psychology #healing
Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may be admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples, and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself.
“In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords (them) the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to (their) potential—as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.”
- Bill Watterson
The two mindset shifts I find myself focusing on to escape the trap:
- It’s not about achieving the extraordinary, it’s about finding purpose, joy, and fulfillment in the ordinary along the way.
- The prize is not the achievement you strive for, but the striving itself. This is about dislocating your happiness from any “ends” you’re trying to reach. It’s about avoiding the “when, then” psychology that says “when I get [X], then I’ll be happy.”
Notes from Sahil Bloom’s Newsletter