Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Archives for April 2022

“Follow Your Passion” Is Terrible Career Advice

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The cliché “follow your passion” is easily the worst career advice you could ever give or get.

My guidance: Don’t do something you love. Do something you’re good at, even if it may not be something you’re passionate about.

Contentment isn’t likely to come from figuring out what you love and doing it for your career. Career success really comes from doing what other people will love you—and ‘compensate’ you—for doing.

Idea for Impact: You don’t have to give up your dreams, but pursue them as a hobby. Don’t try to find a perfect job. Find a good, if not a passion-filled, career and find the gratification of pursuing your passions outside of work.

Besides, people don’t really know what reality is like until they’re doing it. Therefore, perhaps a better way to choose what you do be to follow your effort? Be flexible. Have a broad view of what you wish to achieve, and be prepared to compromise on how you make it happen. Enjoy the work that you do, and discover aspects of it you’d enjoy regardless of being paid or not. True career contentment comes from an appreciative boss, helpful coworkers, the opportunity to learn and grow, a reasonable commute, and a middle-class living.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Some Lessons Can Only Be Learned in the School of Life
  2. The Myth of Passion
  3. Get Started, Passion Comes Later: A Case Study of Chipotle’s Founder, Steve Ells
  4. Do-What-I-Did Career Advice Is Mostly Nonsense
  5. Don’t Use Personality Assessments to Sort the Talented from the Less Talented

The Secret to Happiness in Relationships is Lowering Your Expectations

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Happiness depends not on how well things are going, but on whether things are going better or worse than expected. (A case in point: under-promising and over-delivering is a sure way to build customer loyalty.)

Right-size what you can expect from others. You’d be happier to accept other people’s difficult behaviors when you expect less from them. The instant you feel disappointed because another person didn’t come through for you, remind yourself, “It isn’t for me to have those expectations on her.”

The definitive purpose of moderating your expectations of other people isn’t to give them some sort of pass. Instead, it is to help you take off your rose-colored spectacles and appreciate the being-as-is. This change of attitude helps you moderate the constant frustration—even anger—from those around you.

Idea for Impact: If you have high expectations of other people and they disappoint you, you’re giving them permission to dictate how you’ll feel. That’s a lot of power to give to others.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  2. Change Your Perspective, Change Your Reactions
  3. Affection Is No Defense: Good Intentions Make Excellent Alibis
  4. Release Your Cows … Be Happy
  5. The Surprising Power of Low Expectations: The Secret Weapon to Happiness?

Inspirational Quotations #940

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Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.
—Paul Simon (American Musician)

Never have anything to do with an unlucky place, or an unlucky man. I have seen many clever men, very clever men, who had not shoes to their feet. I never act with them. Their advice sounds very well, but they cannot get on themselves; and if they cannot do good to themselves, how can they do good to me?
—Mayer Amschel Rothschild (German Financier)

The test of any man lies in action.
—Pindar (Greek Lyric Poet)

There must be more to life than having everything.
—Maurice Sendak (American Writer, Illustrator)

Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things, but in doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Neglect nothing; the most trivial action may be performed to God.
—Marie Angelique Arnauld (French Abbess)

The art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men.
—James Arthur Hadfield (British Psychoanalysts)

Discover the centre of your being and hold fast to it; only from there can you describe the perfect circle of life rounded into its absolute fullness.
—Nolini Kanta Gupta (Indian Hindu Revolutionary)

As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us.
—Arnold J. Toynbee (British Historian)

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.
—Henry Ward Beecher (American Protestant Clergyman)

We ought to fear a man who hates himself, for we are at risk of becoming victims of his anger and revenge. Let us then try to lure him into self-love.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)

Simply by making the effort to start something, you will be miles ahead of almost everyone else.
—Gary Player (South African Golfer)

Private interpretation in religion is like cutting your own hair.
—Austin O’Malley (American Aphorist, Ophthalmologist)

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
—Paul Valery (French Critic, Poet)

He is not poor that has little, but he that desires much.
—Samuel Daniel (English Poet)

Can’t Expect to Hold the Same Set of Beliefs Your Entire Life

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It’s okay to challenge your core values and change.

That’s normal and healthy.

It means you’re able to ability to transcend your current worldview and have an open mind. You’re willing to learn about new perspectives. You’re eager to search actively for evidence against your favored beliefs, discover and challenge your internal biases, and change your core values if they no longer make sense.

Having the freedom to change your core beliefs and being able to reason and reconsider your positions on something is an integral part of being human, as Aristotle writes in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Don’t be more committed to the appearance of consistency than to real growth.

Don’t inadvertently buy into the values that predominate popular culture.

When you have doubts and questions and changes of heart and mind, even on fundamental issues such as faith or political orientation, don’t consider them character defects or moral flaws. You’re just exercising your ability for rational thought.

Life should alter you. It should recondition your soul and mind and refocus your lens. Time and experience—the people you meet, the ideas you stumble upon, and how you discover meaning—should all change you. On religion, say, you won’t have the understanding of yourself and of God and the world that you had ten years ago. And you can bet that the same won’t be true ten years from now.

As a human, you grow and change. Your worldview can—and should—reflect that growth. Regardless of what you feel, think, believe, and profess today, if someday in the future you find yourself in a different place, remember: it’s okay to realign your mind—and to speak it.

Idea for Impact: Rethink everything you previously thought out. It’ll only strengthen your character.

You’ll also discover that you’re rarely offended by other people’s opinions anymore, even when they differ significantly from your own. You’ll be care far more about how people justify and rationalize those views. And you’ll get a better appreciation of the nuances—this is much more important than whether or not someone agrees with you.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Ethics Lessons From Akira Kurosawa’s ‘High and Low’
  2. No One Has a Monopoly on Truth
  3. Saying is Believing: Why People Are Reluctant to Change an Expressed Opinion
  4. Why People are Afraid to Think
  5. Care Less for What Other People Think

Don’t Be a Prisoner of the Hurt Done to You

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The Irish philosopher and poet John O’Donohue writes in Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong (1998,)

Forgiveness is one of the really difficult things in life. The logic of receiving hurt seems to run in the direction of never forgetting either the hurt or the hurter. When you forgive, some deeper, divine generosity takes over. When you can forgive, then you are free. When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you. If you are really disappointed in someone and you become embittered, you become incarcerated inside that feeling. Only the grace of forgiveness can break the straight logic of hurt and embitterment. It gives you a way out, because it places the conflict on a completely different level. In a strange way, it keeps the whole conflict human. You begin to see and understand the conditions, circumstances, or weakness that made the other person act as they did.

Forgiveness begins with recognizing that the pain wrought upon you by someone else stems from her own deep suffering.

In other words, forgiveness is opening up to the insight that, while you are the victim of another who has caused you some suffering, she herself is also a victim of suffering. A set of circumstances—often beyond your understanding—have influenced her to perpetuate the hurt upon you.

When you adopt this enlightened state, you’re not condoning or justifying aggression, abuse, or violence. Instead, you’re responding with such kindness as to equip you with a substantial emotional breakthrough towards giving up resentment, harsh judgment, and revenge against the person who caused hurt.

Responding with the understanding that suffering stems from suffering can progressively offer you emotional freedom from the second-order suffering that comes from replaying that hurt repeatedly.

Idea for Impact: Forgiveness is for you—not for anyone else. Append your grievance story to remind youself of the heroic choice of realizing that forgiveness was hard—but you found a way to forgive anyway. Holding onto the anger and resentment will, then, no longer carry the same weight on you.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Blame Your Parents for Your Current Problems?
  2. Seven Ways to Let Go of Regret
  3. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy
  4. The Buddha Teaches: How to Empower Yourself in the Face of Criticism
  5. How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis

Inspirational Quotations #939

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Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
—Irving Howe (American Critic)

Being taken for granted can be a compliment. It means that you’ve become a comfortable, trusted element in another person’s life.
—Joyce Brothers (American Psychologist)

Management is nothing more than motivating other people.
—Lee Iacocca (American Businessperson)

Seem not greater than thou art.
—Robert Burton (English Scholar, Clergyman)

I couldn’t wait for the sun to come up the next morning so that I could get out on the course again.
—Ben Hogan (American Golfer)

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.
—Reginald Horace Blyth (British Japanologist)

If only the strength of the love that people feel when it is reciprocated could be as intense and obsessive as the love we feel when it is not; then marriages would be truly made in heaven.
—Ben Elton (English Comedian, Writer)

The best armor of old age is a well-spent life preceding it.
—Charlie Munger (American Investor, Philanthropist)

It is better to be a has-been than a never-was.
—Cecil Parkinson (British Politician)

To do all the talking and not be willing to listen is a form of greed.
—Democritus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
—Camille Pissarro (French Painter)

People entering marriage [must] enter it with a proper understanding of marriage as a God-given gift to help people grow in the virtues of love, faith and charity and to grow in unselfishness.
—A. J. Reb Materi (Canadian Clergyman)

A small spark can start a great fire.
—Emmet Fox (American New Thought Leader)

Modesty is the chastity of merit, the virginity of noble souls.
—Emile de Girardin (French Journalist)

Let us not speak of tolerance. This negative word implies grudging concessions by smug consciences. Rather, let us speak of mutual understanding and mutual respect.
—Dominique Pire (Belgian Dominican Priest)

If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.
—Dan Rather (American Newscaster)