Being an Adult

The Four Stages of Life by Mark Manson.

1. Mimicry: As children, the way we’re wired to learn is by watching and mimicking others. The goal of Stage One is to teach us how to function within society so that we can be autonomous, self-sufficient adults. The idea is that the adults in the community around us help us to reach this point through supporting our ability to make decisions and take action ourselves.
2. Self-Discovery: This is about learning what makes us different from the people and culture around us. It requires us to begin making decisions for ourselves, to test ourselves, and to understand ourselves and what makes us unique.
3. Commitment: Here, you focus on things that are a) actually important to you, and b) what you’re not terrible at. Now it’s time to make your dent in the world.
4. Legacy: The goal of Stage Four then becomes not to create a legacy as much as simply making sure that legacy lasts beyond one’s death.

How to Grow the Fuck Up: A Guide to Humans by Mark Manson. Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake. The same way that the adolescent realizes there’s more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain, the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation, approval, and satisfaction. The adult does what is right for the simple reason that it is right. End of discussion.

We are What We Choose by Jeff Bezos (Founder, Amazon). What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices…When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

Dollar Shave Club Founder: Why Life Is Defined By Choices (Forbes). Dubin splits choices into two categories: big and little choices. A big choice, he says, is something like who you choose to marry. There are a few really big choices in life. By contrast, small choices may not be as obvious but are so much more frequent. Choices like where, how and with whom you choose to invest your time, he says. Small choices are everpresent. So much so that Dubin argues small choices may matter more than big choices and have a bigger impact on your life. “Be mindful of these little choices.”

The Responsibility/Fault Fallacy by Mark Manson. A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems. Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they are not the same thing. If I hit you with my car, I am both at fault and likely legally responsible to compensate you in some way. Even if hitting you with my car was an accident, I would still be responsible. This is the way fault works in our society. If you fuck up, you’re on the hook for making it right. And it should be that way. But there are also problems we aren’t at fault for, yet we are still responsible for them.

Your Fear Of Looking Stupid Is Making You Look Stupid (Medium). John Lennon once said, “Trying to please everybody is impossible — if you did that, you’d end up in the middle with nobody liking you. You’ve just got to make the decision about what you think is your best, and do it.”

You Don’t Need Permission (theschooloflife.com). We’re no longer the infant who just popped everything interesting into its mouth and smiled. Now we look around and wonder: Is this OK? And generally we cease to wonder very much. We simply assume it’s probably not. Even in the absence of active prohibition, we stifle our impulses. We internalise those millions of nos. 

The Fear of Missing Out by Mark Manson. FOMO is a compulsive desire to experience something (or be somewhere) motivated not by what you gain, but rather by the fear of what you will potentially lose. And this idea of loss is usually imagined…All of life’s great experiences come with associated costs. They require investment and sacrifice. And it’s completely normal and healthy to be unwilling to commit to them at times. That doesn’t mean you’re necessarily missing anything. In fact, if you think about it, you’re always missing something. And sometimes it’s actually better that you’re missing those things.

Stop Taking Pride In Not Knowing How To Do Basic Shit (thefinancialdiet.com). We don’t need to be perfect, but we need to stop thinking that being a mess is quirky or cute, because it is not. We should strive to be the person that other people say “Damn, they have their shit together” about, because that is one of the highest compliments we can be paid. And as long as it is within our mental and physical capacities to be doing these things, we have no excuse other than our own laziness, really, and that’s something we should definitely not be taking pride in.

More Reading

3 Important Life Skills Nobody Ever Taught You by Mark Manson.

1. How to Stop Taking Things Personally. When people criticize you or reject you, it likely has way more to do with them — their values, their priorities, their life situation — than it does with you. I hate to break it to you, but other people simply don’t think about you that much (after all, they’re too busy trying to believe everything is about them).
2. How to Be Persuaded and Change Your Mind. You’re going to be wrong a lot in life. In fact, you’re going to be wrong pretty much all of the time. And in many ways, your ability to succeed and learn over the long-term is directly proportional to your ability to change what you believe in response to your ignorance and mistakes.
3. How to Act Without Knowing the Result. Developing the ability to simply do things for no other reason than curiosity or interest or hell, even boredom — the ability to do things with no expectation for result or accolade or productivity or fanfare — will train you to better make these big ambiguous life decisions. It will train you to simply start on something without knowing where in the hell it’s going.

Learning How to Think: The Skill No One Taught You (Farnam Street). I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

10 Life Lessons I Learned from Surviving My 20s by Mark Manson. My 20s certainly were dramatic. Here are some of the life lessons I learned.

17 Hard Truths About Life I Ignored For Way Too Long by Darius Foroux. So after I got stuck last time, I thought of the hard life truths I was ignoring. Once I returned to these lessons, everything improved again.

10 Lessons I Learned From Making Many Mistakes In My 20s by Darius Foroux. Learning from your mistakes does not happen automatically—it requires thinking and reflection. So here’s my reflection on the lessons I learned from the mistakes I made in my twenties. 

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