✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

• Transform chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.
• It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.
• He whose life has a why can bear almost any how - Friedrich Nietzsche
• Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult.

📒 Summary + Notes

Rule 1: Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back

• Take responsibility.
• Transform chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

Rule 2: Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible For Helping

• The care and order that you project on someone you are responsible for helping (dog, parents, spouse, etc.) project on yourself as well.
• It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.

Rule 3: Make Friends With People Who Want The Best For You

But a villain who despairs of his villainy has not become a hero. A hero is something positive, not just the absence of evil.

• Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, and not the most difficult. This promotes humility and shows you the true nature of the act or the reason behind the act.

Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?

Rule 4: Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today.

• If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse.
• Winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.
• Working of internal critic on false basis
  1. It selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, power, money, etc.)
  2. Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant.
  3. Then it contrasts you unfavourably with someone truly stellar, within that domain.
  4. Or worse, it makes you believe this comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life.
• You can’t fix things if you don’t know they are broken. You are broken.
• Get the internal critic to work for you.

Rule 5: Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them.

• Infants push forward to see where the actual boundaries lie.
• Don’t reward bad behaviour

Here are some things to teach infants. Do not bite, kick or hit, except in self-defence. Do not torture and bully other children, so you don’t end up in jail. Eat in a civilized and thankful manner, so that people are happy to have you at their house, and pleased to feed you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they don’t hate you and might therefore deign to teach you something. Go to sleep properly, and peaceably, so that your parents can have a private life and not resent your existence. Take care of your belongings, because you need to learn how and because you’re lucky to have them. Be good company when something fun is happening, so that you’re invited for the fun. Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you around. A child who knows these rules will be welcome everywhere.

• Disciplinary Principles
  1. Limit the rules
  2. Use minimum necessary force to enforce those rules
  3. Parents should come in pairs
  4. Parents should understand their own capacity to be hard, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and deceitful.

Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world—merciful proxies, caring proxies—but proxies, nonetheless. This obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost self-esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security. It’s more important even than fostering individual identity. That Holy Grail can only be pursued, in any case, after a high degree of social sophistication has been established.

Rule 6: Set Your House In Perfect Order Before You Criticize The World

• Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.
• Simply stop doing what you know to be wrong. Not essentially according to the external code of behavior but to your own standards of judgment.
• Don’t overthink it, if you feel it’s wrong, stop that behavior.
• Or find a god-damned good reason for doing it.

Rule 7: Pursue What Is Meaningful ( Not What Is Expedient )

Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.

• Turn “What should I do today?” to “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?”
• Don’t run away from hardships for there lies the possibility of unparalleled growth.
• Be disciplined instead of being motivated.
• Do it anyway. Regardless of the state, you are in.
• Harden your mind, body, and soul to take the actions that the situations demand.
• Take charge and take responsibility for your life and maybe others around you.

Rule 8: Tell The Truth—Or, At Least, Don’t Lie

• Pay close attention to what you do and say. Judge yourself on ideal metrics and find places of improvement

Stasis doesn’t bring forth your hidden potential (your full self). You have to say something, go somewhere, and do things to get turned on. And, if not … you remain incomplete, and life is too hard for anyone incomplete.

• Never weaken your character as one with a weak character is easily mowed down by adversities.
• Act in a manner that is honorable, don’t say untrue things, and betray your self.

“Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.” That is the voice of authenticity.

“Did what I want happen? No. Then the world is unfair. People are jealous, and too stupid to understand. It is the fault of something or someone else.” That is the voice of inauthenticity.

• Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.
• What you could be is a limitless possibility. Don’t limit or sacrifice yourself with regard to who you currently are.

Rule 9: Assume That The Person You Are Listening To Might Know Something You Don’t

• A genuine conversation is mostly listening.
• True Thinking is all about:
  • Challenging prejudicesL
  • Enhancing perception
  • Being articulate
• When in dispute, try to reinstate the last idea/thought of the other person before you make your point.
• You never talk to a group, It’s always individuals.

Rule 10: Be Precise in Your Speech

• In our perception, the world reveals itself as a set of tools and obstacle. Something to “utilize” and something to “navigate”
• In tragedy, precision may leave the tragedy intact, but it chases away the ghould and the demons.
• When things go south, when shit hits the fan, when adversity strikes. What has been ignored comes to the surface.
• When things lack clarity and specificity the walls crumble and the chaos makes its presence know.
• The only way to mitigate chaos is through precision and specific order.

Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding

• Just like in chess: When can’t tell why someone did something. Just look at the consequence and infer the motivation.
• “I only live for you” → No. Don’t be an Oedipal parent

Too much protection devastates the developing soul

My mother said, “If it was too good at home, you’d never leave.”

• You have to toughen up, especially men. Though it will be hard, and no it won’t be easy.

Rule 12: Pet A Cat When You Encounter One On The Street

Cooperation is for safety, security and companionship. Competition is for personal growth and status.

• It’s the hero’s arch. You have nothing. You strive for more. You work hard and diligently. You succeed. You become a hero.
• You are in a war. It is a continuous struggle. Not a battle of a day. When worries associated with the crisis arise at other times, remind yourself that you’ll think through them during the scheduled period.
• You will always have problems and tragedies to face. Pet a dog when you encounter one of the street.

Last Thoughts

• After each dispute, ask yourself. What did you do to contribute to the current situation. And however small it is. Fix it.
• Strength in the face of adversity.

It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father’s funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on.