reading Stop Doing That Shit by Gary John Bishop
"In your day-to-day life you are, for the most part, on autopilot."
"The reality is, you create your experience of life in your self-talk and then act accordingly."
"A big part of living the life you want is taking ownership of your choices, now and in the future."
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
"It’s always much easier to measure the decline of others than your own."
"There’s a reason why so few make it out of the trap of their own mind. The trap all too often seems to be just fine from day to day."
"You just can’t keep responding in ordinary ways if you are truly out to live an extraordinary life."
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
"Why do you do what you do? ...If you keep living this way, where is it all headed?"
"Self-discipline is nothing more than doing what you say you will do, when you least feel like doing it."
"When the imagination and willpower are in conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception."
"It’s all survival. Safety over aliveness. Predictability over joy or love or freedom or the life of your dreams."
"If you really are after some kind of new life, some new and unprecedented result, that will require risk on your part. That will require you to push through your predictable self-talk, your all-too-familiar emotional freeze-frame, and reach for the unknown."
"Let me stop right here and explain a little something about your subconscious. This isn’t some self-help, psycho-neuro faffle-babble. It’s real, it’s there, and it’s working you like an old sock puppet."
"Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one."
"You are addicted to the version of yourself you have become, and your entire existence is about perpetuating that myth."
"There’s an irresistible link between happiness and where your attention is pointed. Same goes for unhappiness, of course."
"The more complex we become as human beings, at both societal & individual levels, the more we experience psychic entropy which is a fancy way of saying that the more complex life becomes, the more miserable we’re likely to become. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can fill the void."
"You’ve wrapped up this miracle—your life—in a mundane web of petty, shallow expressions of what it is to be alive. Then you wonder why you’re not happy or satisfied or fulfilled!"
"Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
"Your 'truth' and 'the truth' are not the same, even though you have designed your life around the idea that they are.”
“What if 'speaking your truth' is what keeps you trapped?”
“Like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth.”
“Dry your eyes, sit up in your chair, and finally set the record straight with yourself.”
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect.”
“When I say that we view people through the perspective of our conclusion, what we’re also doing is testing them to see how they measure up to what we’ve concluded. Do they conform? Do they conflict?”
“Your love, your self-expression, are there to be broadcast to the world, not shut down, manipulated and controlled in the ruins of a once blooming friendship or relationship.”
“It’s what you have concluded about life that has you stuck in a certain place.”
“What you’re dealing with internally often doesn’t match up to what is going on externally.”
“Look at the things you want in life but that you either don’t pursue or always seem to fall short of.”
“That’s what true acceptance is for a human being. When you can let something be itself without any charge or reaction around that thing.”
“That feeling, that experience of yourself, is where your conclusions combine to form a very personal experience of actually being you, something that permeates every part of your being.”
“Have you ever noticed how everything you are after is always later? It’s never here, now.”
“Life isn’t a movie, where the struggle and the happy ending are only an hour or two apart. And you can’t fall asleep during the boring parts or cover your eyes when shit gets gory.”
“What are you actually up to that would make this life of yours a truly great one?”
“The cause of your existence is coming from the past into the present day and on into your future like a straight line.”
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
“They work backward. Everything they do is guided from the future. They start with the ending!”
“It doesn’t matter what you do; it only matters that you do.”
“Every day, several times a day, sometimes hundreds of times a day and for countless days to come, you have to ask yourself, ‘What is my future telling me to do right now?’”
“Own your life, own where it’s been, own where it’s headed and what you need to do to wake yourself up to what’s possible each and every day of it.”