Things to Remember

These are some things I jotted down one day last week, I’ll refine them a bit more later on. Think of it as an aide-memoire of things that work for me, your milage may vary.

• Don’t worry about things that haven’t happened.
• Don’t turn whatever has happened and/or is bothering you into a catastrophe, especially if no one else is telling you that it is one. Seek out someone you trust and ask them “is this a catastrophe?” Not only will they say no about 99.9% of the time, they will often tell you why it isn’t a catastrophe.
• The people who are important to you will not use your personal characteristics as a laundry list of personal failings in the same way that you do. In fact they won’t do it all. What you perceive as your own obvious and innate failings, others will often struggle to even see. Self awareness and hyper-awareness are two different things.
• There will be people who don’t like you, people who don’t think you’re good enough, and people who won’t give you a chance. They most likely intersect, meaning there are fewer of them than you might think. You don’t have to satisfy these people, only those who like you and support you. Most of all, you have to be good enough for you.
• Everybody has different needs and wants in life. Even though your needs and wants will often intersect with those of others, there is still no reason to use other people as the measure for what you should be getting out of life.
• A person has more depth and dimensions than are measurable. If you focus solely on a single metric when you measure yourself against some standard or goal, you will be wrong in some way or another. A qualified and multi-dimensional validation of your progress will give you a more nuanced and more supportive sense of where you are heading and how to correct yourself.
• Always focus on your capability. Regard potential as something to be shaped into capability.
• Take time to think about things in many different ways, employing both proven mental models and lateral thinking.
• Often problems are easier to tackle once you have been for a walk in the countryside.

• Ideas
• Self Improvement
• Depression
• Twenty