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Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You

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Both Buddhists and Stoics also encourage us to rehearse ‘non-attachment’. They share a goal of tranquillity, to be reached through detaching oneself from the passions that tie us to worldly cares. It is undoubtedly excellent to strive to achieve one’s maximum potential, but that should be to please ourselves, not be judged by others, and for me having led a ‘good-enough’ life with its share of wonders and disasters, I am content and so, ready for a ‘good-enough’ death. Do not seek to have events happen to you as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.51 I have extended the ‘good-enough’ theory to most of my life and now my death. We are, at times, so often obsessed or feel pressurised into ‘being the best at …, the fastest at …, the cleverest at …’ I genuinely worry about all of this positive thinking/life coaching!

Take Literature Notes when reading. Highlight stuff and write down stuff that resonates with you. Try to take these notes in your own words. Yes, you might just be paraphrasing from the text for its own sake, but the extra effort is worth it. Epicureans lived a simple, ascetic life, believing that by limiting themselves to a few natural desires (such as friendship, bread and water), they would be far happier than those who finally bring pain upon themselves through entertaining greater needs. It seems so self-evidently preferable to enjoy your work, and to draw a sense of meaning from it, that it sounds bizarre to question the idea. Alan Watts, who gave us the image of trying to wrap up water with string, made the point that it is absurd to work at something you don’t enjoy, purely to make more money to be able to live longer and continue doing something you don’t… Perhaps, then, to feel anger is unavoidable but not in itself helpful; the key is turning it into something constructive. We are angry because we would like to change something in the world (or maybe in ourselves), something that seems to be unjust.A good relationship, like a good parent or a good death, need only be ‘good enough’, consisting of two people navigating each other’s inadequacies with kindness and sympathy. The Greeks, however, were not of this opinion, and their preferred model – that emotions stem from how we interpret events – now once again has the upper ground in modern clinical understanding. Expressing our unhappiness in a sensitive way is one of the most productive things we can do in a relationship. The psychiatrist-author Viktor E. Frankl, writing of his experiences in the concentration camp, finds this same truth in the most unthinkable circumstances, when he writes about the way in which prisoners placed in positions of authority granted meagre favours to their friends while others were denied: It is not for me to pass judgement on those prisoners who put their own above everyone else. Who can throw a stone at a man who favours his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same. Mitigating Future Disappointment At its best, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, it ‘consists in two solitudes protecting, defining, and welcoming one another’.

To align ourselves along that x=y axis through life, shifting our expectations to work with reality, reminding ourselves that things may not work out as we expect, that we may lose the things we value, that things come and go: all this we know is to aim for a kind of tranquillity. It may seem an odd question to ask at this point in the book, but is happiness truly what we should seek? And if so, is it in its richest form synonymous with an avoidance of disturbance? Having perhaps convinced you of those things, I’d like to leave you by undoing those convictions.

Thus it became permissible to prefer certain external things such as wealth, family and social position, as long as one didn’t become attached to them. Stoics do not have to eschew these comforts in the way the Cynics did, as their aim is merely to gain psychological robustness (virtue) through not needing or attempting to control anything in life beyond their thoughts and actions. Marcus Aurelius wrote admiringly of his adopted father, that he was able to enjoy great wealth ‘without arrogance and without apology. If [riches] were there, he took advantage of them. If not, he didn’t miss them.’ Epictetus has already given us the guideline for sorting through this: only the parts that concern what we think and do are worthy of our attention. The rest of it we can ignore. So in the case of hoping for a promotion, we are in control of how well we work, the time and effort we put into our jobs and, to an extent, making sure that our endeavours are visible to the people who might choose to reward us. Moreover, if we set about exercising this control with the thought ‘I will work as well as I can and furthermore make sure that my good work is visible’, we can make sure we achieve exactly that. The thought experiment shows that we choose our lifestyles – our houses, our clothes, our watches – with other people in mind. One way or another, we project a style designed to make others admire or envy us. Material Items, and How They Make Us Feel

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