Reward Yourself After Work Quotes

If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point that you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all; go at once and seek torments for yourself, as if you yourself were guilty of their wickedness. Take these torments upon yourself and suffer them, and your heart will be eased, and you will understand that you, too, are guilty, for you might have shone to the wicked, even like the only sinless One, but you did not. If you had shone, your light would have lighted the way for others, and the one who did wickedness would perhaps not have done so in your light. And even if you do shine, but see that people are not saved even with your light, remain steadfast, and do not doubt the power of the heavenly light; believe that if they are not saved now, they will be saved later. And if they are not saved, their sons will be saved, for your light will not die, even when you are dead. The righteous man departs, but his light remains. People are always saved after the death of him who saved them. The generation of men does not welcome its prophets and kills them, but men love their martyrs and venerate those they have tortured to death. Your work is for the whole, your deed is for the future. Never seek a reward, for great is your reward on earth without that: your spiritual joy, which only the righteous obtain. Nor should you fear the noble and powerful, but be wise and ever gracious. Know measure, know the time, learn these things. When you are alone, pray. Love to throw yourself down on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it, tirelessly, insatiable, love all men, love all things, seek this rapture and ecstasy. Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears. Do not be ashamed of this ecstasy, treasure it, for it is a gift from God, a great gift, and it is not given to many, but to those who are chosen.

Well, that's pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that's a tragedy, that's a crime―because you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to obey, and just proceed through the material in whatever way they require. And in fact, most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they've been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years―that's the way I did it, for example. Like, you're told by some stupid teacher, "Do this," which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you work your way through and they give you your letters: an awful lot of education is like that, from the very beginning. Some people go along with it because they figure, "Okay, I'll do any stupid thing that asshole says because I want to get ahead"; others do it because they've just internalized the values―but after a while, those two things tend to get sort of blurred. But you do it, or else you're out: you ask too many questions and you're going to get in trouble. Now, there are also people who don't go along-and they're called "behavior problems," or "unmotivated," or things like that. Well, you don't want to be too glib about it―there are children with behavior problems but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don't like to conform, or just want to go their own way. And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I've taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don't take your word for it. And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they're a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself. That's what real education would be about, in fact.

We're all creatures of complex needs and desires. The only certain thing in a romantic relationship is that you will both change, and one morning you will wake up, go the mirror, and see a stranger. You will have what you wanted, and discover you want something different. You think you know who you are, and then you'll surprise yourself. In all the choices in front of you, Restless, one thing is clear: love is not something to be thrown away lightly. There was something about this man, beyond coincidences of timing and opportunity, that drew you to him. Before you give up on the marriage . . . give him a chance. Be honest with him about the needs that aren't being met, the dreams you want to pursue. Let him find out who you really are. Let him help you in the work of opening that door, so the two of you can finally meet after all these years. How do you know he can't satisfy your emotional needs? How can you be sure he doesn't long for magic and passion just as you do? Can you state with absolute certainty that you know everything there is to know about him? There are rewards to be gained from the effort, even if it fails. And it will take courage as well as patience, Restless. Try everything you can . . . fight to stay with a man who loves you. Just for now, put aside the question of what you might have had with someone else, and focus on what you can have, what you do have, at this very moment. I hope you'll find new questions, and that your husband might be the answer.

Having a fear of failure means you believe that even the smallest error could be evidence that you are a worthless and awful person. Having a fear of being imperfect means that it is difficult for you to accept yourself as you are—imperfect and, therefore, perfectly human—and so you interpret any criticism, rejection, or judgment by others as a threat to your very tenuous grasp on perfection. Having a fear of impossible expectations means fearing that even after you’ve worked hard and achieved the goals set for you, your only reward will be continually higher and more difficult goals to achieve, with no rest and no time to savor your achievements.

We often want quick answers, quick results, instant rewards, and that’s normal in our high tech, instant, Google driven world. To take that first step towards reaching a goal or realizing a dream, knowing that there will perhaps be a thousand more steps to follow in order to make it happen, can be daunting. It’s simple and yet complicated. The simple part of achieving success is that it just takes work. For me, staying focused on my goals and envisioning my dreams every day, makes the work flow almost on its own. The hard part is the mindset, and to not self sabotage, because you don’t believe in yourself. We often think we can’t achieve our wildest dreams or that we are somehow incapable, and then we never, ever take that first step. I never felt that I was a very confident person, but with the support of some wonderful people and my own inner fire, I kept going. The hardest part after working and working, was to actually accept that I deserved success. Success in itself is kind of scary too, as it comes with having to be responsible, and not flake out. The people who have supported you and invested in you deserve that. I guess what I am trying to say is that if you want something, you have to take action. A little step towards it every day. Then there is a reason to feel accomplished every day. Match your energy and vibration with what you envision. Believe. You deserve success, so go for it.

Some gifted people have all five and some less. Every gifted person tends to lead with one. As I read this list for the first time I was struck by the similarities between Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities and the traits of Sensitive Intuitives. Read the list for yourself and see what you identify with: Psychomotor This manifests as a strong pull toward movement. People with this overexcitability tend to talk rapidly and/or move nervously when they become interested or passionate about something. They have a lot of physical energy and may run their hands through their hair, snap their fingers, pace back and forth, or display other signs of physical agitation when concentrating or thinking something out. They come across as physically intense and can move in an impatient, jerky manner when excited. Other people might find them overwhelming and they’re routinely diagnosed as ADHD. Sensual This overexcitability comes in the form of an extreme sensitivity to sounds, smells, bright lights, textures and temperature. Perfume and scented soaps and lotions are bothersome to people with this overexcitability, and they might also have aversive reactions to strong food smells and cleaning products. For me personally, if I’m watching a movie in which a strobe light effect is used, I’m done. I have to shut my eyes or I’ll come down with a headache after only a few seconds. Loud, jarring or intrusive sounds also short circuit my wiring. Intellectual This is an incessant thirst for knowledge. People with this overexcitability can’t ever learn enough. They zoom in on a few topics of interest and drink up every bit of information on those topics they can find. Their only real goal is learning for learning’s sake. They’re not trying to learn something to make money or get any other external reward. They just happened to have discovered the history of the Ming Dynasty or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and now it’s all they can think about. People with this overexcitability have intellectual interests that are passionate and wide-ranging and they study many areas simultaneously. Imaginative INFJ and INFP writers, this is you. This is ALL you. Making up stories, creating imaginary friends, believing in Santa Claus way past the ordinary age, becoming attached to fairies, elves, monsters and unicorns, these are the trademarks of the gifted child with imaginative overexcitability. These individuals appear dreamy, scattered, lost in their own worlds, and constantly have their heads in the clouds. They also routinely blend fiction with reality. They are practically the definition of the Sensitive Intuitive writer at work. Emotional Gifted individuals with emotional overexcitability are highly empathetic (and empathic, I might add), compassionate, and can become deeply attached to people, animals, and even inanimate objects, in a short period of time. They also have intense emotional reactions to things and might not be able to stomach horror movies or violence on the evening news. They have most likely been told throughout their life that they’re “too sensitive” or that they’re “overreacting” when in truth, they are expressing exactly how they feel to the most accurate degree.

…we use the dopaminergic power of the happiness of pursuit to motivate us to work for rewards that come -after we are dead- depending on your culture, this can be knowing that your nation is closer to winning a war because you’ve sacrificed yourself in battle, that your kids will inherit money because of your financial sacrifices, or that you will spend eternity in paradise. It is extraordinary neural circuitry that bucks temporal discounting enough to allow (some of) us to care about the temperature of the planet that our great-grandchildren will inherit. Basically, it’s unknown how we humans do this. We may merely be a type of animal, mammal, primate, and ape, but we’re a profoundly unique one.

Keep in mind the rewards ahead. Workouts provide awesome internal rewards; after a long dance practice or gym workout I always have more energy and a clearer mind, and I’m able to focus on things I need to get done. But we all know it’s hard to remember that great feeling when you’re headed off to the gym, dreading the work ahead. Conjuring that ecstatic state of mind you know you’ll find later can be a tremendous motivator. If you prefer external rewards, motivate yourself with baby steps every day to hit a bigger long-term goal--one with a luxurious reward as your prize. Once you’ve reached it, allow yourself to follow through with whatever reward it was that motivated you, whether it’s a great glass of wine or a Sunday movie marathon.

Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to the world after we die. If self-interests were the primary source of meaning in life, then it wouldn’t matter to people if an hour after their death everyone they know were to be wiped from the face of the earth. Yet, it matters greatly to most people. We feel that such an occurrence would make our lives meaningless. The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater; a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror, but if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said Royce, solves the paradox of our ordinary existence, by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves, the will which delights to do this service, and is not thwarted, but enriched and expressed in such service… Above the level of self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they suggest the existence in people of a transcendent desire to see and help other beings achieve their potential. As our time winds down, we all seek comfort in simple pleasures; companionship, everyday routines, the taste of good food, the warmth of sunlight on our faces. We become less interested in the awards of achieving and accumulating and more interested in the rewards of simply being. Yet, while we may feel less ambitious, we also have become concerned for our legacy, and we have a deep need to identify purposes outside ourselves that make living feel meaningful and worthwhile. In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments, which after all is mostly nothing much, plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments; the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute by minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self, which is absorbed in the moment, your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery, but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out.

How to stick with it. Inertia is a real thing. Momentum will build. When you do something often enough it becomes a ritual, like going to church or brushing your teeth. You will eventually recondition your body to crave working out and eating the right foods. The circuitry can be rewired. There’s the trigger, the process, and the reward. The key is to get it to the point where it’s such a habit, you want to do it. Let’s take a real-life example that all of us have faced: we haven’t been to the gym in a while, we feel sluggish, and we don’t want to go. The idea of lacing up the sneakers and hitting the gym feels like torture. The trick is to remind yourself that at the end of that workout, your mind actually feel pleasure. It feels good. Sometimes we get brainwashed into thinking that Gym = Pain, Candy = Pleasure when really it’s the opposite: without fail, our bodies feel better after they’ve been in motion.

Each purpose, each mission, is meant to be fully lived to the point where it becomes empty, boring, and useless. Then it should be discarded. This is a sign of growth, but you may mistake it for a sign of failure. For instance, you may take on a business project, work at it for several years, and then suddenly find yourself totally disinterested. You know that if you stayed with it for another few years you would reap much greater financial reward than if you left the project now. But the project no longer calls you. You no longer feel interested in the project. You have developed skills over the last few years working on the project, but it hasn’t yet come to fruition. You may wonder, now that you have the skills, should you stick with it and bring the project to fruition, even though the work feels empty to you? Well, maybe you should stick with it. Maybe you are bailing out too soon, afraid of success or failure, or just too lazy to persevere. This is one possibility. Ask your close men friends if they feel you are simply losing steam, wimping out, or afraid to bring your project to completion. If they feel you are bailing out too soon, stick with it. However, there is also the possibility that you have completed your karma in this area. It is possible that this was one layer of purpose, which you have now fulfilled, on the way to another layer of purpose, closer to your deepest purpose. Among the signs of fulfilling or completing a layer of purpose are these: 1. You suddenly have no interest whatsoever in a project or mission that, just previously, motivated you highly. 2. You feel surprisingly free of any regrets whatsoever, for starting the project or for ending it. 3. Even though you may not have the slightest idea of what you are going to do next, you feel clear, unconfused, and, especially, unburdened. 4. You feel an increase in energy at the prospect of ceasing your involvement with the project. 5. The project seems almost silly, like collecting shoelaces or wallpapering your house with gas station receipts. Sure, you could do it, but why would you want to? If you experience these signs, it is probably time to stop working on this project. You must end your involvement impeccably, however, making sure there are no loose ends and that you do not burden anybody’s life by stopping your involvement. This might take some time, but it is important that this layer of your purpose ends cleanly and does not create any new karma, or obligation, that will burden you or others in the future. The next layer of your unfolding purpose may make itself clear immediately. More often, however, it does not. After completing one layer of purpose, you might not know what to do with your life. You know that the old project is over for you, but you are not sure of what is next. At this point, you must wait for a vision. There is no way to rush this process. You may need to get an intermediary job to hold you over until the next layer of purpose makes itself clear. Or, perhaps you have enough money to simply wait. But in any case, it is important to open yourself to a vision of what is next. You stay open to a vision of your deeper purpose by not filling your time with distractions. Don’t watch TV or play computer games. Don’t go out drinking beer with your friends every night or start dating a bunch of women. Simply wait. You may wish to go on a retreat in a remote area and be by yourself. Whatever it is you decide to do, consciously keep yourself open and available to receiving a vision of what is next. It will come.

Time management also involves energy management. Sometimes the rationalization for procrastination is wrapped up in the form of the statement “I’m not up to this,” which reflects the fact you feel tired, stressed, or some other uncomfortable state. Consequently, you conclude that you do not have the requisite energy for a task, which is likely combined with a distorted justification for putting it off (e.g., “I have to be at my best or else I will be unable to do it.”). Similar to reframing time, it is helpful to respond to the “I’m not up to this” reaction by reframing energy. Thinking through the actual behavioral and energy requirements of a job challenges the initial and often distorted reasoning with a more realistic view. Remember, you only need “enough” energy to start the task. Consequently, being “too tired” to unload the dishwasher or put in a load of laundry can be reframed to see these tasks as requiring only a low level of energy and focus. This sort of reframing can be used to address automatic thoughts about energy on tasks that require a little more get-up-and-go. For example, it is common for people to be on the fence about exercising because of the thought “I’m too tired to exercise.” That assumption can be redirected to consider the energy required for the smaller steps involved in the “exercise script” that serve as the “launch sequence” for getting to the gym (e.g., “Are you too tired to stand up and get your workout clothes? Carry them to the car?” etc.). You can also ask yourself if you have ever seen people at the gym who are slumped over the exercise machines because they ran out of energy from trying to exert themselves when “too tired.” Instead, you can draw on past experience that you will end up feeling better and more energized after exercise; in fact, you will sleep better, be more rested, and have the positive outcome of keeping up with your exercise plan. If nothing else, going through this process rather than giving into the impulse to avoid makes it more likely that you will make a reasoned decision rather than an impulsive one about the task. A separate energy management issue relevant to keeping plans going is your ability to maintain energy (and thereby your effort) over longer courses of time. Managing ADHD is an endurance sport. It is said that good soccer players find their rest on the field in order to be able to play the full 90 minutes of a game. Similarly, you will have to manage your pace and exertion throughout the day. That is, the choreography of different tasks and obligations in your Daily Planner affects your energy. It is important to engage in self-care throughout your day, including adequate sleep, time for meals, and downtime and recreational activities in order to recharge your battery. Even when sequencing tasks at work, you can follow up a difficult task, such as working on a report, with more administrative tasks, such as responding to e-mails or phone calls that do not require as much mental energy or at least represent a shift to a different mode. Similarly, at home you may take care of various chores earlier in the evening and spend the remaining time relaxing. A useful reminder is that there are ways to make some chores more tolerable, if not enjoyable, by linking them with preferred activities for which you have more motivation. Folding laundry while watching television, or doing yard work or household chores while listening to music on an iPod are examples of coupling obligations with pleasurable activities. Moreover, these pleasant experiences combined with task completion will likely be rewarding and energizing.

But that is a lie! Here we have been breaking our backs for years at All-Union hard labor. Here in slow annual spirals we have been climbing up to an understanding of life—and from this height it can all be seen so clearly: It is not the result that counts! It is not the result—but the spirit! Not what—but how. Not what has been attained—but at what price. And so it is with us the prisoners—if it is the result which counts, then it is also true that one must survive at any price. And what that means is: One must become a stool pigeon, betray one’s comrades. And thereby get oneself set up comfortably. And perhaps even get time off sentence. In the light of the Infallible Teaching there is, evidently, nothing reprehensible in this. After all, if one does that, then the result will be in our favor, and the result is what counts. No one is going to argue. It is pleasant to win. But not at the price of losing one’s human countenance. If it is the result which counts—you must strain every nerve and sinew to avoid general work. You must bend down, be servile, act meanly—yet hang on to your position as a trusty. And by this means . . . survive. If it is the essence that counts, then the time has come to reconcile yourself to general work. To tatters. To torn skin on the hands. To a piece of bread which is smaller and worse. And perhaps . . . to death. But while you’re alive, you drag your way along proudly with an aching back. And that is when—when you have ceased to be afraid of threats and are not chasing after rewards—you become the most dangerous character in the owllike view of the bosses. Because . . . what hold do they have on you? You even begin to like carrying hand barrows with rubbish (yes, but not with stone!) and discussing with your work mate how the movies influence literature. You begin to like sitting down on the empty cement mixing trough and lighting up a smoke next to your bricklaying. And you are actually and simply proud if, when the foreman passes you, he squints at your courses, checks their alignment with the rest of the wall, and says: “Did you lay that? Good line.” You need that wall like you need a hole in the head, nor do you believe it is going to bring closer the happy future of the people, but, pitiful tattered slave that you are, you smile at this creation of your own hands. The Anarchist’s daughter, Galya Venediktova, worked as a nurse in the Medical Section, but when she saw that what went on there was not healing but only the business of getting fixed up in a good spot—out of stubbornness she left and went off to general work, taking up a spade and a sledge hammer. And she says that this saved her spiritually. For a good person even a crust is healthy food, and to an evil person even meat brings no benefit.

Thirty-Nine Ways to Lower Your Cortisol 1 Meditate. 2 Do yoga. 3 Stretch. 4 Practice tai chi. 5 Take a Pilates class. 6 Go for a labyrinth walk. 7 Get a massage. 8 Garden (lightly). 9 Dance to soothing, positive music. 10 Take up a hobby that is quiet and rewarding. 11 Color for pleasure. 12 Spend five minutes focusing on your breathing. 13 Follow a consistent sleep schedule. 14 Listen to relaxing music. 15 Spend time laughing and having fun with someone. (No food or drink involved.) 16 Interact with a pet. (It also lowers their cortisol level.) 17 Learn to recognize stressful thinking and begin to: Train yourself to be aware of your thoughts, breathing, heart rate, and other signs of tension to recognize stress when it begins. Focus on being aware of your mental and physical states, so that you can become an objective observer of your stressful thoughts instead of a victim of them. Recognize stressful thoughts so that you can formulate a conscious and deliberate reaction to them. A study of forty-three women in a mindfulness-based program showed that the ability to describe and articulate stress was linked to a lower cortisol response.28 18 Develop faith and participate in prayer. 19 Perform acts of kindness. 20 Forgive someone. Even (or especially?) yourself. 21 Practice mindfulness, especially when you eat. 22 Drink black and green tea. 23 Eat probiotic and prebiotic foods. Probiotics are friendly, symbiotic bacteria in foods such as yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Prebiotics, such as soluble fiber, provide food for these bacteria. (Be sure they are sugar-free!) 24 Take fish or krill oil. 25 Make a gratitude list. 26 Take magnesium. 27 Try ashwagandha, an Asian herbal supplement used in traditional medicine to treat anxiety and help people adapt to stress. 28 Get bright sunlight or exposure to a lightbox within an hour of waking up (great for fighting seasonal affective disorder as well). 29 Avoid blue light at night by wearing orange or amber glasses if using electronics after dark. (Some sunglasses work.) Use lamps with orange bulbs (such as salt lamps) in each room, instead of turning on bright overhead lights, after dark. 30 Maintain healthy relationships. 31 Let go of guilt. 32 Drink water! Stay hydrated! Dehydration increases cortisol. 33 Try emotional freedom technique, a tapping strategy meant to reduce stress and activate the parasympathetic nervous system (our rest-and-digest system). 34 Have an acupuncture treatment. 35 Go forest bathing (shinrin-yoku): visit a forest and breathe its air. 36 Listen to binaural beats. 37 Use a grounding mat, or go out into the garden barefoot. 38 Sit in a rocking chair; the soothing motion is similar to the movement in utero. 39 To make your cortisol fluctuate (which is what you want it to do), end your shower or bath with a minute (or three) under cold water.

Focus intently and beat procrastination.    Use the Pomodoro Technique (remove distractions, focus for 25 minutes, take a break).    Avoid multitasking unless you find yourself needing occasional fresh perspectives.    Create a ready-to-resume plan when an unavoidable interruption comes up.    Set up a distraction-free environment.    Take frequent short breaks. Overcome being stuck.    When stuck, switch your focus away from the problem at hand, or take a break to surface the diffuse mode.    After some time completely away from the problem, return to where you got stuck.    Use the Hard Start Technique for homework or tests.    When starting a report or essay, do not constantly stop to edit what is flowing out. Separate time spent writing from time spent editing. Learn deeply.    Study actively: practice active recall (“retrieval practice”) and elaborating.    Interleave and space out your learning to help build your intuition and speed.    Don’t just focus on the easy stuff; challenge yourself.    Get enough sleep and stay physically active. Maximize working memory.    Break learning material into small chunks and swap fancy terms for easier ones.    Use “to-do” lists to clear your working memory.    Take good notes and review them the same day you took them. Memorize more efficiently.    Use memory tricks to speed up memorization: acronyms, images, and the Memory Palace.    Use metaphors to quickly grasp new concepts. Gain intuition and think quickly.    Internalize (don’t just unthinkingly memorize) procedures for solving key scientific or mathematical problems.    Make up appropriate gestures to help you remember and understand new language vocabulary. Exert self-discipline even when you don’t have any.    Find ways to overcome challenges without having to rely on self-discipline.    Remove temptations, distractions, and obstacles from your surroundings.    Improve your habits.    Plan your goals and identify obstacles and the ideal way to respond to them ahead of time. Motivate yourself.    Remind yourself of all the benefits of completing tasks.    Reward yourself for completing difficult tasks.    Make sure that a task’s level of difficulty matches your skill set.    Set goals—long-term goals, milestone goals, and process goals. Read effectively.    Preview the text before reading it in detail.    Read actively: think about the text, practice active recall, and annotate. Win big on tests.    Learn as much as possible about the test itself and make a preparation plan.    Practice with previous test questions—from old tests, if possible.    During tests: read instructions carefully, keep track of time, and review answers.    Use the Hard Start Technique. Be a pro learner.    Be a metacognitive learner: understand the task, set goals and plan, learn, and monitor and adjust.    Learn from the past: evaluate what went well and where you can improve.

The reasons vary concerning why we tell ourselves we’re not ready for a given task or assignment. For some of us, the hesitance to act stems from past failures that have had a significant impact on our self-confidence. We fear a repeat of those experiences. For others, the tendency toward inaction stems from an aversion to struggle. They consider every struggle toward a desired outcome as evidence of a lack of competence or preparation (or both). In the next section, we’ll explore how the habit of telling yourself you’re not ready can have a negative impact on your productivity. How This Bad Habit Hurts Your Productivity First, you become less likely to take risks. Consequently, you’re prevented from enjoying the rewards that come with taking those risks. Instead, you’ll be inclined to stick to tasks and projects that allow you to stay within your comfort zone. They’re “safe.” They don’t require you to wonder what might happen during the course of working on them. Second, waiting until you’re 100% ready - which is to say, never taking action - prevents you from expanding your areas of competency. Because you choose to stay within your comfort zone, you confront few challenges. As such, you’re never faced with a problem that spurs you to broaden your skill set. A third way this habit affects your productivity is that it encourages you to procrastinate. By convincing yourself you’re not ready to undertake a given task, you’ll find it’s easier to rationalize postponing taking action. You’ll start to spend an inordinate amount of time planning and preparing. Fourth, staying in your comfort zone robs you of opportunities to impress influencers. After all, you’re taking fewer risks. That means you’ll rarely have a chance to stand apart from the pack. Instead, you’ll devote yourself to safe tasks and projects, which cause you to blend in with everyone else. Fifth, constantly telling yourself you’re not ready gradually erodes your self-confidence and morale. Over the long run, that diminishes your ability to work productively while increasing your stress levels. The good news is that you can break this subversive habit and start enjoying the fruits of improved productivity. Following are seven ideas for making that happen.

To Cicotte, who had known Burns over the years, his performance was baffling. He had never sensed that the drawling Texan was capable of anything like this. Burns could make a dozen mistakes, find himself in a manure pile of troubles, yet now he came up clean. Cicotte need slip only once, and they'd be cutting him up in pieces. On the mound, Cicotte was king. Year after year, they hadn't come any better. Burns had been a sloppy, very mediocre, third-rate nothing. Was the difference all in the skill of the pitching arm? What changed the pattern when it came to really staying alive? The answer to that was the answer to the whole story of Cicotte's life. He had grown up believing it was talent that made a man big. If you were good enough, and dedicated yourself, you could get to the top. Wasn't that enough of a reward? But when he got there, he had found otherwise. They all fed off him, the men who ran the show and pulled the strings that kept it working. They used him and used him and when they had used him up, they would dump him. In the few years he had been up, they had always praised him and made him feel like a hero to the people of America. But all the time they paid him peanuts. The newspapermen who came to watch him pitch and wrote stories about him made more money than he did. Meanwhile, Comiskey made a half million dollars a year on Cicotte's right arm. Burns knew how to operate. So did Gandil. Cicotte didn't. That was the answer.

Turning Rejection Around What if your friendly, hopeful conversation starter is not met with signals of approval or interest? If the person you approach is fidgety, avoids eye contact, appears uneasy, and exhibits none of the signals of welcome, chances are he or she is not interested in interaction—at least not at that moment. The first thing to do is slow down. Be patient, and give the person time to relax with you. If you present yourself as relaxed and open to whatever develops (whether a good conversation, a valuable working relationship, even friendship or romance), your companion may in time relax too. Use your verbal skills to create an interesting conversation and a sense of ease to break the tension. Don’t pressure yourself to be able to define a relationship from the first meeting. Keep your expectations general, and remember the playfulness factor. Enjoy someone’s company with no strings attached. Don’t fabricate obligations where none exist. It may take several conversations for a relationship to develop. If you had hoped for romance but the feelings appear not to be reciprocated, switch your interest to friendship, which has its own rich rewards. What if you are outright rejected? Rejection at any point—at first meeting, during a date, or well into a relationship—can be painful and difficult for most of us. But there are ways to prevent it from being an all-out failure. One thing I like to tell my clients is that the Chinese word for failure can be interpreted to mean “opportunity.” And opportunities, after all, are there for the taking. It all depends on how you perceive things. There is a technique you can borrow from salespeople to counter your feelings of rejection. High-earning salespeople know that you can’t succeed without being turned down at least occasionally. Some even look forward to rejection, because they know that being turned down this time brings them that much closer to succeeding next time around. They may even learn something in the process. So keep this in mind as you experiment with your new, social self: Hearing a no now may actually bring you closer to the bigger and better yes that is soon to happen! Apply this idea as you practice interacting: Being turned down at any point in the process helps you to learn a little more—about how to approach a stranger, have a conversation, make plans, go on a date, or move toward intimacy. If you learn something positive from the experience, you can bring that with you into your next social situation. Just as in sales, the payoff in either romance or friendship is worth far more than the possible downfall or minor setback of being turned down. A note on self-esteem: Rejection can hurt, but it certainly does not have to be devastating. It’s okay to feel disappointed when we do not get the reaction we want. But all too often, people overemphasize the importance or meaning of rejection—especially where fairly superficial interactions such as a first meeting or casual date are concerned. Here are some tips to keep rejection in perspective: -Don’t overthink it. Overanalysis will only increase your anxiety. -Keep the feelings of disappointment specific to the rejection situation at hand. Don’t say, “No one ever wants to talk to me.” Say, “Too bad the chemistry wasn’t right for both of us.” -Learn from the experience. Ask yourself what you might have done differently, if anything, but then move on. Don’t beat yourself up about it. If those thoughts start, use your thought-stopping techniques (p. 138) to control them. -Use your “Adult” to look objectively at what happened. Remember, rejecting your offer of conversation or an evening out does not mean rejecting your whole “being.” You must continue to believe that you have something to offer, and that there are open, available people who would like to get to know you.

Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. Quitting a high-paying position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved (this may seem crazy, but I’ve tried it and it works). This is the first step toward the stoic’s throwing a four-letter word at fate. You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself. Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts. It is more difficult to be a loser in a game you set up yourself. In Black Swan terms, this means that you are exposed to the improbable only if you let it control you. You always control what you do; so make this your end.

Vasana is determinism that feels like free will. I’m reminded of my friend Jean, whom I’ve known for almost twenty years. Jean considers himself very spiritual and went so far in the early nineties as to walk way from his job with a newspaper in Denver to live in an ashram in western Massachusetts. But he found the atmosphere choking. “They’re all crypto Hindus,” he complained. “They don’t do anything but pray and chant and meditate.” So Jean decided to move on with his life. He’s fallen in love with a couple of women but has never married. He doesn’t like the notion of settling down and tends to move to a new state every four years or so. (He once told me that he counted up and discovered that he’s lived in forty different houses since he was born.) One day Jean called me with a story. He was on a date with a woman who had taken a sudden interest in Sufism, and while they were driving home, she told Jean that according to her Sufi teacher, everyone has a prevailing characteristic. “You mean the thing that is most prominent about them, like being extroverted or introverted?” he asked. “No, not prominent,” she said. “Your prevailing characteristic is hidden. You act on it without seeing that you’re acting on it.” The minute he heard this, Jean became excited. “I looked out the car window, and it hit me,” he said. “I sit on the fence. I am only comfortable if I can have both sides of a situation without committing to either.” All at once a great many pieces fell into place. Jean could see why he went into an ashram but didn’t feel like he was one of the group. He saw why he fell in love with women but always saw their faults. Much more came to light. Jean complains about his family yet never misses a Christmas with them. He considers himself an expert on every subject he’s studied—there have been many—but he doesn’t earn his living pursuing any of them. He is indeed an inveterate fence-sitter. And as his date suggested, Jean had no idea that his Vasana, for that’s what we’re talking about, made him enter into one situation after another without ever falling off the fence. “Just think,” he said with obvious surprise, “the thing that’s the most me is the thing I never saw.” If unconscious tendencies kept working in the dark, they wouldn’t be a problem. The genetic software in a penguin or wildebeest guides it to act without any knowledge that it is behaving much like every other penguin or wildebeest. But human beings, unique among all living creatures, want to break down Vasana. It’s not good enough to be a pawn who thinks he’s a king. We crave the assurance of absolute freedom and its result—a totally open future. Is this reasonable? Is it even possible? In his classic text, the Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali informs us that there are three types of Vasana. The kind that drives pleasant behavior he calls white Vasana; the kind that drives unpleasant behavior he calls dark Vasana; the kind that mixes the two he calls mixed Vasana. I would say Jean had mixed Vasana—he liked fence-sitting but he missed the reward of lasting love for another person, a driving aspiration, or a shared vision that would bond him with a community. He displayed the positives and negatives of someone who must keep every option open. The goal of the spiritual aspirant is to wear down Vasana so that clarity can be achieved. In clarity you know that you are not a puppet—you have released yourself from the unconscious drives that once fooled you into thinking that you were acting spontaneously.

I suppose this is what fools call poetic justice," said Miss Leonora, "which is just of a piece with everything else that is poetical—weak folly and nonsense that no sensible man would have anything to say to. How a young man like you, who know how to conduct yourself in some things, and have, I don't deny, many good qualities, can give in to come to an ending like a trashy novel, is more than I can understand. You are fit to be put in a book of the Good-child series, Frank, as an illustration of the reward of virtue," said the strong-minded woman, with a little snort of scorn; "and, of course, you are going to marry, and live happy ever after, like a fairy tale.

Don't lie. Its amazing how naturally lying comes to us, isn't it? No one ever has to teach us. We spill juice on the carpet and Mommy says, "Did you do that?" And then it hits us, Oh, I know. I'll just tell her I didn't do it! She'll be none the wiser. But she is, of course, the wiser, and she shouts vehemently at us not to lie anymore. And then our teachers tell us not to lie. Then our friends say it's okay to lie to the authorities but not to lie to them. Then in every romantic relationship we choose to indulge, it'll be stated over and over, "Be honest! Just tell me how you feel." It's strange, though, that amidst all those "don't lie" lessons, no one ever tells you the one person you will end up lying to the most often and the one person you really shouldn't be lying to at all is yourself. You'll tell yourself you like a job when you don't. You'll tell yourself you're in love with someone when you aren't. You'll tell yourself you aren't attracted to a person when you are. You'll tell yourself you don't really want to go after that dream job for reasons a, b, and c, but in truth you put it off because you're terrified. Basically, it's because that dream job and that new relationship would be too tough. Too complicated. You'll stick with your current job and an uninspired relationship because they're easy. They're convenient. I've decided that our days aren't meant to be convenient. If you wake up and find that your life is really convenient, I suggest running (not walking) to the next challenge. Life is meant to be rewarding, and reward only comes from hard work that you want to be doing. The work can be physical, mental, or emotional. It can entail an occupation, a relationship, or a project such as building your son a tree house. You have to find those things that are worthy of your pursuit, and it starts by being honest with yourself.

Rural Free Delivery (RFD) Home, upon that word drops the sunshine of beauty and the shadow of tender sorrows, the reflection of ten thousand voices and fond memories. This is a mighty fine old world after all if you make yourself think so. Look happy even if things are going against you— that will make others happy. Pretty soon all will be smiling and then there is no telling what can’t be done. Coca-Cola Girl Mother baked a fortune cake pale yellow icing, lemon drops round rim, hidden within treasures, a ring—you’ll be married, a button—stay a bachelor, a thimble—always a spinster, and a penny—you’re rich. Gee, but I am hungry. Wait a second, dear, until I pull my belt up another notch. There that’s better. So, you see, Hon, I am straighter than a string around a bundle. You ought to see my eye, it’s a peach. I am proud of it, looks like I’ve been kicked by a mule. You know, dear, that they can kick hard enough to knock all the soda out of a biscuit without breaking the crust Hogging Catfish This gives you a fighting chance. Noodle your right hand into their gills, hold on tight while you grunt him out of the water. This can be a real dogfight. Old river cat wants to go down deep, make you bottom feed. Like I said, boys, when you tell a whopper, say it like you believe it. Saturday Ritual My Granddad was a cobbler. We each owned two pairs of shoes, Sunday shoes and everyday shoes. When our Sunday shoes got worn they became our everyday shoes. Main Street Saturday Night We each were given a dime on Saturday opening a universe of possibilities. All the stores stayed open and people flocked into town. Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds set up a popcorn stand on Reinheimer’s corner and soon after lighting a little stove, sounding like small firecrackers, popping began. Dad, laughing shooting the breeze with a group of farmers, drinking Coca Cola, finding out if any sheds needed to be built or barns repaired, discussing the price of next year’s seed, finding out who’s really working, who’s just looking busy. There is no object I wouldn’t give to relive my childhood growing up in Delavan— where everyone knew everyone— and joy came with but a dime. Market Day Jim Pittsford’s grocery smelled of bananas ripening and the coffee he ground by hand, wonderful smoked ham and bacon fresh sliced. He’d reward the child who came to pick up the purchase, with a large dill pickle Biking home, skillfully balancing Jim Pittsford’s bacon, J B’s tomatoes and peaches, while sniffing a tantalizing spice rising from fresh warm rolls, I nibbled my pickle reward.

If, after reading this book, you still believe such a system to be entirely unworkable, it might be worth asking yourself why you are so sure this is the case. Imagine for a moment that you are a medieval peasant working the land of a lord in exchange for a meager subsistence and some vague promises of protection. Your entire worldview is defined by unchanging, divinely sanctioned hierarchies over which you have little control. You were born a serf, and you will die a serf. You don't waste much time thinking about why the world is the way it is - it just is. If you do bother to consider why you've been assigned such a rough lot in life, you're provided with ample justification for this state of affairs by people who, it seems, know far more than you about the ways of the world. If you just sit down, do as you're told, and work hard, then you'll be rewarded - perhaps not in this life, but certainly in the next.

You have the power to be the master of your physical destiny Eliminate negative self-talk Use visualization to enforce your positive mindset Create SMART goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound Learn to love exercise by forgetting the past, pacing yourself, ditching excuses and overcoming insecurities Build the exercise habit with cues, routines and rewards Use the FITT Principle to create your ideal workout program Work through all three energy systems to achieve total fitness Vary your training heart rate zone for total cardiovascular fitness

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

Having a fear of being imperfect means that it is difficult for you to accept yourself as you are—imperfect and, therefore, perfectly human—and so you interpret any criticism, rejection, or judgment by others as a threat to your very tenuous grasp on perfection. Having a fear of impossible expectations means fearing that even after you’ve worked hard and achieved the goals set for you, your only reward will be continually higher and more difficult goals to achieve, with no rest and no time to savor your achievements.

It also affects your desire to stand out from the crowd and seek greatness. Cannabis makes you content with life, and when you are overly comfortable, you stop seeking change and trying to better yourself and your life. When you are high, you elevate above your emotions, but because you don't process them naturally, you rob yourself of learning from them and advancing in different areas of your life. After all, one of the reasons why we have such powerful feelings is because we are meant to learn from them and grow psychologically. Cannabis neutralises fear, which is good when you are desperate, but remember, fear exists to make us strong. By becoming dependent on any substance to help us deal with fear energy, we prevent ourselves from further evolving naturally. Yes, life is more difficult without drugs and alcohol to help us take the edge off. But the more challenging something is, the reward is that much sweeter. If you introduce drugs and alcohol into the equation, you prevent yourself from developing the necessary mental anchors that help when dealing with challenging times. As humans, we require life's resistance to become strong and learn to deal with difficult situations in life. We need fear as a building block so we can develop courage.

One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who's any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson." Helmholtz laughed. "Then why aren't you on an island yourself?" "Because, finally, I preferred this," the Controller answered. "I was given the choice: to be sent to an island, where I could have got on with my pure science, or to be taken on to the Controllers' Council with the prospect of succeeding in due course to an actual Controllership. I chose this and let the science go." After a little silence, "Sometimes," he added, "I rather regret the science. Happiness is a hard master–particularly other people's happiness. A much harder master, if one isn't conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth." He sighed, fell silent again, then continued in a brisker tone, "Well, duty's duty. One can't consult one's own preference. I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. It has given us the stablest equilibrium in history. China's was hopelessly insecure by comparison; even the primitive matriarchies weren't steadier than we are. Thanks, l repeat, to science. But we can't allow science to undo its own good work. That's why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches–that's why I almost got sent to an island. We don't allow it to deal with any but the most immediate problems of the moment. All other enquiries are most sedulously discouraged. It's curious," he went on after a little pause, "to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled–after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.

Day after day, the curtain rises on a stage of epic proportions, one that has been running for centuries. The actors wear the costumes of their predecessors and inhabit the roles assigned to them. The people in these roles are not the characters they play, but they have played the roles long enough to incorporate the roles into their very being, to merge the assignment with their inner selves and how they are seen in the world. The costumes were handed out at birth and can never be removed. The costumes cue everyone in the cast to the roles each character is to play and to each character’s place on the stage. Over the run of the show, the cast has grown accustomed to who plays which part. For generations, everyone has known who is center stage in the lead. Everyone knows who the hero is, who the supporting characters are, who is the sidekick good for laughs, and who is in shadow, the undifferentiated chorus with no lines to speak, no voice to sing, but necessary for the production to work. The roles become sufficiently embedded into the identity of the players that the leading man or woman would not be expected so much as to know the names or take notice of the people in the back, and there would be no need for them to do so. Stay in the roles long enough, and everyone begins to believe that the roles are preordained, that each cast member is best suited by talent and temperament for their assigned role, and maybe for only that role, that they belong there and were meant to be cast as they are currently seen. The cast members become associated with their characters, typecast, locked into either inflated or disfavored assumptions. They become their characters. As an actor, you are to move the way you are directed to move, speak the way your character is expected to speak. You are not yourself. You are not to be yourself. Stick to the script and to the part you are cast to play, and you will be rewarded. Veer from the script, and you will face the consequences. Veer from the script, and other cast members will step in to remind you where you went off-script. Do it often enough or at a critical moment and you may be fired, demoted, cast out, your character conveniently killed off in the plot. The social pyramid known as a caste system is not identical to the cast in a play, though the similarity in the two words hints at a tantalizing intersection. When we are cast into roles, we are not ourselves. We are not supposed to be ourselves. We are performing based on our place in the production, not necessarily on who we are inside. We are all players on a stage that was built long before our ancestors arrived in this land. We are the latest cast in a long-running drama that premiered on this soil in the early seventeenth century.

Workaholism is, after all, the most rewarded addiction in the nation. You can be fired for drinking too much, but working too much usually gets you promoted. It also gets you a raise. So you dump yourself into bed exhausted most nights, only to do it all again tomorrow.

After reading this book, hopefully you will realize the challenges to be overcome in successfully marketing yourself and your artworks as a professional visual artist. All of this is taking place in a continually changing environment that requires watchfulness and feeding. For the few who venture forth, the rewards will more than justify the hard work needed.

To speak and to be understood is a freedom. It is perhaps the most fundamental freedom. To summon words intentionally, and have another person understand your meaning and connect with it, is to be unbound. Conversely, without it, a part of you is caged. You feel betrayed by a spotty brain-tongue connection. And you notice when others don't catch your full drift. Maybe it's the context of what you mean; maybe it's the inflection in your voice; maybe it's undercutting yourself by putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. This trapped feeling is far more acute when you move in a language that isn't your own. There are intricacies andsubtleties that matter a great deal to communicating. Without them, your meaning is stuck in your throat. This is how I felt after arriving in Canada, where I had to translate simple thoughts into English, with all the added social cues, before I could get them past my lips. This translation work is labour. It's time and effort spent trying to wrangle unruly words that won't fit in your mouth. God, have you tried to say "parallelogram"? Have you tried to differentiate it from a rhombus? When will I ever need to say "parallelogram?" Anyway: it's mental gymnastics, and the only reward is blank looks on the faces of people who can tell you're trying to say something but hear another. Maybe I messed up the syntax? Maybe my pronunciation was off and now I have to spend twenty minutes convincing you I'm not stupid? Damn, I can't believe some people can just speak and be understood. The luxury!

Autopilot is perfect for feeling numb rather than the pain of failure, injustice, or disappointment. But that numbness also kills your chance to experience immense joy and the fullness that comes from knowing you’ve touched someone else’s life. People will judge you and your dreams. They’ll tell you you’re crazy and try to convince you that mediocrity is the smarter choice. And that’s because it’s easier if you buy into the same lie they have, that no one person can really make a difference and that life is about “growing up” instead of working toward your personally authored, happily ever after. If you want to live a life driven by passion, if you want to make a difference in the world, to fight for something bigger than yourself and prove to others that yes, one person can make a difference, you’re in for one of the hardest battles you’ll ever fight. But it’s also the most rewarding.