“Most of the limitations that you feel are imposed on you personally are actually self-imposed. Not knowing who you really are keeps you stuck in secondhand beliefs, nursing old wounds, following outworn conditioning, and suffering a sense of self-doubt and self-judgement” (pg. 13).
“If your involvement changes, so does your experience” (pg 46).
“When you are needy, fulfillment is unattainable” (pg 64).
“You weren’t shaped by what happened to you at birth. You were shaped by what you thought about those happenings” (pg 72).
“Being human means that anything can happen” (pg 77).
“If you want the mind to flow, make the workplace flow” (pg 85).
“Creativity is essential for solving complex problems - the kinds we often face in a fast-paced world . . . we have very little success in training people to be more creative. And there’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure: we’re trying to train a skill, but what we should be training is a state of mind” (pg 86).
“Absolute freedom is terrifying. it expands the unknown as far as the eye can see. That’s the main reaons that human history isn’t about absolute freedom; it is about testing the next boundary, and then moving beyond it to test a new boundary” (pg 99).
“We have defined human nature simultaneously as something to celebrate and something to fear” (pg 99).
“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evengings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
“Babies are afraid of falling from a very early age, and they can’t learn to walk without testing the precarious state between falling down and staying on their feet. Clearly fear of falling loses out in the end . . . only Homo sapiens turn extreme risk-taking into fun” (pg 135).
Grade: C+
There’s some good stuff here, but to be honest, I didn’t even finish reading it - which is BIG for me! It was just a bit too much out there and not enough tangible, usable, application for the here and now. But, I got some good stuff from it. so there’s that.
Here’s perhaps a better, more fair summary: