden. I think all of us struggle with the presence of weeds daily, it’s hard to stay positive all day considering the amount of negative thoughts and worry that we let into our minds. Negative thoughts can be anything from worry to beating ourselves up, to envy, or greed – anything that doesn’t bring us joy and brings us down. The author suggests we replace negative thoughts with positive ones, immediately. “We can’t even have the luxury of allowing a single negative thought, not a single one.” That seems a bit of an impossible task but even if we fall short, we are at least walking in the right direction.
“Stand guard at the gate of your mind” Jim Rohn used to say. Awesome advice.
So the practice is as simple as paying attention to your thoughts. Whenever a negative thought enters your mind try to immediately replace it with a positive one. You can try to understand where the thought came from but flip it on its head into something positive. So if all of a sudden you remember you have to do something and you feel stressed about it, try to realize that feeling stressed doesn’t help with anything, it doesn’t let you go back in time nor does it skip to a time in the future when you’ve done the thing that needs doing. Breathe and be optimistic – your mind just magically reminds you of something you need to do, so you will get the thing done, it’s all under control, and it’s all good. Write it down so you can do it later or do the thing right away and go on with your day. It’s often not as big of a deal as our reaction makes it seem.
Nobody likes to be around someone who is always negative, always complaining about something and mad about the world. We all know that is a state of mind to avoid, so I don’t think it’s necessary to go deep into this. The people who are often the most positive ones, the most optimistic and patient, are the ones who will have more joyful lives. The stoics used to say that the only thing we have control over is our minds, and luckily, that’s all we need to live a joyful life.
Thirdly: Our response to things is what matters.
This is something that I first learned when I started reading the works of philosophers like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. These philosophers follow the philosophy of stoicism which I’d say has this principle as its foundation – the stoics say that what matters is not the event itself but rather how we interpret the event. This is a major paradigm shift and requires some time to digest, but it’s got validity to it. To help me better understand this concept I remind myself of how some things in my life, at the moment they happened, seemed terrible and intrinsically bad, however, looking back on them now I see they opened a lot of opportunities and had they not happened, my life wouldn’t be as it is now.
If we always interpret events with a positive outlook and optimism, we can never be defeated. That’s the main message, and we always have that choice. It’s really the only choice we have as human beings, we can’t dictate what things happen but we can dictate how we react to things. And what are all our days, weeks, months, and years but a series of things happening that require our interpretation?
- A job doesn’t work out – Okay, this is an opportunity to find a job I truly care about so it’s great I’ll have some time to really think deeply about the next job I want to get.
- Technology is super slow – Cool, I could improve on my patience, I don’t want to be the kind of person whose day is ruined if the laptop takes 10 seconds longer to reload a page.
- Someone does something that annoys you – Good, this is a good opportunity to establish limits and to improve on my confrontational skills.
- You’re trying to lose weight and someone offers you cake – good, this is an awesome opportunity to test my willpower. I’ll be stronger for this.
Everything that happens is an opportunity for growth and to strengthen our principles. Everything. The stoics say “What stands in the way becomes the way.” So every time we feel anger, envy, impatience, or sadness, we must analyse the cause of the feeling, look at our situation, and think “What stands in the way, becomes the way”. There’s no way around it. If the road is blocked by a huge rock, we have to remove the rock that’s standing there, and we have to commit time and energy to move it out of the way, otherwise, we won’t get to where we want.
In the book, Robin Sharma says “No matter what happens to you in your life, you alone have the capacity to choose your response to it. When you form the habit of searching for the positive in every circumstance, your life will move into its highest dimensions.”
It couldn’t be more true.
I think these 3 ideas are core ideas behind philosophy and personal development. I also think these skills take a lifetime to master, and there’s no time better than today to start working on them.
All the best,
Martim
