You're Not That Great, Daniel Crosby (100%)

4: Your problem is far more pervasive. Your problem is one that you’re less aware of and is far more insidious than anything you’ve ever consciously done. Your problem is one you likely never even knew you had.
4: Soren Kierkegaard’s “Attack Upon Christendom” is not an attack on his beloved Christianity per se, but rather an indictment of how the Church of Denmark had diluted and trivialized what it meant to be a Christian.
6: If personal excellence is worth having, and it is, it must be struggled for, sought intentionally and hard won.
8: Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and renowned Austrian psychiatrist said it best, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In that response lies our growth and freedom.”III Some may say that the best and brightest are born; that they come into the world with everything they need to be great. If that is the case, I see nothing laudable about greatness. They are simply living out their destiny in much the same way that Panda is, doing what they were programmed to do.
11: Your decision to remain silent is ultimately more about you looking good (and avoiding an awkward conversation) than making her look good.
12: Your problem is not that you’ve done something wrong intentionally, it’s that you don’t always realize the ways in which you are on autopilot. It’s not that you’re living a bad life, it’s more that life is living you. The purpose of this book is to shine a light into some of the forgotten corners of your life. To bring you face to face with the subtle, reflexive and even unconscious things you do to sabotage yourself.
12: illuminating these errors in thinking and behaving, you’ll be better equipped to live an intentional life and feel more in control.
13: the brain is programmed for survival, not exceptionality.
15: The biggest finding to emerge from the self-esteem movement was that praise did not predict self-esteem, accomplishment did. Telling someone that they are special is insufficient if they have not worked to earn it.
16: Our wish, no, need to be special has at least three negative sequelae – it leads us to give up easily, act unethically and mistreat others.
17: It seems that people who believe that they are naturally gifted tend to quit earlier and choose simpler tasks than those who have been socialized to work hard. Feeling special produces a euphoric high that people are understandably hesitant to part with. Thus, when special people are confronted with an especially difficult task, they often back down, seeing it as a threat to their “crown of giftedness.”
17: Really is me. Intelligent and feeling failure is around the corner
18: This “either ‘ya got it or ‘ya don’t” attitude leads to something that psychologists call “learned helplessness.”
19: It is easy to draw parallels between the helplessness of the dogs and a student who has bought into the notion that success is predicated entirely on innate specialness. After all, his success and failure is seen as being entirely out of his hands – so why try?
29: As Ernest Hemingway said more beautifully, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellowman; true nobility is in being superior to your former self.”
31: Consider the most nonsensical thing they have ever done. Go on, imagine it, recount it in detail and puzzle at their downright weirdness. Now, I want you to realize that if we did this exercise with enough people, someone would be imagining YOU. That’s right, you are someone’s weird aunt or uncle.
33: The term for a thought, behavior or feeling that is consistent with one’s idea of the good life is – egosyntonic. Conversely, one that is inconsistent with one’s idea of the good life is termed – egodystonic.
37: One of the hallmark features of depression is “rumination” – a tendency to replay and roll scenarios around in one’s mind again and again. While this can be debilitating when the recycled messages are self-injurious, it can also lead to sound decision-making. In what is being referred to as the “analytical rumination hypothesis” depressed people are better able to zero in on a problem,
37: Depressive realism is the notion that the slightly morose see the world more accurately than do their Polyanna-ish counterparts.
43: Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”
45: With your crazy flag at half-mast, you’ll never know true, unconditional love and acceptance, because you’ve withheld that opportunity from others. Only by flying it high will you be able to separate those who truly support you from those who support only the “perfect” shell of you.
45: The most succinct definition of leadership I know is, “influencing people to work in service of a common goal.”
47: When those battles do arrive, I’m hopeful that you will choose the path of growth, learning and increased empathy rather than the road to nihilism and disillusionment.
51: Sir Francis Bacon posited that, “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distraction sets aside or rejects.”
52: when their guy said something incorrect, their emotions drown it out, but when “the other guy” said something implausible, they rationally pointed out the fallacious thinking.XXXIV The inference we can draw from this experiment is that the emotional tumult created when facts collided with logic fell down on the side of emotion.
52: In simple terms, we rationally evaluate things that do not intersect with our worldview and emotionally evaluate those that do.
56: If everyone with whom we associate looks, acts and thinks like we do, we are able to “successfully” skirt a number of tough internal struggles.
59: our cognitive processes are set up to be parsimonious, not enlightened. Our brains, left to their own devices, make life easy, not good. And while this doesn’t make life fulfilling, it does make some utilitarian sense. After all, we are confronted with myriad decisions daily – what color suit to wear, what to have for breakfast, how to proceed in a relationship – can you really blame us for wanting to put some of our thought processes on auto-pilot?! The trick, I think, is to auto-pilot on things that are of little consequence but to withhold judgment and accept greater ambiguity on things that matter.
60: we must first stop looking at doubt as a sign of weakness and view it as the emotional and intellectual sign of maturity it most truly is.
61: Empathy is a term that is oft-used and little understood. As opposed to sympathy which is hierarchical in nature (e.g., I pity you from a place of relative advantage), empathy requires equal footing.
62: Dogmatic, firmly held, black and white opinions are nice in that they paint the world in easy to understand ways that adhere to well-defined rules.
62: And if you don't you become paralyzed, like me
62: And while this nuanced approach may represent a more labor intensive process, it also provides a more balanced, thoughtful way of living.
62: They have brought me in close proximity to groups of people with vastly different ideas about life and what constitutes truth. That reality has moved me in the direction of greater knowledge and appropriate circumspection about the things I think I know.
70: Obviously, the odds are the same in both conditions (1 in 50), but our confidence that we control the universe is such that we are willing to pay 4.5 times more to be in charge.
74: Although there is considerable upside to decision- making heuristics, one of our most common fallbacks is to rely on the deci- sions of others, a trend that can lead us to make poor decisions.
76: Until you consider the framing of the questions—questions framed as a loss are avoided in both cases. Social psychologists who study loss aversion find that people are typically twice as upset about a loss as they are pleased about a gain.XLI
76: Consider the person who remains unattached to avoid risking heartache and finds loneliness in the process. Or the would-be entrepreneur who never makes the leap of faith and wastes a career working at jobs they hate. The irony of obsessive loss aversion is that our worst fears become realized in our attempts to manage them.
82: Part of the reason that our ideas just aren’t that great is that my idea needs yours and vice versa.
89: Choose friends who see the world differently and thoughtfully consider their views relative to your own.
89: Why I should speak, I deprive others of my viewpoint
94: In a very real sense, we are attempting to climb to the top of the corporate ladder on the backs of those with whom we interact, and in so doing, we are sacrificing a great deal of what would really make us happy along the way.

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You're Not That Great, Daniel Crosby (100%) #82