---

---

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. An old man, a young man and life’s greatest lesson.
2. When we learn how to die and realise we are going to die soon that is when we learn to truly live.
3. Everyone seems to be chasing the wrong thing in life, things they think are important but they are not!

Overall Thoughts

Mitch Albom found out that his college professor from 20 years ago, Morrie Schwartz, was dying of ALS – or motor neurone disease – Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final ‘class’: lessons in how to live.

Mitch has this incredible gift of making the reader feel so connected to the people he writes about. Like all his other books, this one is absolutely amazing and I highly recommend it.

Who is this book for?

Anyone who is going to die – at some point. You skip this one if you are immortal or a god.

On a serious note, anyone looking for perspective in life and the important things in life should definitely read this. If you are feeling a little lost and unsure of life, read this book. Also, if you have a loved one going through this process – it will help you understand the journey.

Main Points & Ideas

(Told from Morrie’s point of view)

1. Death
   • The world goes on. No matter what you are going through, the world goes on. Even if you are dying or getting the news that you are dying, the world will go on. It has done so before you and will continue to do so after you. Don’t try and chase after the world so much and give yourself to the world. It will not return the favour.
   • There is nothing negative about death. It is as natural as life. It is part of the deal. If you live, you must die. Everything in nature dies.
   • When we make peace with the idea of dying, then we do the hard thing – make peace with living. It is only when something gets taken away from us that we truly start to feel its value and importance.
   • “Death ends a life, not a relationship”.
   • When you are facing death, you want to do the mundane that you escaped in your healthy life; sitting in traffic, making dinner, making plans, going to work.
   • Only in the face of death or that of someone else do we realise how much time we actually had and how much time we squandered.
   • Death is a great equalizer. Sitting beside a dying person and listening to them makes you forget about all the busyness of your own life it melts and falls away.
2. Ageing
   • Being young is hard. We have lots of struggles and uncertainty and we are not wise, we often make poor decisions and believe everything that is told to us. Ageing is growth. We learn and become wiser.
   • People who long to be young again – it reflects unsatisfied lives. Missed opportunities, regrets. If you have meaning in life, you don’t want to go back – you would want to go forward.
   • When you are older, your every age lives inside you. You know what it’s like to be 20, 25 and 30. You are every age, up to current all at the same time. You shouldn’t be envious of younger people, because you have been that age.
3. Money
   • Mitch writes about trading his dreams for a paycheck. For a life that society tells him that he should be living. His days were full but his heart was empty. He broke all the promises he made to himself and gave up all his dreams.
   • No matter how much money you have, you can’t take it with you.
   • Ultimately we are all looking for love and we accept substitutes for love in the form of things. We think people will like us and love us if we have nice things. Nothing could be further from the truth.
   • There is a big difference between what we need and what we want but most people can’t tell the difference between the two.
   • Status gets you nowhere. People at the top will look always look down and the ones below will always envy you. So what’s the point?
4. Love & Marriage
   • What we take from the world, we must replenish.
   • “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in”
   • Pay attention to the people, real attention and give them all your focus and they will always remember you.
   • Why are we all in such a hurry in life? Perhaps to find meaning?
   • People either rush into a marriage or often delay it. This is not about age, but about understanding yourself and what you want. People often don’t know themselves, they don’t know who they really are hence they don’t know what they want in a partner.
   • Having a common set of values, morals and goals are important in a marriage. If you do not respect each other or cannot compromise for each other – there will be trouble. In a marriage you get tested, you find out what you are made of and what the other person is made of.
5. Culture
   • Most people understand that when we are infants, we need others to survive and when we are old and frail, we need others to survive. But what most people don’t understand is that in the middle, we also need others to survive. However, most people can be mean and cruel. How do we deal with that?
   • People are only mean when they are threatened in some way and the culture makes everyone scared for something, losing a job, losing money, a house, a loved one. People, then, only tend to look out for themselves.
   • The culture around us is always reminding us that we are not enough. Not good enough, not rich enough, not thin enough … always reminding us that we could be more. We shouldn’t let the culture decide that for us, we choose who we are.
   • If the culture around is toxic, we can be the catalyst for change. We don’t need to wait for others to start the change. We can do it. We can create our own culture.
6. Forgiveness
   • Pride, anger, grudges, hatred – you will regret all this when you are old.
   • Forgive people before they die and you never know when that might be – so forgive them now.
   • Before forgiving others, you must be willing to forgive yourself first, for all your past misgivings, for all the things you did and didn’t do. Make peace with yourself.
7. Detachment
   • People think detachment from emotions and experiences is a bad thing. It is not. In order to detach from emotion, you must first allow yourself to fully feel it, embrace it. You have to let it penetrate your soul. Know it for what it really is, experience it, live it and only then you can detach from it.
   • Mourn what you have lost, give yourself a good cry if you need to. Feel sorry for yourself but once you are done, balance it with remembering and appreciating all the good you still have in life. Think about all that still remains that you can relish and enjoy.

My Favourite Quotes

1. “I buried myself in accomplishments because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died.” Mitch Albom
2. Upon finding out he is terminally ill and going to die soon – “I’m going to live-or at least try to live the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humour, with composure.” Morrie Schwartz
3. “People see me as a bridge. I’m not as alive as I used to be, but I’m not yet dead. I’m sort of . . . in-between.” Morrie Schwartz
4. “So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things.” Morrie Schwartz
5. “Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.” Morrie Schwartz
6. “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in” Morrie Schwartz
7. “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry Adams
8. “Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.” Morrie Schwartz
9. “To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.” Morrie Schwartz
10. “The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” Morrie Schwartz

---

---

---

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Life is hard – accept it.
2. Love is not what you think it is. It is far wider and complex than language can describe and no one has been able to accurately describe it.
3. The purpose of any relationship in life is the spiritual growth of the people involved.

Overall Thoughts

Although I have read similar wisdom in other books over the years, this book changed my life. This book is by far one of the best books I have read in many years on the topics of love, parenting, spiritual growth, psychology and philosophy. There are so many complex ideas in this book that need to be read, examined and understood individually. I have tried to distil my understanding and learnings from this book in the summary here.

Who is this book for?

I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone. There are so many insightful lessons in this book, this is definitely a book I will be revisiting over and over.

Although the author recalls stories of his psychotherapy patients – the points that he makes are far-reaching and much broader than just patients with mental illness. As you will read below, the book covers topics such as life, parenting, marriage, love, spiritual growth, religion and much more. And he covers all these from the lens of human psychology and philosophy.

Main Points & Ideas

1. Life is hard. Once we understand and accept this truth, the fact that life is hard does not matter anymore. Life is a series of problems. We can either solve problems and move from one to another or we can complain about them. Problems do not just go away. They need to be worked on, solved with time and attention. Most people try to avoid problems as they are not equipped to solve them because most people simply do not take the time necessary to solve life’s intellectual, social and spiritual problems. We must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it. If I say ‘this is not my problem’ and it is caused by society or other people then I have thrown away the responsibility and with it, the solution.
2. Parenting
   • Undisciplined parents are poor role models.
   • Parenting can either follow the ‘Do as I say’ or ‘ Do as I do’ model … if you do not (cannot) do it, then don’t expect your child to do it either. Monkey see monkey do.
   • For a child, the beginning of self-discipline starts with self-disciplined parents. “If a child sees his parents day in and day out behaving with self-discipline restraint, dignity and a capacity to order their own lives then the child will come to feel in the deepest fibres of his being that this is the way to live.”
   • The feeling of being valuable and feeling ‘I am valued’ is a corner store of self-discipline. When you feel valuable, when you feel that you can create value for others, you will naturally take care of yourself because you are valuable because you are important.
   • We spend all this time teaching kids how to read, write, do and but very little time teaching them how to listen, how to speak and how to be.
   • When children watch their parents interact with and navigate the world, that becomes their truth. How their parents do anything is how they think it is done – throughout the universe.
3. Ego boundaries
   • Ego boundaries must be hardened before they can be softened. We must have something to lose or give up. An identity must be established before it can be transcended.
   • True reality is oneness. We see ourselves as discrete objects in the universe separate from all others; stars, rocks, planets, trees etc. Mysticism claims that these boundaries are misconceptions and an illusion. Maya. The only way to experience oneness with the universe is the dissolution of these ego boundaries. An infant has no ego boundaries, in his/her perception they are not separate from the universe. He/she is in the state of pure sainthood and in order to become one – we need to go back to the state of being an infant. One with everything, mother, father and the universe.
   • The world is constantly changing but so is our view of it. Our vantage points keep changing depending on our circumstances (poor, rich, married, a father etc) We need to constantly update the map of reality. We must be willing to get challenged and change our viewpoints. Be open to criticism. Nostalgia is seldom about missing the old things but more about missing the old self. For us to develop a new idea, concept, theory, understanding or self-image the old must die first, there is no other way.
4. Love, marriage and relationships
   • The definition of love in this book; the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s or another’s spiritual growth.
   • The act of ‘falling’ in love is sexually motivated. The agenda is terminating our own loneliness and we insure it with marriage. Falling in love is a temporary collapse of our ego boundaries – driven by the need to procreate and have sex. No matter whom we fall in love with, sooner or later we fall out of love too if the relation goes long enough – we don’t stop loving that per person per se but the feeling of honeymoon and static lovingness soon fades.
   • At the beginning of the relationship, we become one with the beloved but over time we have differences; different opinions, ideas, friends, plans and preferences. We suddenly realise we are not one with our beloved and our individuality comes into play. Our ego boundaries go up immediately – that’s when lots of people fall out of love and start to fall out of the relationship – but that is also when the real work of loving starts.
     The genuine lover encourages the individuality of the beloved. True love is the commitment towards the spiritual growth of another. A major aspect of genuine love is the separateness of the self and the beloved.
   • Love is an expression of freedom. The exercise of choice. When someone claims (or acts in ways that says) they cannot live without someone, it is a necessity – it is not love. That person is a parasite.
   • The problem with the modern-day image of marriage is that one person needs to be everything for the other – friend, husband, lover, partner, companion, support, guide and so on. This is simply not possible. The author makes a point that open marriage is the only mature marriage that is healthy and not seriously destructive to the spiritual growth and health of the individuals involved.
   • Passive dependent individuals get their identity from others and their relationships. They want to be loved all the time and seek it so desperately and spend all their energy pursuing love that in the end, they have no energy left to give any love. If your goal is to be loved – you need to become worthy of the love you seek. You cannot be a person worthy of love if all you want is to be loved passively.
5. Everyone has a religion.
   • Religion here is greater than a factional membership. Greater than being a Hindu, Muslim, Jew or a Buddhist. Everyone has some understanding of life and its purpose, some worldview, some perspective on how they look at life and the world – That is their religion. How someone chooses to see the world (just, fair, dualistic, karmic, random, chaotic, etc) is their religion because based on this religion is how they interact with and operate in this world.
   • Very few of us have distinct personal lives – most of the things we believe and carry with us throughout life are hand me down from our parents – including our worldviews and religions. Second-hand information of God and religion – we are taught by someone else based on their views and experiences. True religion should be a personal one – based on our own experiences.
   • Spiritual growth is the journey from the microcosm into the macrocosm – we must be willing to learn new things in order to do this and let go of our old ideas and self. People find new information threatening because they have to work and revise their maps of reality.
   • You cannot give up anything you don’t already have. You cannot give up winning before you have won – you are still a loser. You must forge an identity before you can give it up. You must have an ego before you can lose it. You must have an opinion before you can change it.
   • The process of spiritual growth is much like the process of evolution. They both run contrary to entropy, against the natural laws and forces. They both go from a lower form of organisation to a higher one.
   • People at the top are often alone. This is true in business, athletics, or spiritual evolution – not many have reached that level.

My Favourite Quotes

• Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering – Carl Jung
  We must learn for ourselves and teach our children the tools and techniques through which to allow true suffering. As neurosis ultimately becomes a bigger problem than the suffering itself.
• Good discipline requires time.
• It is death that provides life with all its meanings.
• Throughout the whole of life, one must continue to learn to live and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die – Seneca
• The best decision-makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions but still retain their ability to be decisive.
• Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.
• A good marriage can exist only between two strong and independent people.
• True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed (like sexual attractiveness). It is a committed, thoughtful decision.
• Love anything that lives – a person, a pet, a plant – and it will die.
• If someone is determined not to risk pain, then such a person must do without many things [in life].
• Great marriages can not be constructed by individuals who are terrified by their basic aloneness, as so commonly is the case, seeking a merging in the marriage.
• All human interactions are opportunities either to learn or to teach.
• The path to holiness lies through the questioning of everything.
• Science is a religion. A religion of scepticism.
• We are almost always less or more competent than we believe ourselves to be. The unconscious, however, knows who we really are.
• The culture that nourishes us in childhood is nurtured by our leadership in adulthood.
• Evolving as humans, we carry humanity on our backs. And so humanity evolves.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

---

---

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. The most valuable thing in life is a grand goal in life, a coherent philosophy for life. Whatever it may be (Stoicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Cynicism, Epicureanism etc) but having one is a prerequisite in living a good life and preventing us from ‘misliving’.
2. Modern philosophers tend to spend their days debating esoteric topics, the primary goal of most ancient philosophers was to help ordinary people live better lives.
3. Many of us have been persuaded that happiness is something that someone else, a therapist or a politician, and must confer on us. Stoicism rejects this notion. It teaches us that we are very much responsible for our happiness as well as our unhappiness.

Overall Thoughts

This is a great book for beginners who want to learn more about Stoicism and also for the practitioners of Stoicism alike who may want a refresher. The book has a clear structure and breaks down the origin, rise, decline and consequent revival of Stoicism.

Although the subject of Stoicism in itself is fascinating and when the author quotes the Stoics and their lives, he has done a tremendous job however, when he draws his own conclusions and tries to adapt the philosophy to modern life – he fails the Stoics and their teaching. The subject and the original material reference in this book is absolutely amazing however the execution of this book, not so much.

One element that really appealed to me was the author making frequent comparisons between Zen Buddhism and Stoicism. If you are anything like me and have a keen interest in Buddhism you may find these comparisons very helpful as I was able to draw from my knowledge of Buddhism and draw parallels and conclusions in Stoicism.

Who is this book for?

This book is for anyone who wants to:

• Improve their life through the use of a coherent philosophy
• Learn about the various philosophies for life
• Wanting to learn the benefits of self-control and self-discipline
• Learn how to develop a grand goal and vision for life
• Learn how to age well and live a meaningful life

This is a great book for anyone wanting to learn about Stoicism and learning about its origin, history, main contributors, rise and decline.

Also, for someone who is well versed in Stoicism, this book has great historical stories and a clear lineage and uptake of Stoicism in the ancient world. More importantly, the book has very important Stoic lessons and practices.

Main Points & Ideas

1. The Stoics’ interest in logic is based on their belief that a man’s distinctive feature is his rationality. According to the Stoics, man is distinguishable from all other animals by his ability to reason – so it is his duty to be reasonable.
2. The pursuit of tranquillity
   People have this misconception that the Stoics were these anti-joy zombies who experienced no emotions however that is not the case. The Stoics realised that a life plagued with negative emotions—including anger, anxiety, fear, grief, and envy—will not be a good life, so they develop a philosophy of life that teaches how to limit these negative emotions and pursue tranquillity.
3. Negative Visualisation
   As the name suggests, you visualise all the bad things you are afraid can plague your life. Why you ask? For so many good reasons.
   • Negative visualisation helps us learn the value of things we already have by contemplating losing them (our kids, ability to walk and see, money, homes, cars etc). By consciouslly thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalise our capacity for joy.
   • By contemplating the death of a loved one, we can learn to be more present with them, love them and appreciate them more. Make the most of our time with them.
   • By contemplating our own death we can live life more fully. Not by going wild and #YOLO’ing but by appreciating life more and not wasting our time and being grateful for all the opportunities.
   • Negative visualisation helps us contemplate the impermanence of the world (including our own self) and it helps us deal with change.
4. Trichotomy of control
   In life there are three types of sitautions:
   • Situations where we have complete control
     These are the things we should be doing first and foremost, these should be our primary concerns as our efforts are directly responsible for the outcomes.
   • Situations where we have no control
     Don’t waste any time thinking about or worrying over such things. If you cannot control it in any way shape or form, then let it go.
   • Situations where we have some but not total control
     Most of life exists in the realm. However, the Stoics made an important distinction; we may not have control over outcomes but we control the goals we set for ourselves. We may not control our desires and impulses but we control how and if we act upon them. Therefore the goal should not be external (for example I must win this tennis match) but should always be internal (I will play to my best ability).
5. Self Denial
   Similar to the practice of negative visualisation the Stoics periodically practised ‘poverty’ where they purposely went hungry, thirsty, dressed down for cold weather and slept on the floor among other things. They purposely created a contrast to the comforts of life to keep reminding themselves that if they lost everything, it wouldn’t be so bad. The practice also ensured that no vices take hold over their lives and makes them its slave. Much like fasting is prescribed by many of the major religions of the world to practice austerity and experience the plight of the poor, the Stoics took it further than just food and water. Although not to please Zeus or any other god but to ensure that they don’t cling to the things they enjoy. And then they would ask themselves; is this the fate you were so afraid of?

Impacts On My Life

1. After reading about Epictetus’s advice on avoiding social gatherings where the discussion is food, celebrities and other people – I started avoiding most such gatherings as I realised for 90% of the people this is the purpose of a gathering, to discuss current affairs, sports, cars, money and other people. These things don’t add value to my life. If I don’t hang out with you, now you know why – Epictetus told me so 🙂
2. After incorporating Negative Visualisation into my life, I noted an increased presence in my NOW. I was more conscious about my own mortality and that of the people around me. I became more cognisant about squandering my time and trying to make the most of my (remaining) time with my wife and daughter and making a valuable contribution to their lives and the world.
3. After learning about the Stoics’ practice of self denial and practiced poverty, I started volunteering at a homeless men’s shelter in Canberra. It was my ‘feed two birds with one scone’ idea where I could help in providing these men a safe, warm place to spend the night in the Canberra winter and at the same time, sleeping the nights with the bare minimum – sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. This practice not only made me realise that you can make a difference no matter how small you start, but talking to some of these men also made me realise that anyone’s situation could be worse and life can turn upside down without notice – so always plan for misfortune and be prepared for it.
4. I started looking at material objects for the utility they provide as opposed to the status they provide (car, house, clothes, jewellery, jobs etc). Everything I purchase for myself is purely for its utilitarian purpose. Hence I often struggle spending money on myself where its not a need but a want, I simply cannot justify it to myself.

Key Takeaways for Me

1. It is important to live life by a philosophy, not a religion but a philosophy. Religions serve a different purpose. A philosophy of life is unique to me and becomes my north star.
2. If humans are still struggling with the same questions, predicaments and conditions after almost 2000 years then there is something fundamentally wrong with how we conduct our lives, organise our societies and the value we attach to the various concepts of life.
3. You attain wealth and fame by the virtue of your character and not by pursuit (the Stoics advocated not pursuing fame and wealth, however almost all of them turned out famous and wealthy).
4. Nothing is worth doing pointlessly. It should either be a means to an end, or an end in itself.
5. Be fatalistic about the past and the present. The past is gone, its done – get over it and move on. The present is happening now and will soon turn into past. I can only impact the future, so I must focus my energy there.
6. Choose friends carefully. People have the capacity to disrupt my tranquillity so it is important to know this and be ready to deal with this. Befriend people who are doing a greater job than me in their pursuit of tranquillity and living a life of meaning – learn from them and get challenged by them. But at the same time also remember – people do not choose to have the faults that they do.
7. Punishment, if necessary, should not originate from retribution but for the good of the wrongdoer, to prevent them from doing it again.
8. After originally reading this book, I wrote two article and made a video on the topic of the trichotomy of control. Check them out here, here and here.

My Favourite Quotes

• Stoicism is not so much an ethic as it is a paradoxical recipe for happiness – Paul Veyne
• Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune – Seneca
• All things human are short-lived and perishable – Seneca
• By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.
• Our most important choice in life is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal – Epictetus
• This mortal life endures but a moment – Marcus Aurelius
• Another person will not do you harm unless you wish it; you will be harmed at just that time at which you take yourself to be harmed – Epictetus
• Is it not madness and the wildest lunacy to desire so much when you can hold so little? – Seneca
• In our youth, it takes effort to contemplate our own death; in our later years, it takes effort to avoid contemplating it.
• I always seek to conquer myself rather than fortune, to change my desires rather than the established order, and generally to believe that nothing except our thoughts is wholly under our control, so that after we have done our best in external matters, what remains to be done is absolutely impossible, at least as far as we are concerned – Descartes
• Our anger invariably lasts longer than the damage done to us – Seneca

---

---

Overall Thoughts

This is by far one of the best books I have read in many many years. So good in fact I read it twice in a year. It presents a plethora of good science and facts with a humorous undertone – which makes it very enjoyable. Although not a very easy read (lots of studies, dense facts, research etc) but it is a very informative book, so do take your time with it.

Who is this book for?

Short answer – Anyone who wants to be happy and understand happiness.

Long answer – Anyone who wants to understand our motivations, reasons, and predictability of happiness. Anyone curious to understand the process of happiness and most importantly what we think will make us happy versus what actually does make us happy. Anyone who wishes to understand the working of our brain and how we happiness relates to our memory of the past and our predictions of the future.

Impacts On My Life

1. This book has made me realise how we perceive and think of happiness with our limited faculties of recalling the past, imagination and envisioning a future.
2. It has given me a deeper understanding and a deeper look into my own thinking and my own understanding of the world, my world view and my understanding of my uniqueness and that of others.
3. This book has shown me the fallacies of my own mind and shown me how we can fall prey to our own, well-intentioned, thinking.

Main Points & Ideas

1. Happiness is subjective – it is an emotional state and cannot really be explained – everyone experiences happiness differently based on their unique experiences and cannot be compared. Even when we try to compare our own experiences it’s complicated because we are comparing our existing experience, that we’re currently having, with a memory of an experience and memories can often be very unreliable.
2. Our brain does not hold memories in its entirety but keeps snippets and highlights. Hence our memories are not a good reliance on the past – most often we remember our feelings of the event. The brain is reweaving the experiences and not retrieving them. Information acquired after an event can alter the memory of the event. Our brains fill in and leave out details of past memories and future imaginations – that’s not the problem, the problem is we are not aware of it and the brain does it without consulting us!
3. Once we have had an experience, we simply cannot set it aside, as we now base all future predictions, past memories and present, based on this (subjective) experience.
4. People can often be wrong about their feelings. Our interpretations of our feelings are based on what we think caused them. For example, feeling pain and believing that we are feeling pain looks very much alike in our brains. Experience implies participation in an event and awareness implies observation. We all experience them but not everyone is aware that they are experiencing emotions.
5. When we imagine how something will feel in the future – we imagine how it will feel now and then allow for a fact that now and later are different things. We base our predictions of the future on our present and we often make the mistake of thinking that the future will be similar to the present. Also, when we try to think of the past, about relationships, and about our feelings, political views, grief – we base our answers and memories on how we feel on the issue now. Hence we find it hard to feel good about an imagined future when we are too busy feeling bad about the actual present. Our brains have this Reality First policy.
6. If we experience the world exactly how it is, then we would be too depressed, but if we experience it exactly how we want it to be then we would be too deluded. A healthy psychological immune system makes us feel good enough about the situation to deal with it and bad enough to do something about it. When an experience makes us feel sufficiently unhappy (above a certain threshold) the psychological immune systems kicks in and cooks facts and shifts the blame to offer us a positive (retrospective) view of the situation.
7. Explanations allow us to understand the events and makes sense of how they can happen again. Unexplained events have a novelty – they strike us as unusual and rare which extends the extent of their emotional impact. When we cannot explain an event or something it lingers in our minds – it becomes a mystery or a conundrum. Our curious minds keep going back to them.
8. We all feel we are unique and not like others and definitely not average. That is why we often don’t listen to others’ advise – I am unique hence my reasons for pursuing and doing something are unique too and someone else cannot feel what I am feeling so their advice and experience, although good, does not entirely apply to me.

Key Takeaways for Me

1. Don’t compare your happiness with someone else – it’s all a subjective experience. It is all a you-know-what-I-mean feeling, which cannot be explained.
2. More options and variety lead to ultimate dissatisfaction because we always keep comparing to the alternatives – keep choices and options to a bare minimum.
3. I have learnt that negative events don’t affect us for as long or as hard as we think they will. Most people who experience major traumas (rape, physical assault, natural disasters) claim their lives have been enhanced by the experience.
4. After making a decision don’t look at the alternatives. When we have the option to swap, change, exchange we have the tendency to do so or at least like what we picked less as we always keep comparing to the alternative. In choosing freedom we often choose less satisfaction. We often feel more regrets when we find out the alternative rather than when we don’t.

My Favourite Quotes

• “Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see.”

• “We think we are thinking outside the box but we don’t realise how big the box really is”

• “Distorted views of reality are made possible by the fact that experiences are ambiguous—that is, they can be credibly viewed in many ways, some of which are more positive than others. To ensure that our views are credible, our brain accepts what our eye sees. To ensure that our views are positive, our eye looks for what our brain wants.”

• “Regret is an emotion we feel when we blame ourselves for unfortunate outcomes that might have been prevented had we only behaved differently in the past, and because that emotion is decidedly unpleasant, our behaviour in the present is often designed to preclude it”

• “We don’t just treasure our memories – we are our memories”

• “Our memory for emotional episodes is overly influenced by unusual instances, closing moments, and theories about how we must have felt way back then”

• “We not only pass our genes to make people who look like us but we also pass on our beliefs to make people who think like us”

• “If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.”

• “Social structures (such as religions and castes) and physical structures (such as mountains and oceans) were the great dictators that determined how, where, and with whom people would spend their lives, which left most folks with little to decide for themselves.”

• “Each one of us is trapped in a place, time or circumstance and our attempts to use our rational minds to transcend those boundaries are not effective.”

• “Our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains, but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and pre-existing knowledge to construct our perception of reality.” – Immanuel Kant

---

---

Overall Thoughts

Although I have read similar wisdom in other books over the years, this book changed my outlook on how I think about my own mindset. This book made me realise that in each of us both the fixed and growth mindset exists and depending on the various situations of life each one surfaces. Being a parent of a 4-year-old, what resonated most with my in this book was the section on teaching and parenting and I have learned not only how to assess my fixed mindset and develop a growth mindset but also how to help cultivate it in another person. However, I do feel the book does a very good job in explaining how the differences between a fixed and growth mindset but falls a bit short in the practical applications of developing a growth mindset which is something you would expect from a book called Mindset.

Who is this book for?

The chapters of the book are split into various aspects of life; Parenting, Teaching, Leadership, Sports etc. Anyone who wants to gain an understanding of the different mindsets and get a window into their own mindsets should read this book. This book is particularly useful for parents, educators, leaders and sports coaches – people who can nurture and encourage others to grow.

Impacts On My Life

1. This book made me realise how I often operate with a fixed mindset, and it helped me identify my fixed mindset triggers and persona.
2. I have learned that after a failure, we should use the experience and the available resource not to protect and nurse our bruised egos but to reflect and learn from the experience – the growth mindset way.
3. Trying to exert as little effort as possible is a hallmark characteristic of the fixed mindset.
4. As a parent, I realised that my child is a growing and developing person and my commitment, above anything else, should be towards their development – body, mind and spirit. And the best gift I can give my child is to teach her to love challenges, be curious about mistakes and progress, enjoy hard work and effort, and seek new strategies to keep on learning.

Main Points & Ideas

Effort / Skill / Talent

1. People with the fixed mindset see effort as a bad thing, because if they need to put in effort in anything then it means they don’t have the talent, skill or a natural ability for this. Whereas, people with a growth mindset view effort as the hallmark action of growing your abilities and skills and becoming more talented.
2. Potential is someone’s capacity to develop, over time – what they can be – not what they are right now. We do not know where someone can go with the right effort, training and coaching – their true potential.
3. People tend to blame their lack of excellence and accomplishment on a lack of talent and skills, where else what they actually lack is the right effort. The reason effort is terrifying is it robs you of your excuses. Without effort and imagination, you can always be more but with effort, you cannot say that anymore.
4. Without effort, we can be many things but once we put in the effort, try hard and perhaps fail then we don’t see the possibility – hence we don’t like to put in the effort and try.

Failure & Challenge

1. People with a growth mindset thrive when they are stretched and challenged. They get their thrill from learning new things and hard things. However, when people with a fixed mindset are challenged and things get hard – and they don’t feel validated, smart or talented – they lose interest. They get their thrill from what is easy – what they have already mastered. They like the known and staying in their comfort zone.
2. In the fixed mindset, a failure becomes an identity and tends to define future efforts and outcomes. (I am a failure, therefore I will continue to fail). However, in the growth mindset, even though failure is a painful experience, it does not define you. It is something to deal with, face and learn from.
3. We like to see extraordinary people as fundamentally different from us. We like to see them as talented or born with skills not bestowed upon mere mortals as ourselves. Furthermore, we like to see them as superheroes who are born different. We do not see them as relatively normal people who made themselves extraordinary through effort and hard work and perhaps repeated failures.

Consistency and Character

1. Skills, talents and abilities can get you where you want to be, but to stay there and continue to be at the top of your game you need consistency. You need to keep working as hard or even harder once you have ‘made it’ to stay there, and that takes character – the character and consistency to keep showing up.
2. “Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way. When people—couples, coaches and athletes, managers and workers, parents and children, teachers and students—change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework.”

Relationships

1. With a fixed mindset navigating relationships, particularly marriage can be quite challenging. With a fixed mindset, people either tend to blame their own ‘permanent’ qualities of their partners.
2. Failures and setbacks become about protecting your own egos and always trying to prove your competence which eventually puts you in a competition with your own partner to try and constantly prove you are the smarter one, knowledgeable one, intelligent one and so on.
3. Most relationships face a tough time because when people encounter a partner with desires and need different to theirs, they don’t know how to deal with those differences, as they have not learned to do that. A fixed mindset keeps you within the realm of the known and your comfort zone.
4. The ultimate goal of a marriage and any relationship really is to encourage your partner’s development and have them encourage yours.

Parenting

1. Praise matters, and how we praise matters even more. As a parent, it is fairly common and easy to fall into the trap of praising kids for their abilities, actions, intelligence etc. However, praising them for their intelligence and brilliance does lots of harm to their performance as well as their motivation. If we tell our kids they are smart, clever, intelligent for achieving and accomplishing something, then what are they when they don’t? “If success means they’re smart, then failure means they’re dumb.”
2. Doing the easy things. If children are praised for completing something, then the next time they try and avoid doing the hard things – for fear of not completing it and in return not getting the praise they relished in.
3. Praise must be given to children’s efforts, hard work and focus towards a task. Even showing interest in their work and effort goes a long way.
4. As parents and society at large, we tend to protect our children from failure and criticism in order to boost their confidence and self-esteem. However, children require honest and constructive feedback in order to learn.
5. In the spirit of discipline and teaching their kids rules, most parents don’t realise the message they are sending – ‘If you don’t do what I say, you will be judged and punished’. Instead, what needs to be taught to kids is how to think through the problems they are facing and make their own smart decision.
6. Some parents and educators think that lowering the bar will make it easier for kids and give them a winning and successful experience in order to boost their self-esteem, leading to long term achievement. Unfortunately, it does not work. It ends up creating poorly educated children who feel entitled to easy work followed by easy praise.
7. Next time you’re in a position to discipline, ask yourself, What is the message I’m sending here: I will judge and punish you? Or I will help you think and learn?

Key Takeaways for Me

1. The story of the hare and the tortoise gave effort a bad name. It suggests that effort is for plodders and if and when the talented ones stuff up is the only time when plodders can win – with effort.
2. Effort is the cornerstone of accomplishments – not talent, skills and genius.
3. Winning and losing is not as important as putting in your best effort and learning something new. Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?, did I learn?
4. As a parent, I have also learned that when my child has a setback and I react with anxiety or with concern about her ability, this enforces more of a fixed mindset. Her abilities are growing, and she is learning new things every day. With the right effort, she will overcome these small setbacks.
5. The process of trying, learning and developing yourself is more important than just the outcomes.
6. In the fixed mindset, both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind. When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it (so you do very little new work to put yourself at risk of failure), and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.
7. Identify your fixed mindset persona based on your triggers – and give this persona a name – make it obvious to be identified in the future. For example; my fixed mindset persona is Mr Zehmat (rhymes with my name and means bother/botheration/annoyance/irritation). Zehmat shows up every time I try to do something challenging that requires focus and attention, or something out of my comfort zone. Zehmat tries to protect me from failure and disappointment, but in effect limits my abilities and outcomes.
8. This fixed mindset persona that exists in almost all of us is born to protect us and keep us safe, and it is usually born at a very young age – children as young as toddlers tend to have a fixed mindset based on their experiences with failure. Over time, this fixed mindset persona doesn’t develop new tools but exists in its limited ways. And the best thing to do to overcome and educate this persona is to take on challenges and sticking to them, bounce back from failure, and helping and supporting others to grow.

Things I will be implementing after reading this book:

1. Overcoming the fixed mindset
   • It starts by accepting that we all have both mindsets.
   • Then we learn to recognise what triggers our fixed mindset. Failures? Criticism? Deadlines? Disagreements?
   • And we come to understand what happens to us when our fixed-mindset “persona” is triggered. Who is this persona? What’s its name? What does it make us think, feel, and do? How does it affect those around us?
   • Importantly, we can gradually learn to remain in a growth-mindset place despite the triggers, as we educate our persona and invite it to join us on our growth-mindset journey.
   • Ideally, we will learn more and more about how we can help others on their journey, too.
2. At the end of the day, asking myself and my family:
   • What did you learn today?
   • What mistake did you make that taught you something?
   • What did you try hard at today?”
3. When someone compares themselves to another, asking them is he/she’s actually smarter than you or just more experienced? And what do you need to get to that level?
4. Using new language to help my daughter with learning and becoming better
   • “It is not entirely about you and your performance. It is a teacher’s job to find every possible flaw. Your job is to learn from the critique and make your outcome even better.”
   • “It must be a terrible thing to feel that everyone is evaluating you, and you can’t show what you know. We want you to know that we are not evaluating you. We care about your learning, and we know that you’ve learned your stuff. Likewise, we’re proud that you’ve stuck to it and kept learning.”
   • “Everyone learns differently. Let’s keep trying to find the way that works for you.”
   • I know it’s so disappointing to have your hopes up and to perform your best but not to win. But you know, you haven’t really earned it yet. There were many kids there who’ve been in [fill in the activity] longer than you and who’ve worked a lot harder than you. If this is something you really want, then it’s something you’ll really have to work for.” If you want to do it purely for fun, that was just fine. But if you want to excel in the competitions, more is required.
   • Champs are the people who work the hardest. Anyone can become a champ by working hard. “Tomorrow, tell me something you’ve done to become a champ.”

My Favourite Quotes

• “A person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training”
• “In one world—the world of fixed traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.”
• “Becoming is better than being.” The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of becoming.”
• “Lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is a simple question: If you’re somebody when you’re successful, what are you when you’re unsuccessful? “
• “Instead of trying to learn from and repair their failures, people with the fixed mindset may simply try to repair their self-esteem.”
• “No matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.”
• “The top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it’s where many growth-minded people arrive as a by-product of their enthusiasm for what they do.”
• “If you don’t give anything, don’t expect anything. Success is not coming to you, you must come to it.”
• “You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to the task of becoming a little better each and every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.” – Coach Wooden
• “Don’t judge. Teach. It’s a learning process”

Illustration