Category Archives: Self-Esteem

October 23, 2017

How To Tell Someone They’re An Asshole

By wise sloth

 

Look, there’s something that everyone who knows you wants to tell you, but they don’t know how to say it, and frankly, they’re a little afraid to because they know how you would react to hearing it. What they want to tell you is that you’re an asshole. There’s no simpler or kinder way of putting it, but that’s what you are. And that’s not meant as an insult. This is constructive criticism, tough love. Look, there’s a lot about you that we like. That’s why we tolerate the behavior that makes you an asshole. We want you around. We just want you to stop being such an asshole all the time. We want to help you grow so that we can all have a better time together. But in order for that to happen, you need to stop being an asshole. And I hate to pull the guilt trip card, but if you really cared about us you would want to get your head straight out of respect for us so that we don’t have to live with an asshole.

Here’s what I mean when I say you’re being an asshole. Basically, it all stems from the fact that you only think about yourself. You’re so focused on the importance of your own wants that you walk all over those around you like a marauding zombie oblivious to the path of destruction you leave behind you everywhere you go. You may or may not realize it, but you’re prone to treating others with a lack of respect. This means you must not understand how important people are, because if you understood how important they are, you wouldn’t treat them the way you do. So before the night is over you should read these blogs that explain the concept your parents must have never taught you:

The Cosmic Perspective

The Value of Life

Karma Ghosts

It’s not hard to treat people well. All you have to do is look at things from other people’s point of view. When you’re standing around talking to people and milling about, stop and look at the people around you. Think about how your actions affect them. Imagine different possibilities of ways you could behave that would make everybody’s lives better.

When you start to do something that you know is going to hurt or inconvenience them, stop and ask yourself what your justification is. Whatever your justification is, I can guarantee it’s wrong. Nobody deserves to be yelled at, belittled, intimidated, screwed over, beaten or killed. I mean, look at you. You’re an asshole. You lower the quality of life for most of the people around you. Should you be yelled at, beaten or killed? No. As many vendettas as people could rightfully claim against you, nobody wants that. We want you to grow. We’d rather you learn from your mistakes than for us to have to punish you for them. The only reason we would punish you anyway is to teach you a lesson. Nobody has to get blood on their hands if you would just realize what an asshole you are and fix that.

You need to look at others the same way. You don’t need to go through life being an asshole to other people. You don’t have to be mean to get what you want. You don’t have to hurt others to get what you want, and you can go out of your way for other people without being rewarded for it and still be happy. In fact, the better you treat others the better you’ll feel about yourself and the happier you’ll be.

Look, I don’t know what happened to you in your past that made you be such an asshole. I’m sure somewhere down the line someone was an asshole to you. Or maybe someone passively neglected your needs the way you neglect others’ today. If you’re in pain then you have everyone’s sympathy. It’s understandable if you’re lashing out at the world out of fear and anger at the things that have happened to you. It’s understandable if nobody ever taught you how to act respectfully towards others. If people knew your whole story, they’d sympathize with you instead of resenting you. They’d understand that you’re not a bad person. You’re just a hurt person.

Or maybe the problem isn’t that you had an unfair life. Maybe the problem is you were pampered and spoiled growing up. If that’s the case you’re still a victim because your life of privilege has crippled you. Your arrogance and sense of entitlement deserve our sympathy, not the resentment we feel towards you.

At any rate, even if we could find the exact excuse that explains your behavior an excuse is not a justification. You can’t keep treating people like they’re less important than you. Your actions are your responsibility, and if you’re old enough to read this then you’re old enough to accept responsibility for your actions.

Nobody expects you to have a religious conversion right here and now. Just spend some time alone in a place you feel comfortable and do some serious soul-searching. Put your ego aside and question yourself objectively. Ask yourself what’s wrong with you instead of waiting for someone else to tell you. Once you figure that out then figure out a reason and a way to fix those flaws. When you’re ready to listen to other people ask them to tell you what they wish you would fix about yourself. When they tell you don’t argue with them. Don’t say a word except to ask for clarification and elaboration. No matter what they say or how off base or rude they are, when they’re done talking say, “Thank you for telling me how you feel.” Then walk away and think about what they said.

If you disagree with anything they said, have the wisdom and humility to assume they might be right. The reason you’re an asshole is because you’ve got something figured out wrong. So when other people tell you that you’re wrong about something, there’s a good chance there’s some truth to what they’re telling you. The point of discussing your flaws isn’t to win an argument. The point is to arrive at truth. Your way of arguing has a history of ending in violence. So you need to learn how to argue effectively before you have another argument. If you can’t take criticism without getting angry at the person in front of you then ask your friends and family to write you a letter explaining why you’re an asshole and what you can do to fix it. When you read those letters, read for truth.

Look, I’m sorry I had to call you an asshole, but you needed to hear it. Now that you’ve heard it you need to face the fact that it’s true and man up and fix that not just for our sake but for your own. And don’t beat yourself up over this, and don’t get mad at the person who sent you this. Take it like an adult. Use it, and move forward so we can all get back to making the most out of our lives. Thank you for listening.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

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October 4, 2017

6 Inaccurate Ways People Judge You

By wise sloth

1. By the possession of a college degree

A college degree tells you surprisingly little about a person. Human resource personnel who hire workers like to say that it shows you can commit to something big and follow through. To this I would respond, have you ever joined the military? Have you ever washed dishes at a restaurant? Have you ever cleaned toilets? Pauper’s work isn’t for the faint of heart. It takes more sacrifice and more grit than practically any other job.

Having a college degree tells me you could afford to go to college. Maybe that’s because you were smart enough to get a scholarship. Maybe you got a sports scholarship and got passed through all your classes unfairly. Maybe you were a spoiled frat boy who drank and fucked your way through 4 blurry years of fun and made D’s on half your classes, and the only reason you got that high of a grade is because you cheated. I don’t know. The fact that you have a college degree doesn’t necessarily tell me anything. I don’t even know what you learned. Every college. You could have gone to a worthless school where you didn’t learn anything. You could have had bumbling teachers who spent all semester talking about themselves. You could have majored in music, and while I would admire your musical talent, that wouldn’t have anything to do with what kind of a person you are. Some of the dumbest people I’ve known have had college degrees. Some of them even had doctorates.

 

"I assure you, an educated fool is more foolish than an uneducated one." Moliere

 

2. By your rank

You could be a judge who is called “your honor,” a military officer who is called “sir,” a clergyman who is called “father,” a doctor is called “Dr.” or a CEO who commands the subservience of everyone who works for you. I don’t care what your rank is because rank is a social construct awarded by people, who are generally fools. Your rank doesn’t tell me anything about who you are, but if you rub your rank in other people’s faces that tells me immediately that your self-worth is based on the opinions of others and the meaningless symbols they give you. Even if you’re the pope or the president. That doesn’t mean anything to me. You may have proven to your followers that you deserve respect, but I’ll judge you on more than your rank.

 

3. By your own level of confidence

How great you believe yourself to be is rarely indicative of your greatness. Likewise, an inferiority complex doesn’t necessarily reflect inferiority. The perfect example is gangstas who drive flashy cars and wave guns around. Nobody displays more confidence than a gangsta rapper, but few people are as petty and ignorant as gangsta rappers. On the other end of the scale, great scientists and artists can be extremely hard on themselves and have a low opinion of themselves even though they’ve accomplished more than most people ever will, but it’s their humility that gives them room to grow and motivates them to constantly improve themselves and their skill. Granted, some people create self-fulfilling prophecies by telling themselves they’re strong, capable people or weak, pathetic people. But your opinion of yourself (in and of itself) doesn’t tell me anything about you.

 

4. Your talent in any one skill

So you’re a great musician, painter, soldier, CEO or medical doctor. Great. Good for you. That tells me that you’re passionate or at least dedicated to one thing, but that’s all it tells me. You could still be the world’s biggest asshole. You could also be a great humanitarian. Your personality could be anything and everything. Just because you’re the best at what you do doesn’t tell me if you deserve respect or pity.

 

5. By your age

Growing old doesn’t necessarily reflect growing up. Some of the oldest people I know are some of the dumbest people I know. There was a time when growing old was a sign of strength and success. Now growing old is easy. There was a time when growing old gave you the power to beat younger people until they feared and respected you. That time is gone as well. Now you have to earn respect by being a good, intelligent, driven, wise person, and that doesn’t come automatically with age. That’s something you have to work on, and that’s something the young can accomplish as well as the old.

 

6. By your wealth

There are a lot of ways to make money. Some involve intelligence, a good work ethic, sacrifice, and tenacity, but owning wealth is not mutually exclusive with success, intelligence or integrity. You can be a mean, stupid screw up and still become wealthy, especially if your parents were wealthy and well connected. In fact, some studies suggest that the more wealthy you are the more likely you are to be a heartless bastard. After all, the only way to get money is to take it from someone else. Thus, the formula for success in a capitalist economy is to pay your workers as little as possible while charging your customers as much as possible. This means the world’s richest men are the world’s best thieves.

Every billionaire is guilty of this, but when judging barely rich people you have to look at them on a case by case basis. On the other end of the spectrum, there are a lot of ways to become poor, and being a virtueless bastard is only one of them. The quickest path to poverty is to be born to poor parents in a country where wages are as low as possible while the cost of goods and housing are as high as possible and the cost of higher education is so expensive it creates a glass ceiling. Regardless of what chance of financial success you’re born into, professional success is not the end-all purpose of human existence.  Jesus and Buddha were penniless, and both of their philosophies centered around how much more important it is to be a good than to be rich and powerful. If you’re going to judge the success of a man’s life, wealth and power are not the primary criteria.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

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October 4, 2017

6 Accurate Ways People Judge You

By wise sloth

 

 

1. By the books you read

You are what you think. You are what you know. The best way to gain knowledge and improve yourself is by reading books. Furthermore, the books you choose to read reflect your values and goals. If someone can tell you every book they’ve ever read you could paint a pretty accurate picture of that person’s mind without knowing anything else about them. When I go into someone else’s house who I barely know the first thing I do is look for their bookshelf. If they don’t have one that automatically tells me something about them. If they do have a bookshelf then the books they choose to keep in their house will tell me more about them.

 

2. By the television shows you watch and the music you listen to habitually

In the same way, books fill and shape your mind, so does television programs and music. The entertainment you choose to put into your head also reflects your values. However, if you told me one movie you’ve watched or one song you’ve heard I couldn’t discern much about you from just that. There could be any number of factors that led to you absorb that entertainment. However, if you all you watch is mindless sitcoms every single night that will tell me a lot about you, not just by the fact that you enjoy mindless stimulation but that you’re not spending your time doing other more intellectual or humanitarian activities. If you never watch documentaries that will tell me you don’t value seeking out knowledge as much as someone who does. If your entire album collection is rap music I could probably predict that you spent an irresponsible amount of money on your car and shoes. If all you listen to is Christian music then I could predict that you’re a Christian. If all you listen to is country music I could predict that you probably have an oversimplified and codependent view on love. If all you listen to is rock and roll I could predict that you value autonomy but express that value in how much you base your identity to rock and roll culture.

 

3. How you react to inconveniences

No action is an island. The way you behave in one situation is how you’re likely to behave in similar circumstances. If you freak out when you can’t find your shoe I can accurately predict that you’ll freak out over other meaningless inconveniences, and this is a sign that you have poor conflict management skills. I wouldn’t date you. If you treat your waitress rudely at a restaurant I can bet that you’ wouldn’t take my feelings into consideration in the future. If you gossip to me then I know you would gossip about me. If you fold under pressure like when you’re traveling abroad then I can predict that you would fold under pressure in other extreme situations. Granted, extreme situations are rare in life. So this won’t affect whether or not I’d choose to have you as a friend, I wouldn’t promote you at work if the decision was up to me.

 

4. By your philosophy on life

If you can tell me your philosophy on life then I don’t need to judge you. You’ll have told me everything I need to know about you in order to understand you. If you don’t have a philosophy then I’ll I know you’re wandering through life aimlessly and are prone to relatively volatile behavior and are swayed by social influence. I can count on one hand how many people I’ve met with a philosophy. If someone tells me their philosophy on life is a one-line, vague answer like, “Love everybody,” then I know that not only do they not have a philosophy but they’re deluded. They may tend to think they’re right about things they know nothing about. If they say, “Kant once said…” or “Nietzsche once said…” then I’ll know that they get all their ideas from other people and don’t think for themselves. At least, they don’t think outside the intellectual paradigm they’ve been handed. Furthermore, they’re likely to be so sure of their intellectual supremacy that they’ll refuse to listen to contradicting ideas and will even condemn anyone who does for being intellectually inferior. Is this a brash over-generalization? Probably. Is it accurate more often than not? In my experience, yes.

 

5. By the questions you ask and the extent that you try to answer them

The amount of answers to life’s questions you understand is directly proportional to the amount of questions you ask. If you never ask questions or devote yourself to answering them then I’ll know you’re an ignorant person who accepts the status quo and will likely defend it. If the only questions you ask are, “What car should I buy?” “What’s on TV?” or “Who’s going to win the World Cup?” then I know that you’re a mindless consumer whore. You might be fun at parties, but your usefulness in life and to other people is on par with the entertaining distractions you can buy at the mall. If you ask questions about politics, psychology, economics and foreign cultures then I can predict that you’ll be an extremely useful and interesting person to have in my life.

 

6. By what you spend your money on

Money is a metaphor. A thousand dollars represents anything you can buy with a thousand dollars. It also represents the amount of time and work you’ve put into earning those dollars. So when you buy something with money you’re trading time and work for a good or service. You’re literally trading your life away. You’re practically paying with blood. So the things you choose to buy directly and immediately reflect your values. They show what you would trade your life for. If you buy a pointlessly expensive car then I can tell automatically that your life is empty. If you buy books then I know that you value growth. If you buy herbal supplements then I can tell that you value life. If you buy vacations I can tell that you’re adventurous.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Self-Esteem

October 4, 2017

5 Reasons Why It’s Bad To Be Conceited

By wise sloth

"The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit." Aesop

1. It reflects a lack of understanding of reality.

It doesn’t matter how much you know, how clever you can think, how successful you are, where you’ve been or what you’ve experienced… you don’t know anything about anything. You don’t know what set the universe in motion. You don’t know what all has been happening for the past 4.7 billion years or where the atoms in your body have been in that time. You don’t know the meaning of life or the secret to creating it. You don’t know how backward your culture is. You don’t know what the leaders of the world are doing. You don’t know what anyone else in the world is thinking. You don’t know how all the technology you use every day works, and there are places in this world you wouldn’t survive a day in. You might have mastered a skill, but you’re only good at a handful of them. There are libraries full of things you don’t know. If you walk around congratulating yourself for how smart you are then you have a flawed perception of reality. Your perception of yourself obviously doesn’t take into account the fact that you don’t know shit about shit.

 

2. Conceit is obvious, and others will look down on you for it. 

While you go around viewing yourself as a golden god everyone around you will view you as a fool, and they won’t want to get close to you or do things for or with you. Not only will they look down on you for overestimating your importance, but they’ll look down on you for being too thick to realize that everyone thinks you’re a fool.

 

3. Conceit is a waste of time.

Being conceited requires you dedicate a certain percentage of your brain power to thinking about how great you are and analyzing how inferior other people are to you. This takes time, and you only have so much time each day to think about who and what you are, where you’re going, how you’re going to get there and what you’re going to do. In between all that you also have to think about how to navigate your way through your daily routine, and at some point you need to take a break from thinking and just enjoy the experience of being here now. If you want to make the most out of your life you need to use your thinking time wisely, and thinking about how much better than everyone else you are is a waste of time. The cost/benefit analysis doesn’t add up. Sure, you get a warm, fuzzy feeling out of it, but it’s a sadistic, short-sighted pleasure. There are greater pleasures in the universe, and there’s more important work that needs to be done for the sake of humanity than patting yourself on the back all day.

If you really did something worth patting yourself on the back for you accomplished it not by thinking about how great you are but by applying your mind to the task in front of you. If you did that and accomplished something great, and now you’re patting yourself on the back about it all day, then you’re not applying your mind to doing more great stuff. If you’re not moving forward then you’re stagnating and regressing. That will still happen even in an ivory tower.

 

4. Conceited people are untrustworthy.

You might be a well-credentialed, professionally successful person, but if you’re so conceited that it shows then that says something about the way you look at life. That says something about how you treat people. The only way to get conceited is to obsess over yourself. Anyone who is conceited is the center of their own universe. You can bet that people like that will almost always put their wants and needs before anyone else’s.

There are about 7 billion people in the world, and there’s more on the way. You only have a short amount of time to find the best people out there to spend your fleeting, irreplaceable life with. Conceited people don’t have what it takes to become true best friends. So as soon as you see someone with their nose up in the air, write them off. They’re not the friend or ally you’re looking for, and if you do end up tangling your lives together then don’t be surprised when it turns out you can’t count on a conceited fool to get your back when you’re in a tight spot.

 

5. You end up hating yourself with the same level of intensity as you love yourself.

Conceit stems from self-obsession. Your narrow mindedness might blind you to a lot of your flaws, but eventually, you’re going to fail to live up to your own unrealistically high expectations, and you’re going to know it. And since you’re so obsessed with your perfection, and you’re so hard on others who fail to live up to those standards, you’re inevitably going to treat yourself the same way. Conceited people beat themselves up worse than anyone. So anytime you see someone making a spectacle out of patting themself on the back, you can be sure their other arm is secretly stabbing their self in the chest. That obsessive self-abuse isn’t mature, responsible or laudable.

Beating yourself up is irresponsible because it has negative real-world consequences. Making the most out of your life requires good mental health. You have to be able to think straight and approach life’s challenges with confidence and concentration. As you overcome bigger and bigger challenges you need to keep the presence of mind to enjoy life along the way. Riding an emotional roller coaster where you praise yourself blind and then beat yourself up can only hold you back from fulfilling your potential.

The more you beat yourself up the worse you’re going to feel awful, which is a travesty in and of itself, but long-term anxiety will yield a whole new batch of psychological problems. Conceit is like a drug. It makes you feel good for a little bit, but if you do it too much you risk losing yourself in a downward spiral of misery. So if you ever catch yourself being conceited, stop yourself.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Self-Esteem

October 4, 2017

11 Ways Not To Define Your Self-Worth

By wise sloth

1: By how much smarter you are than anyone else

It’s impossible to overstate how important knowledge is. The sum of your knowledge shapes your personality and abilities.  So having an encyclopedic amount of knowledge in your brain will truly make you a stronger, more complete person. However, being smart doesn’t warrant being conceited, because being conceited about your intelligence is shortsighted and illogical on multiple levels.

There’s more to know about life than your brain is capable of comprehending. Bragging about being the smartest person in the room is like an ant bragging about being the smartest ant in the hive. All it proves is how little you really understand about life.

Even if you know that you don’t know everything, you may still be tempted to feel better than other people if you’re the foremost expert in your field, but that just means you’re great at one or a few things. Most people are really good at one or two things, and everybody knows about all sorts of things that you never will. Being really good at something doesn’t make you any better than anyone else. All it proves is that you’re doing something while you’re alive, and you were supposed to be doing something anyway. So bragging about knowing something is jerking yourself off for doing the mandatory minimum.

By all means, strive to become a genius. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing, but how far you’ve walked your path doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else. The person next to you is just another animated pile of stardust, on their own, private quest to figure out what the heck they’re doing here.  If you’re smart enough to understand the value of life you wouldn’t place others beneath you because of their IQ level. You would treat everyone with the full respect and appreciation that a living, breathing, conscious animated pile of start dust deserves.

 

 

2: By how less smart you are than everyone else

If you’re not academically inclined, don’t judge yourself contemptibly. You don’t have to be as smart as anyone else to justify your existence. Your worth is not determined by your test scores or anyone else’s. The value of your existence stems from the fact that you’re in a unique position in all of space and time to do something that nobody else can do: become you. You don’t need to match other people’s success. You just need to find what interests you and learn what you can about it for your own personal sake.

 

3: By the size of your bank account

Money has no inherent worth. It’s a symbolic medium of exchange that represents whatever it can be traded for, which is almost everything. Since money is so powerful, the more of it you have, the more people will love, forgive, respect, worship, fear and obey you. If you have enough money to effectively wield the power of a demigod, and people are always treating you like one, eventually you might start identifying as one.

If you don’t have any money, and you have to work like a slave for a rich boss who treats you like a subhuman creature, you might start to feel like a subhuman creature. If you spend long enough unable to afford good food, housing, clothes, transportation or leisure, eventually you may forget or just stop believing that life could be any other way. After you get used to living like a subhuman, you might start to identify as a subhuman.

These assumptions are shortsighted though, because while money affects what you can do in a monetary economy, it doesn’t affect what you inherently, fundamentally are, because what you are, is a mind with a body that grew out of an inexplicable spinning wad of atoms. You’re a phenomenal cosmic miracle mystery, the existence of which raises profound questions and possibilities. The root of your value extends all the way back to before the big ban, but money is just dust in the wind.

While having money/debt can’t define what you are, what you do with it does. Your spending habits are your choices. They’re based on your values and are indicative of your prime prerogative. If you choose to spend your life jerking yourself off over how much money you have and hoarding overpriced designer widgets, instead of solving the world’s problems, you’re going to look like a fool to whatever created you. If you do choose to use your money to solve the fundamental problems facing humanity, there’s no telling how far your actions will echo.

 

 

4: By how much power you have over other people

If you live long enough, you’re going to find yourself in a position of authority over someone else. You’ll have the power to inflict real-world consequences on that person if they don’t obey you, and you’ll be able to point to real-world reasons why your authority is justified. The longer you spend in a position of authority and the more authority you have, the more you’ll get used to it. Eventually, your brain will just take the social hierarchy you and everyone else lives by for granted. If/when that happens, you’re likely to assume that you really do deserve power over people… and that the people beneath you deserve to be controlled by you.

The fact that one person can control another has no bearing on the intrinsic worth of either person. We’re all equal. Our ancestors just taught our elders to teach us customs that stratify humanity into tiers where certain people have control over other people’s lives. These customs don’t reflect the intrinsic nature of reality. They’re just the rules of a game that people made up. Authority is a social contract between equal beings deserving of equal respect.

 

5: By how much power other people have over you

If you live long enough, eventually you’ll find yourself at the bottom of a pyramid-shaped authority structure. Often times the people with power over you will force you to perform gestures of subservience to them like bowing, saluting, addressing them as “Mr.,” “Mr.” “Sir,” “Ma’am,” “Your Honor,” etc. If you get used to treating other people like they’re a higher form of life than you, then eventually you’re likely to start believing it, which is why these customs were created in the first place, to subjugate the subjugate-able. When your superiors have the authority and resources to threaten, punish and control you, it seems all the more real that they’re more than you. But like I said in the previous section, the power structures around you are made up. Your position in society doesn’t define your intrinsic worth.

Make no mistake though, you can’t just go around telling your parents, bosses, and police that their authority is a fraudulent pyramid scheme, and you don’t have to obey them. If you do that they’ll draw on the real world resources available to them to punish you in a very real way. And sometimes they should for your own good. So, sure, fight the system if it’s doing more harm to you than good, but understand that you have to play by the rules to survive. Just try not to let it get you down. You’re worth more than your superiors say you are, and they’re not worth as much as they think they are.

 

6: By your beauty or lack thereof

Beauty isn’t a force of nature woven into the fabric of the universe like gravity, space or light. It’s an idea that exists nowhere else in the universe except the neurons of animals’ brains. It’s not even an original idea. It’s an instinct that was preprogrammed in our brains as a rote survival mechanism. So, on a lot of levels, when we look at something in awe, lust or disgust, it’s nothing personal. You shouldn’t be too flattered or offended by preprogrammed knee-jerk selfish reactions that happen in the brains of tiny animals.

Tiny animals we may be, but we’re still important. If you cut the integumentary system off of a human and look at what’s under our skin, you’ll see a machine so complex it defies all explanation. The design of the human body is as complex as the design of the solar system we live in. Your body is a force of nature strong enough to conquer light and gravity, which in my opinion makes you worth more than a star, more than a galaxy.

On the cosmic scale of things, it’s a non-event if someone (including you) likes or dislikes the way your integumentary system looks. Your base worth is already infinitely valuable. So anyone’s opinion of your is already irrelevant.

Granted, it’s hard to stay optimistic when people call you ugly names and treat you like you’re worth less than them. All I can say is, try to keep in perspective what’s happening and what’s truly important. All that really matters is that you achieve your life goals. That’s how you earn a more personally meaningful life. People’s opinion of you is just one rote side-detail you pass by on the highway of life that leads to your dreams.

 

 

7: By your age or lack thereof

The fact that you just happened to be born before or after someone else has no bearing on the intrinsic value of either person. Being old may give you authority/responsibility over younger people, but that has no bearing on the intrinsic value of either person either. Your personal experiences/accomplishments have no bearing on anyone else’s life other than your own. Nobody owes you anything just because you were born before them and did stuff while you were around. You don’t owe anyone older than you any more honors than they owe you. We’re all equals on different stages of the same journey. There’s simply no sane reason to conclude that the chronological stage of one’s journey has any positive or negative effect on the worth of a separate being.

Without comparing yourself to others, you might still judge yourself for being too young or too old.  If you do, you might want to take a camping trip and rethink how you define your self-worth. People are like trees. Young and old trees don’t suck more than adult trees. They’re all just trees that, when placed next to each other make a beautiful forest. Granted, it’s hard to be so optimistic when you’re getting spanked by your parent or staring at the wall of a retirement home thinking about how you don’t have any time, friends, family, money or energy left. The truth is, sometimes life sucks. That’s the cost of living. Luckily, your comfort level isn’t synonymous with the value of your life.

 

8: By your success

Being successful is useful, and you should feel proud of your accomplishments. However, having success doesn’t change what you are any more than having money, beauty or authority does for all the same reasons. Success isn’t a force of nature. It’s a perception that doesn’t exist anywhere else except in your mind, and your idea of success is different from everyone else’s. So if you believe you’re successful, it’s only because you’ve achieved your personal goals. That doesn’t mean you’re worth more than the day you were born or that you’re worth more than anyone else who hasn’t achieved what you’ve achieved.

Also, just because you’ve achieved something doesn’t mean the thing you achieved matters. There are a lot of people out there constantly succeeding, yet constantly failing to achieve anything meaningful in life.

 

9: By your failures

It’s easy to view your failures as proof that you’re incapable, inferior, defective, and worthless. But again, this is just your perception. The goals you’re failing to achieve may not even be important, and you might be beating yourself up for failing to live a counterproductive lifestyle.

Any goal you want to achieve requires mastery of some skill, and the only way to hone a skill is by practicing. Only by doing things wrong can you learn how to do them right. There’s really no such thing as failure. There’s only the learning process. So if you’re failing at something, that means you’re on the path to mastery. Granted, it might not feel like you’re mastering anything if say, your marriage fails and you lose your house, but your tragedy will teach you lessons that could have prevented your loss if you’d known them earlier. Look, no sports team gets to win every game, but the only way to win after a loss is to keep playing and apply the lessons that cost you so dearly to learn.

Suppose you did screw up big once or twice or a thousand times, and you learned all the lessons you should have from those mistakes… but you still feel guilty for screwing up so bad in the first place at all. If that’s the case, your heart is in the right place, but your perception is shortsighted. You wouldn’t have made the mistakes you made then if you knew the things you knew now. Since you didn’t know the things you know now, there’s no way you could have made the right decisions then. You hadn’t experienced enough of life to know the right thing to do, and the only way you were ever going to learn about life is by experiencing it unprepared. Sure, if you screwed up, then on some level, that’s bad or else it wouldn’t need to be corrected, but on the cosmic scale of things, failure is growth.

 

 

10: By how much you’re mistreated

The subconscious processes in your brain tend to associate the way you’re treated with your self-image. That’s just human nature. Maybe it’s a design flaw, or maybe there’s a higher purpose. We don’t know. However, we do know that if you take a pair of identical twin babies and raise one in an abusive house and another in a loving house, the one in the loving house will grow up with higher self-esteem. So the difference isn’t the individual, it’s the environment.

You can only base your perception of reality on what you’ve learned from your environment, but even though you’re a product of your environment, you’re more than that. You have the capacity to consciously build on what you’ve learned. So if a lifetime of abuse has left you feeling depressed, you should see a mental health professional and learn the facts of life that weren’t handed to you by the people you ended up surrounded by. One of the things a mental health professional will likely teach you is that when people are abusive, they’re usually just projecting their own fears, traumas, stresses and negative self-image. In other words, people don’t treat you according to who you are. They treat you according to who they perceive you to be, which is a shadow of who they see themselves to be.

 

 

11: By what ancient mythology says you’re worth

Humans have invented thousands of religions, but none of them pass every test for truth. They all contain scientifically inaccurate claims, speculation, contradictions, absurdities and moral values that reflect the cultures that produced them. There isn’t one single religion that humans could rediscover and recreate exactly the way it was originally written because they’re all based on the personal experiences, values, prejudices, misunderstandings, and speculations of the original authors.

Every religion humans have ever created contain enough evidence to fit the definition of mythology. Sometimes mythologies teach us that God loves us, but they tend to also teach us that we don’t deserve to be loved by God. They tend to teach that we’re sinners who need to atone for our evil ways. Often times they teach us that humans can be divided into the righteous and the wicked or the high caste and the low caste. These claims can’t be backed up with empirical evidence. They’re just ideas created by people who don’t understand their place in the universe. I’m not saying that I understand our place in the universe, but I do know that you shouldn’t base your self-worth on any belief system which passes the mythology test.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Self-Esteem

October 4, 2017

The Confidence Talk

By wise sloth

Picture of a boy wearing a Super Man cape, holding his arms up triumphantly and looking confidently at the sky

 

Confidence is defined: “a feeling of self-assurance arising from one’s appreciation of one’s own abilities or qualities.”

Self-confidence is defined: “a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgment.”

Do those definitions describe you? Or would you describe yourself as more of a weak, scared, directionless, lonely, worthless failure who is spending your life sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else get what they want, all the while wondering how and why everyone but you seems to have life figured out and possesses the direction, drive, strength, and confidence to make the most out of life? If so, that’s okay. On one level, it’s a sign of mental health.

Everyone is born lost, weak, scared and confused, and nobody ever learns the true meaning of life. Nobody ever gets it all figured out. Nobody really has any idea what the hell we’re doing here. So nobody can prove that what they’re confidently doing with their life is right. The most confident people you’ve ever seen could just be confidently failing at everything that truly matters and making a fool out of themselves in the eyes of God or the cosmos or whatever. I’m not saying that anyone with any shred of confidence is wrong. I’m saying that humility is sanity, and the goal of becoming more self-confident can’t be to cultivate dogmatic faith in your perpetual supremacy because that would just be delusional. So if you feel a little lost, you’re just being realistic.

 

 

Another reason you shouldn’t blame yourself too much for being insecure is because you’ve been indoctrinated to feel inferior and set up to fail by your culture. Your school raised you to assume that if you don’t excel at bureaucratic testing, you’re not worthy of having a good job and thus a good life. Your economic leaders, who don’t pay you enough to live like a real human being, constantly remind you that if you’re not a millionaire it’s because you’re lazy and not worth a dollar. Your bosses teach you that you deserve to have to follow orders. Movies and sitcoms lead you to believe that if you’re not as beautiful and funny as your favorite fictional heroes then you’re barely a real person. Commercials brainwash you to believe that you’re incomplete, and the only way to complete yourself is to buy things you can’t afford with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like. And religions teach you that no matter what you do, you’ll always be a worthless, unenlightened, selfish sinner who doesn’t even deserve the love of your own creator. When you grow up with the whole world telling you that you’re worthless, then your lack of confidence isn’t evidence you failed at what was expected of you; it’s evidence you succeeded at the task you were groomed for.

You were born unprepared, and before you could even get on your feet, the world pushed you down. So your insecurities aren’t completely your fault. However, if someone pushes you down and you don’t do everything in your power to stand back up, it becomes your fault that you’re still down. You’re a product of your environment, but you’re not bound by your environment’s definition of you. The key to freeing yourself from all the self-defeating beliefs the world has planted in your subconscious isn’t by cultivating and exerting raw strength of mind and willpower. When you do that, all you’re really doing is temporarily denying what you already believe about yourself. Your perception of your worth is never going to change until you change the criteria you’re basing your perception of your worth on.

Your objective worth isn’t defined by what people think of you, your rank, your success rate, your body fat percentage, the number of people you’ve slept with, the size of your sex organs, the money in your bank account or the clothes on your back. We’re all inherently, equally, infinitely valuable because we’re all cosmic miracles. You’re the rarest, most elegant, most powerful, and thus the most valuable thing in the known universe. Nothing you can ever do or not do can possibly change that by even a fraction of a degree.

And as long as you can think and move, you can solve almost any problem. You can grow out of any shortcoming as long as you set your mind to the task and never give up, but first, you need to believe your potential is limitless because you’ll only let yourself go as far as you believe you can. That self-assurance comes naturally when you stop defining yourself the way your primitive culture tells you to and you start seeing yourself for the cosmic machine you truly are.

 

 

To this you might reply, am I really that great? Are any of us really that great? After all, you said yourself, we’re all lost, which can be interpreted to mean we’re all failures. And on the cosmic scale of things, we’re all just pond scum festering for a brief moment in a far corner of the universe. We’re just biological waste that floundered briefly, died meaninglessly and was forgotten immediately. So why should anyone be proud of that?

You should be proud of what you are, because you’re part of something bigger than us that’s truly amazing, and the brevity of life makes our existence infinitely valuable while also rendering our fears and failures ultimately meaningless. You’re not an outsider looking in on the universe. You’re part of the grand design, and you should be flattered to be a part of it all. The mysteriousness of life isn’t cause to give up and loathe ourselves. It’s an invitation to explore and be awestruck.

Having said all that, life isn’t just a rosy theory. It’s a cold, hard, stressful place full of brutal consequences. If life keeps kicking you in the teeth, the reason isn’t because you were destined to fail. It’s just that your education is incomplete. You weren’t born as a fully grown, self-actualized, confident, mature adult, but you were born with everything you need to become one. However, unlike aging, personal growth doesn’t happen automatically. Every step you make on that journey has to be done consciously, deliberately and consistently.

If you want the fruit of life, you have to climb the tree of life to get it. If you want to reach the Promised Land, you have to cross a mountain first. The journey isn’t easy, but it’s manageable. You just have to take it one step at a time and never give up. If you’re scared of even starting, the good news is that the longest journey begins with baby steps, and you don’t even have to believe in yourself to take those steps. You can hate yourself, but if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll just walk right out of the darkness despite yourself.

The other good news is that the journey doesn’t actually have an end. Success and failure in life isn’t black and white. It’s not a matter of whether or not you reached the finished line. The way life works is, the more you grow, the better life gets. The less you grow, the worse life is for you. Every step you take is winning. The only question is, how much of your prize are you going to claim?

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Self-Esteem

October 4, 2017

8 Steps To Build Confidence

By wise sloth

1: Get in shape, and get yourself together.

If your body is unhealthy, your entire reality suffers. You’ll have less energy. You’ll have less motivation, which is just as well because you’ll be less mobile. You’ll have more aches and pains, and you’ll be more prone to depression. If you want to live life to its fullest then your body needs to be in optimal working order. Trying to build confidence while maintaining an unhealthy lifestyle is like walking an endless journey with your feet tied together. If you’re guilty of this, you shouldn’t hate yourself. This doesn’t change your intrinsic worth. You’ve already suffered the consequences by not feeling as good as you would have if you were taking better care of your body.

Everyone should recognize that everyone is equal regardless of their health and hygiene. However, our brains are hardwired with instinctual shortcuts that manipulate our subconscious and make us sexually attracted to healthy bodies. For right or wrong, better or worse, the reality of the world we live in is that the healthier you are, the more positively people will respond to you in general. The less healthy you are, the more negatively people will respond to you in general. Even if you’re the epitome of unhealthiness, there will still be people who will love you dearly, but life would have been a lot easier for you in general if you’d been physically fit.

You shouldn’t judge yourself and beat yourself up for being unhealthy. That’s not doing yourself any favors. That’s like making a wrong turn while driving, and then stopping the car and spending the rest of your life living under an overpass abusing drugs and alcohol to numb the guilt and punish yourself for making a wrong turn. This is only as big of a deal as you make it.

If/when you are physically fit, you shouldn’t be arrogant about it. Your physical fitness is good for you, but it doesn’t make you better than anyone else. But you do deserve to be proud of yourself. Your responsible behavior has rewarded you with a better functioning body to enjoy life with longer, and it looks good. It’s a lot harder to be depressed and insecure when you can look at your good looking body in the mirror and feel proud of yourself.  For better or worse, right or wrong, you’ll also find it much, much easier to flirt with the opposite sex when you look like you take care of yourself. You’ll also naturally have more confidence when talking to the opposite sex, because you already know you have what they need.

 

 

2: Educate Yourself

You’re not your clothes. You’re not your rank. You’re not your age. You’re not your skin color. You’re not your nationality. You’re not your penis size. You’re not your khakis. You are your mind. Everything you’ll ever do or say is defined by what’s in your mind. The way you grow and get better at anything is by learning. I can’t stress this enough, knowledge is the key to everything. If you’re not learning either from a book, a video or experiences on the streets, then you’re not growing. If you’re not learning then you’re stagnating. If you never learn anything, you’ll just stay a lost, confused, helpless child your entire life. Tragically, it takes just as much time and effort to stay stupid as it does to grow up. You have to do something every day for the rest of your life, you may as well do what makes you stronger and your life better.

The more you know about everything the better you’ll be at everything, but probably the most important thing you can teach yourself is how to solve problems. Anytime anything goes wrong in your life it’s because there’s a problem. The better you are at solving problems, the less problems there will be in your life, and the easier it’ll be for you solve them and move on. If you don’t know the first thing about problem-solving, then you shouldn’t be surprised if your life feels like one long string of problems. It’s not because fate is out to get you. Fate gave you the tools to solve your problems. You just need to use them. The better you get at solving problems, the more naturally confident you’ll be, because you’ll know that you have the ability to solve whatever problems life throws at you.

 

 

3: Know Yourself. Define your wants. Define your values.

If you have no idea who you are, what you believe, what you stand for or what you want out of life then you should feel directionless, because you are. It should also come as no surprise that you feel insecure about your self-worth because your perception of reality has to be based on something. If you don’t consciously define yourself then your environment will subconsciously define you by default. That’s when you end up basing your self-worth and life goals on what bullies, celebrities, and corporations tell you.

You don’t have to live that way. You can effortlessly and confidently stand up for yourself against all the naysayers in the world, but before you can stand for or against anything, you have to know who you are and what you believe. You have to understand your strengths to appreciate them, and you have to understand your weaknesses so that you can work within them. If you believe that you have to eliminate all your weaknesses before you can be confident, you’re wrong. Nobody in the world can succeed at everything, and nobody should. You just need to figure out what’s important to you and then figure out how you can achieve your goals using the gifts you have. Once you know what you want, and you’re firmly on the path towards getting it, then it becomes irrelevant how anyone else feels about you. You’re already making a B-line to where you want to be. There’s nothing anyone can tempt, threaten or distract you with. When nobody has any leverage over you then you have no reason to fear them, and you don’t have to work up the strength to stand up for yourself.

The first step every single person on the planet should take on the path to self-discovery is to complete a professional personality/aptitude test. Do an internet search for life skills or professional development centers in your local area and find one that offers personality/aptitude tests. They’re not exactly cheap, but it’s the best investment you’ll ever make in your life. It’ll tell you things about yourself that you never knew. It’ll show you that your quirks aren’t failures; they’re what make you unique. They define your beauty and what you’re good at… and what you shouldn’t waste your time pursuing. They point the way to finding your own personal happiness. That’s priceless.

Once you have a rough idea of who you are, what you’re capable of and what you want, then the next step is to further explore who you are by doing more of what you like and less of what you don’t. Go out and find people who are like you, study the things you’re interested in, experiment with new hobbies. As you do these things you’ll further refine who you are and what you want. The clearer the path before you comes, the less strength it takes to stand up for yourself and follow your own path. You won’t have to stress over picking or justifying which fork in the road to take. The way will just be clear to you, and you’ll find yourself confidently running towards your destiny.

 

 

4: Love yourself.

You’re never going to allow yourself to improve your inner-self or your external circumstances if you hate yourself because you’ll have no motivation to succeed. In fact, a negative self-image becomes your motivation to destroy yourself, and your low expectations for yourself inevitably become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t love yourself then your future always looks hopeless no matter how good your life is. When you love yourself, then the future always looks hopeful regardless of what’s going on in your life. When you love yourself for who you are, your confidence is inherently tamper-proof. It won’t matter when you fail or someone treats you badly. If you base your self-worth solely on the fact that you’re an amazing, elegant, beautiful miracle then you’ll experience all the negative events in your life, not as soul-crushing mini-apocalypses, but as learning experiences at best or the cost of living at worst. But the more you love yourself, the less you even notice life’s little grievances, because you’re too busy celebrating life.

Many people who hate themselves were abused, abandoned and unloved at some point in their lives. If you’re one of those people, understand that it’s natural to respond to abuse and abandonment by feeling depressed and insecure, but I promise you that there’s more to you than what you’ve been led to believe. You deserve to love yourself. I can’t convince you to love yourself in a few paragraphs, but a licensed mental health professional can walk you through the steps of healing your emotional traumas. Therapy might be expensive, but healing your wounds will make you happier than buying new toys or doing more drugs. Seeking help isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of resourcefulness. It may be scary, but it doesn’t cost anything to have a consultation with a therapist and find out what kind of help is available.

 

 

5: Acknowledge your successes, and practice accomplishments. View failures as practice, not apocalypses.

If you have access to a computer and are smart enough to understand everything I’m saying then you’re not a failure. Your mind (and thus your potential) is already greater than most of the people who have ever existed. If you have low self-esteem, you’re not giving yourself enough credit for all the little, accumulative successes in your life. You’ve done many great things, and you’re blessed in many ways. But don’t take my word for it. Write your own gratitude list, and try to make a habit of taking time to be thankful for the good things in your life instead of focusing so much on the bad things. The more acutely aware of your strengths, successes, and blessing, the more naturally confident you’ll feel. The more obsessively you count all your perceived weaknesses, failures and setbacks, the easier it will be to feel depressed.

If you’re having difficulty thinking of 5 things you’re grateful for, don’t worry, that can be fixed, but the only way your list is going to get longer is for you to take action and succeed at more things. Big successes are built on little successes. You don’t have to change the world today to feel good about yourself. Seek out little things you can do to improve your life. Find little challenges for you to conquer. Accomplish whatever is within your ability. It’ll give you something good to feel about today, and you can be confident about the fact that you’re moving forward… even if you fail at everything you attempt.

Failing at accomplishing a goal is only failure if you don’t learn anything from your experience. If you do, that’s not failing. That’s practice. You’ll never become an expert at anything unless you fail over and over again. If you keep practicing and allowing yourself to “fail” without beating yourself up over it then eventually you’ll understand what works and what doesn’t. Then succeeding is just a matter of going through the steps you’ve learned. Then young people will look up to you with admiration and want to know your secret to success.

 

6: Simplify your life, and don’t set yourself up for failure.

There’s not enough time in our short lives to experience and master everything. Succeeding at life can’t be a matter of doing, having and being everything. That would be impossible, but you have to do something. You’ll experience the most meaning and happiness by doing, having and being what matters most to you, personally. This requires you to define and work towards your goals, but it also requires you to eliminate distractions and obstacles in your life. If you live in a madhouse full of toxic people who bring you down, and you spend three hours every day stuck in traffic listening to mindless radio stations on your way to a job that you hate, then of course you’re going to be stressed, disoriented, impatient, frazzled and generally not your best self. You can’t be your most confident when your life revolves around coping with drama and misery.

The solution to your gridlocked life isn’t to buck up and work harder and complain less. That’s just becoming better at drudgery. The solution to your problem is to eliminate avoidable problems in your life. This may require you to move, change jobs, change companionship and/or change your purchasing habits. These kinds of changes can be intimidating, and they shouldn’t be made flippantly, but if something is holding you back, then you’re just setting yourself up for perpetual failure by keeping it in your life. If you choose to keep creating the conditions for failure then there’s nothing else I can tell you to help you build confidence other than, “Stop doing that.”

 

 

7: Understand that courage and confidence aren’t mutually exclusive.

One summer when I was a teenager I visited a lake with tall cliffs around it that people were jumping off of into the water. Enticed by adventure, I climbed the cliff and stood at the edge. As I looked down at the water, my legs felt weak, and my stomach roared with butterflies. I wanted to jump, but I was terrified. So I stood there for five long minutes searching my soul for the courage to leap. As my friends taunted me, I knew I was running out of time to prove I wasn’t a coward, but I hadn’t found the right thoughts to get me over the edge.

Finally, it dawned on me that it didn’t matter if I found the right argument because even if I did, the end result would be the same: My brain would stop chattering long enough for my feet to move forward. In that moment I realized all I had to do was shut my brain up for one second and act. So I did, and I jumped off that dizzyingly high precipice. I accomplished something that took significant courage without using courage. Once I got over the initial fear, I climbed back up the cliff and jumped again. The second jump was almost as scary as the first, but it took a lot less time to execute. The next summer I was doing backflips off the cliff fearlessly.  That’s how overcoming fear works. You learn to believe in yourself by doing the things you never believed possible.

 

 

8: Don’t invent excuses.

You’re the only enemy standing between you and self-confidence, and the strongest weapon in your enemy’s arsenal is excuses. There’s no argument you anyone can use to beat an excuse because excuses are logic-proof. They’re based on circular reasoning and create self-fulfilling prophecies which validate their premise. All of your excuses may sound perfectly logical on paper. They may look justified, but they’re based on the flawed assumption that you’re a passive victim of life who isn’t in control of the most powerful machine in the known universe.

Your excuses may help give your life structure and explain away all the bad things that happen to you, but they’re not really doing you any favors. They’re imaginary boundaries that you made up and exist nowhere else in the universe except your mind. They only limit those who make them. There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have an excuse for everything, and those who don’t have to make excuses. Neither of those types were born that way; they both chose to be.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Growing up and Becoming You
Happiness and Peace
Self-Esteem
Health
Drugs and Addiction
Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Leadership and Authority
My Tweets About Self-Help

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Self-Esteem

September 28, 2017

Tweets by The Wise Sloth #8: Practice, Failing and Determination

By wise sloth

Cartoon image of a sloth sitting on a mountain top. He is wearing a yellow robe. His head is bowed with his eyes shut, and beams of light shine from around his head. With his left arm, he is holding one finger in the air. Above him are the words, "Tweets by The Wise Sloth."

Experience has taught me that you only have two options in life: 1. Kick life in the balls. 2. Get kicked in the balls by life.

Focus on what you’re doing, not what you want. You climb a mountain by taking steps, not by obsessively staring at the peak.

The fastest, easiest, best shortcut to climbing a mountain, still usually involves climbing a mountain.

Failure = practice.

Failing is practicing, and practicing is succeeding.

When you’re learning a skill, don’t worry about failing. Just worry about not quitting.

All things are possible to those who turn off the TV, get up off their ass, go do something and never quit.

Growing experiences tend to come with growing pains. Accept it. Embrace it. Get on with it.

If you’re going to spend the next hour or so feeling depressed about how empty and hopeless everything is, do it while exercising. #LifeHack

You can’t become a pro until you’ve made all the rookie mistakes.

The more mistakes you make doing something, the more qualified you become to master that thing.

Just because you haven’t done something doesn’t mean you can’t do that thing.

When you feel bored and uninspired, clean your house. You need to do it anyway. You have the time, and you’ll feel good about it afterward.

Whenever I fail at something, I imagine myself as a young Babe Ruth striking out.

If you do one thing all day, every day, it’s only a matter of time until you become professionally good at that thing.

Success requires energy. Does your lifestyle boost or drain your energy? There might be a correlation.

Sticking to a decision requires a reason, not willpower.

You can get your video game character to level 60 or your real self in real life to level 60. Pick one.

The best competitors show up to very few competitions you compete in. Sometimes bad competitors win because they’re the only people there.

We’re born with potential, not talent. Abnormally high talent comes only from abnormally frequent, persistent study and practice.

 

If you enjoyed these Tweets, you’ll also like these:

My Tweets About Self-Help
My Tweets About Romance
My Tweets About Philosophy 
My Tweets About Religion
My Tweets About Politics
My Tweets About Economics
My Tweets About Pop Culture

Leave a comment   |  tags: | posted in Self-Esteem, Tweets

September 28, 2017

Tweets by The Wise Sloth #7: Excuses and Complaining

By wise sloth

Cartoon image of a sloth sitting on a mountain top. He is wearing a yellow robe. His head is bowed with his eyes shut, and beams of light shine from around his head. With his left arm, he is holding one finger in the air. Above him are the words, "Tweets by The Wise Sloth."

If you’ve got time to come up with excuses, you’ve got time to come up with solutions.

By all means, complain when life sucks, but complain while you’re doing something about it.

At some point you have to stop bitching about the hand you were dealt and get on with playing the game the best you can with what you got.

There tends to be an inverse correlation between the amount of time you spend complaining and the amount of time you spend doing something.

“I did the best I could,” is usually an excuse used by people who didn’t do the best they could.

It’s surprising how many times you can have an excuse that sounds perfect on paper but doesn’t really apply or mean shit in reality.

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who have an excuse for everything, and those who don’t have to make excuses.

You can’t move your life forward by making excuses dismissing action, but you can by making excuses dismissing your excuses against acting.

The more you complain about a problem, the less you’re probably doing anything about it.

Nothing was ever built on excuses.

Your dreams are waiting for you to stop making excuses.

I’ve watched excuses ruin more people’s lives than anything else.

Today’s excuses become tomorrow’s regrets.

You don’t hear maggots at the bottom of trash bags asking why life isn’t fair. Well, we’re maggots at the bottom of a cosmic trash bag.

 

If you enjoyed these Tweets, you’ll also like these:

My Tweets About Self-Help
My Tweets About Romance
My Tweets About Philosophy 
My Tweets About Religion
My Tweets About Politics
My Tweets About Economics
My Tweets About Pop Culture

Leave a comment   |  tags: | posted in Self-Esteem, Tweets

September 28, 2017

Tweets by The Wise Sloth #5: Arrogance and Insecurity

By wise sloth

Cartoon image of a sloth sitting on a mountain top. He is wearing a yellow robe. His head is bowed with his eyes shut, and beams of light shine from around his head. With his left arm, he is holding one finger in the air. Above him are the words, "Tweets by The Wise Sloth."

Everyone knows something you don’t, even the greatest fool you loath.

People will respect you more if you act like their equal than if you grovel at their feet and give them higher honors than you give yourself.

The more you think you know, the less it proves you do.

If nobody gets you, it’s more likely because you’re an arrogant idiot surrounded by rational people, than everybody else is evil and stupid.

90% of the times you apologize for your flaws, people would like you more if you just owned them.

Everyone knows more about something than anyone else. Nobody knows squat about everything. Our minds are as unique as our faces.

The bigger the ego, the smaller the mind.

You don’t over apologize because you’re obsessed with other people’s comfort but because you’re obsessed with projecting your insecurities.

The amount you are more or less stupid than anyone else is fractions of a degree.

Everyone detests arrogant people. Know that when you walk around acting like you’re better than everyone…everyone is looking down on you.

Everyone whose opinion of you, you worry about will die one day. Then their opinion won’t matter one damn bit, as it never did.

Everyone is smarter than the average person about at least one thing.

Bragging is far more likely to convince people you’re a pompous ass than a bad ass.

The difference between confident and cocky is that the first means, “I got it covered.” The second says, “I’m better than you.”

The more often you brag about how smart you are, the more wrong you probably are.

The more you tell people how much smarter you are than most people, the more likely you’re just dumb and arrogant.

Every time you try to sound smart, you just sound like you’re trying to sound smart, which smart people know smart people don’t do.

Nobody you knew yesterday is the same person today.

Nobody wants you to impress them. They just want you to entertain and flatter them.

Patting yourself on the back is like shaking your dick after peeing. If you do it more than twice, you’re jerking off.

When anyone starts jerking themselves off about how smart they are to you, stop them and say, “Hey, we all got supercomputers in our heads.”

 

If you enjoyed these Tweets, you’ll also like these:

My Tweets About Self-Help
My Tweets About Romance
My Tweets About Philosophy 
My Tweets About Religion
My Tweets About Politics
My Tweets About Economics
My Tweets About Pop Culture

Leave a comment   |  tags: | posted in Self-Esteem, Tweets

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