Psychology

Mao and Chou represented a society with the longest uninterrupted experience in the art of government, a nation that had always been culturally preeminent in its region. China had absorbed conquerors and had proved its inward strength by imposing its social and intellectual style on them. Its leaders were aloof, self-assured, composed. Brezhnev represented a nation that had survived not by civilizing its conquerors but by outlasting them, a people suspended between Europe and Asia and not wholly of either, with a culture that had destroyed its traditions without yet entirely replacing them. He sought to obscure his lack of assurance by boisterousness, and his sense of latent inadequacy by occasional bullying.

To be sure, no one reached the top of a Communist hierarchy except by ruthlessness. Yet the charm of the Chinese leaders obscured that quality, while Brezhnev’s gruff heavy-handedness tended to emphasize it. The Chinese even amid the greatest cordiality kept their distance. Brezhnev, who had physical magnetism, crowded his interlocutor. He changed moods rapidly and wore his emotions openly. These contrasting styles seemed also to be reflected in Chinese and Russian food. Chinese cuisine is delicate, meticulous, and infinitely varied. Russian meals are heavy, straightforward, predictable. One eats Chinese food gracefully with chopsticks; one could eat most Russian food with one’s hands. One walks away from a Chinese meal satisfied but not satiated, and looking forward to the next experience. After a Russian meal one is stuffed; one can barely face the prospect of the next round.

As yet as his hour of triumph approached, Nixon withdrew ever more, even from some of his close advisers. His resentments, usually so well controlled, came increasingly to the surface. It was as if victory was not an occasion for reconciliation but an opportunity to settle the scores of a lifetime.

I was struck by how restless Nixon was, now that he had achieved the overwhelming electoral approval which had been the ambition of a lifetime. It was almost as if it had been sought for its own sake; as if, standing on the pinnacle, Nixon no longer had any purpose left to his life.

It is fear that keeps people closed. They can’t hear you — they are afraid to hear. And their anger is really their fear upside down. It is only a person who is full of fear who becomes immediately angry. If he does not become angry then you will be able to see his fear. Anger is a cover-up. By being angry he is trying to make you afraid: before you get any idea of his fear, he is trying to make you afraid.

I reached high office unexpectedly at a particularly complex period of our national life. In the life of nations, as of human beings, a point is often reached when the seemingly limitless possibilities of youth suddenly narrow and one must come to grips with the fact that not every option is open any longer. This insight can inspire a new creative impetus, less innocent perhaps than the naive exuberance of earlier years, but more complex and ultimately more permanent. The process of coming to grips with one’s limit is never easy. It can end in despair or in rebellion; it can produce a self-hatred that turns inevitable compromises into a sense of inadequacy.

It’s not the actual violence that scares us. It is the uncertainty and possibility for disaster that emotionally drives us absolutely bonkers.

The need for a stable and predictable environment is a core human need. What frightens us or gives us anxiety is not when bad things happen - it’s when we’re not sure whether a bad thing will happen or not. When something goes wrong, at least we have the power to fix it. We’re still in control. But when life becomes unpredictable - when the house is dark and there’s a mysterious sound upstairs - we feel as though we’ve lost control.

One reason people are reluctant to admit mistakes is that they fear being seen as weak or incompetent. Yet often, generally competent people who take the possibility of mistakes in stride are seen as confident, secure, and “big enough” not to have to be perfect, whereas those who resist acknowledging even the possibility of a mistake are seen as insecure and lacking confidence. No one is fooled.

The attempts to behave in a friendly manner were so studied and took so much exertion that they created their own tension; the slightest disagreement tended to bring to the fore the underlying suspicion and resentment.

Stress is a feeling of emotional strain and pressure. Stress is a type of psychological pain. Small amounts of stress may be desired, beneficial, and even healthy. Positive stress may be desired, beneficial, and even healthy. Positive stress helps improve athletic performance. It also plays a factor in motivation, adaptation, and reaction to the environment.

Brezhnev could not hear often enough my avowal that we were proceeding on the premise of equality — an attitude inconceivable in Peking, whose leaders thought of themselves as culturally superior whatever the statistics showed about relative material strength.

Most rudeness, meanness, and cruelty are a mask for deep-seated weakness. Kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength.

But spending beyond a pretty low level of materialism is mostly a reflection of ego approaching income, a way to spend money to show people that you have (or had) money.

Think of it like this, and one of the most powerful ways to increase your savings isn’t to raise your income. It’s to raise your humility.

When you define savings as the gap between your ego and your income you realize why many people with decent incomes save so little.

It is easy to underestimate what a 30% decline does to your psyche. Your confidence may become shot at the very moment opportunity is at its highest. You — or your spouse — may decide it’s time for a new plan, or new career. I know several investors who quit after losses because they were exhausted. Physically exhausted.

But do you know how hard it is to maintain a long-term outlook when stocks are collapsing?

Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret — all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.

The inability to recognize that investing has a price can tempt us to try to get something for nothing. Which, like shoplifting, rarely ends well.

What most annoyed Kissinger was the manner in which Obama talked about some other world leaders. “A puzzling aspect about Obama is how someone so intelligent could treat his peers with the disdain he did in your article,” he said. “Someone of that stature usually develops a sense of humility.”

What we resent reveals what it is we value, and what we have come to expect (or hope) from others; it may also reveal to what we see ourselves as entitled to: that is, how our expectations or our surroundings are organized or measured. Only an amoral person (a person who didn’t have values or concern for the well-being of self or others) could not experience resentment.

Resentment can also function to warn against further, future, harmful and unfair situations from occurring again.

I discovered a long time ago the things about people I don’t like are the same things I don’t like about myself. It’s like a constant reminder of how imperfect I am as a person.

Maslow described an insecure person as a person who “perceives the world as a threatening jungle and most human beings as dangerous and selfish; feels a rejected and isolated person, anxious and hostile; is generally pessimistic and unhappy; show signs of tension and conflict, tens to turn inward; is troubled by guilt-feelings, has one or another disturbance of self-esteem; tends to be neurotic; and is generally selfish and egocentric. He viewed in every insecure person a continual, never dying, longing for security.

A person who is insecure lacks confidence in his or her own value, and one or more of his or her capabilities, lacks in trust in himself or herself or others, or has fears that a present positive state is temporary, and will let him or her down and cause him or her loss or distress by “going wrong” in the future. This is a common trait, which only differs in degree between people.

Insecurity may contribute to the development of shyness, paranoia or social withdrawal, or alternatively it may encourage compensatory behaviors such as arrogance, aggression, or bullying, in some cases.

The fact that the majority of human beings are emotionally vulnerable, and have the capacity to be hurt, implies that emotional insecurity could merely be a difference in awareness.

Insecurity has many effects in a person’s life. There are several levels of it. It nearly always causes some degree of isolation as a typically insecure person withdraws from people to some extent. The greater the insecurity, the higher the degree of isolation becomes. Insecurity is often rooted in a person’s childhood years. Like offense and bitterness, it grows in layered fashion, often becoming an immobilizing force that sets a limiting factor in the person’s life. Insecurity robs by degrees; the degree to which it is entrenched equals the degree of power it has in the person’s life.

Every murder is a form of self-hate.

There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else.

This is about power and feeling important. It’s rooted in low self-esteem but presents as hyper-confidence and “standing up for what’s right.” Sit down and ask her what is going on in her life where her self-esteem is so low that she has to yell at store clerks to feel good about herself.

Yelling at sales people is when you see a lot of people who feels nobody cares about their voice finally have a recognized voice.

A lot of the more violent/aggressive things people do are out of fear of something happening to themselves. Think about it: Why would anyone who is secure in their life need to attack another human being? Sure, the obvious argument is that there is some kind of moral imperative, like to help others in the future or set some high ethical standard, but this is usually coming from people who are and actions that are inherently unethical in it of themselves. When people fear something, this fear manifests. It’s kinda like fight or flight.

I only accepted that treatment from her because I didn’t value myself.

You wrote, “Who you are comes out at the poker table.” Who were you when you first sat down at the poker table?

I was a girl! I say that disparagingly to myself. I was really upset with myself, to be perfectly honest. I didn’t realize I had internalized so many gender stereotypes and so much socialization from my environment. I study gender stereotypes. I have a Ph.D in psychology. I thought of myself as a good model for women, someone who stands up for myself. How can this be me? I’d be passive. I’d let people bully me. I’d fold. I would know I was making a mistake but couldn’t get the nerve or desire to do anything about it because I didn’t want tension. I didn’t want people to think, “Oh, she’s that bitch who’s been raising me all the time.” I wanted people to like me. Even when I had really good cards, I didn’t make nearly as much money as I should’ve with them because I’d end up folding or not raising. I didn’t want to upset people. I realized this is a big problem and something I have to work on. And not just in poker. I told myself, “You better get your shit together in real-life situations. You’re probably a doormat a lot of the time and don’t realize it.”

The brain doesn’t like uncertainty. We want to know. We want answers. We want a clean story.

The moment we’re on tilt, the moment emotion seeps into our decision process, we’re no longer thinking rationally. We’re no longer making probabilistic calculations, reading people, paying attention. You’re angry at someone, they got under your skin, so you make a decision because you’re angry. You say, “I should raise him because he’s an asshole.” But that’s not your good self, that’s not your clear-thinking self. That’s the version of you that didn’t know better.

The more you focus on what you think you lack, the more you begin to doubt your self-worth, and the more you turn people off. People aren’t dumb. They can see your insecurities blatantly.

I think ever since CN and EU teams became good, KR teams became more cocky and are not afraid to call themselves the best. You look at S7 and before, KR teams always compliment foreign teams and say they could win Worlds but in the end KR teams just stomp. I think it’s human nature to call someone else good if you are 100% sure you are better, but if it’s more close you call yourself the best.

Student from Western cultures tend to procrastinate in order to avoid doing worse than they have done before or from failing to learn as much as they should have, whereas student from non-Western cultures tend to procrastinate in order to avoid looking incompetent, or to avoid demonstrating a lack of ability in front of their peers.

A defense mechanism is an unconscious psychological mechanism that reduces anxiety arising from unacceptable or potentially harmful stimuli.

Sarkozy said that being abandoned by his father shaped much of who he is today. He also has said that, in his early years, he felt inferior in relation to his wealthier and taller classmates. “What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood,” he said later.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.

The great corrupter of public men is the ego — corrupter because distracter. Wealth, sensuality, power cannot hold a candle to it. Looking in the mirror distracts one’s attention from the problem.

If and when an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in others — such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions.

Don’t take it personally. How people treat you has less to do with your actual mistakes, and almost all to do with how they treat themselves. I’ve found that the harshest criticizers are people who are constantly criticizing themselves, and often in complete denial of it, too. Imagine that they are yelling those things at themselves, not at you.

This breaks down to the power of belief. When you believe in yourself, you will have to confidence to do things that you would normally shy away from. When you believe in yourself, you become a different being entirely.

With that being said, it is important for you to recognize the difference between exuding confidence and arrogance. Arrogance comes when you overly push your ideals and force your personality onto others. Confidence comes when you are sure of who you are and you no longer need the validation from others to enforce that.

All serious mountaineers have big egos. You cannot take on the risks and constant suffering of big mountains without one. We may talk like Buddhists, but don’t be fooled, we’re actually hard-driving narcissists.

When he talks to Ned about Lyanna, he has this idealized image of her but that was truly not Lyanna’s personality. Even Ned says that Robert does not see the wolf blood that she has. In the end, Robert truly does not know who Lyanna really was. He loved her beauty and this image he had of her but didn’t love the real person.

Robert puts Lyanna up on a pedestal because she was the only thing Robert could not have. He won the seven kingdoms, he gets drop dead gorgeous Cersei, but he still fantasizes about a woman he never really knew.

If that country can make this kind of thing, films about itself, oh, that country must have a pride and must have an inner strength, and must be strong enough and must be free.

Another source of anti-Americanism is structural. The US is the big kid on the block and the disproportion in power engenders a mixture of admiration, envy, and resentment.

Brent Scowcroft warned that “ad hoc coalitions of the willing can give us the image of arrogance, and if you get to the point where everyone hopes that the US gets a black eye because we’re so obnoxious, then we’ll be totally hamstrung.” A century ago Teddy Roosevelt noted, when you have a big stick, it is wise to speak softly. Otherwise you undercut your soft power.

65% of Americans found Japan “admirable” and only 27% thought the Japanese “arrogant,” a mere 34% of South Korean found Japan admirable and 59% considered Japanese arrogant.

Myths are rich sources of psychological insights. Great literature, like all great art, records and portrays the human condition with indelible accuracy. Myths are a special kind of literature not written or created by a single individual, but produced by the imagination and experience of an entire age and culture and can be seen as the distillation of the dreams and experiences of a whole culture. They seem to develop gradually as certain motifs emerge, are elaborated, and finally are rounded out as people tell and retell stories that catch and hold their interest. Thus themes that are accurate and universal are kept alive, while those elements peculiar to single individuals or a particular era drop away. Myths, therefore, portray a collective image; they tell us about things that are true for all people.

If a woman is beautiful, the problem is compounded. Marilyn Monroe is a touching example; she was worshipped far and wide and yet had great difficulty relating closely to any one person. Finally she found life intolerable. Such a woman is the carrier of a goddess-like quality, an almost unapproachable perfection that finds no place in the ordinary human realm of relationship.

One of Aphrodite’s characteristics is that she is constantly regressive. She wants things to go back where they were; she wants evolution to go backward. She is the voice of tradition, and ironically, it is this very tendency that carries our story forward in its evolution.

Eros comes to Psyche, and even beautiful as he is, he is death to her. All husbands are death to their wives in that they destroy them as maidens and force them into an evolution toward mature womanhood. It is paradoxical, but you can feel both gratitude and resentment toward the person who forces you to begin down your own path of growth.

Most men get their deepest conviction of self-worth from a woman, wife, mother, or if they are highly conscious, from their own anima.

A man depends largely on woman for the light in the family as he is not well equipped at finding meaning for himself. Life is often dry and barren for him unless someone bestows meaning on life for him. With a few words, a woman can give meaning to a whole day’s struggle and a man will be so grateful. A man knows and wants this; he will edge up to it, initiate little occasions so that a woman can shed some light for him. When he comes home and recounts the events of the day, he is asking her to bestow meaning on them. This is the light-bearing quality of a woman.

The touch of light or consciousness is a fiery experience and often stings a man into awareness; this is partly why he fears the feminine so much. A huge proportion of man’s bantam rooster behavior is a futile effort to hide his fear of the feminine. It is mostly the woman’s task to lead a man to new consciousness in relationship. It is almost always the woman who says, “Let’s sit down and talk about where we are.” The woman is the carrier of growth in most relationships. A man fears this but he fears, even more, the loss of it.

Personality characteristics, such as being less flexible and more authoritarian, are associated with prejudice, which may help to explain why two people who have had similar experiences can have differing levels of prejudice, and why those who show one prejudice are more likely to have other prejudices too. Prejudice can also arise from a general need to see oneself positively: people come to see any groups to which they belong more positively than other groups and then develop positive prejudices about their own groups and negative prejudices about others.

There’s nothing more insufferable than people who boast about their own humility.

We’ve been to Anfield with some of our very best teams, but the crowd - who are merciless towards visiting teams and refereeing decisions of which they don’t approve - whips up such an atmosphere that it erodes players’ confidence and make them lose their concentration. It only takes a momentary lapse to upset hours of dedicated preparation, and there’s very little you can do to help players with that. While there are elements of chess to a game of football, wingers, goalkeepers and centre-backs - unlike rooks, bishops and knights -are made of flesh and blood and emotions.

When the crowd at Old Trafford are chanting, “Attack! Attack! Attack!”, it is easy to think that we automatically threw caution to the wind. I never thought about it like this because part of a leader’s job is to eliminate as many risks as possible. We tried to leave nothing to chance. I cannot tell you how many half-time talks centred on the need to be patient and wait for the right opportunity to occur, rather than to be daredevils. I would only want to take risk during the last 15 minutes of a game if we were trailing by a goal.

I was always sparing in my use of the younger players to make sure we didn’t play them too much during their first two or three seasons. They were always raring to go but, at that stage, were still developing both physically and mentally. I also did not want them taking it for granted that they had earned a permanent place in the first team. It was good to keep them hungry.

Complacency is a disease, especially for individuals and organizations that have enjoyed success. I like to think that United’s ability to avoid lapsing towards complacency was one of the characteristics that distinguished the club. We were not always successful at doing so, but I was always eager to stamp out the slightest trace of complacency. Whenever we played a game I never thought victory was in the bag. In the hotel in Moscow in 2008, after we had just won the Champions League and Premier League, I talked to the players about the 2008-09 season and emphasized the need to be prepared for a tough, fresh series of campaigns where nothing was guaranteed.

At Medinah you could see uncertainty start too creep into Team USA after they gave up one point. Then, after the next one went out of the window, confusion started to set in. It wasn’t long before they were panicking, and by then the jig was up. Players forget what they are supposed to do, are incapable of calming themselves down and commit mistakes they don’t usually make. Eventually they capitulate.

I’ve seen this happen a million times. It begins with uncertainty which leads to confusion. Then panic starts to set in, and before you know it, the team has capitulated and defeat becomes inevitable. Meanwhile, the behaviour of their opponents starts to change: their confidence begins to build, their concentration sharpens and they block out all distractions. They can smell the scent of blood, and before you know it, complacency has scored another ugly victory.

Each time I joined a club, I just thought to myself, “I’m not going to fail here.” It was one of the things that drove me. I always had that fear of getting humiliated, and failure was always that wee thing at the back of my mind. I kept silently saying to myself, “Failure. Don’t fail.”

The loneliness was much worse when we played away games because I had no office to use as a refuge. Then, I would often find myself sitting alone in the dressing room. I don’t think this feeling, certainly in my later years as a manager, was caused by worrying about failing. Rather it was prompted by the apprehension, anxiety and uncertainty that always surrounds a big occasion, which might be exacerbated when you depend on others to implement your wishes. I’m sure other leaders experience similar feelings, no matter how worldly and important they may seem to others.

Even now, when I’m watching United from the directors’ box or at home on the television, I feel twinges in the pit of my stomach. I never tried to get rid of this feeling. Maybe some people, before a big performance or important encounter, try to calm their nerves with breathing exercises or a dram of whisky, but I never did so. I just accepted that nagging anxiety as part of my job. It accompanied me through life and it would have been a big warning sign that I was no longer up to the task had that anxiety - which really was a sign of how badly I wanted to win - ever disappeared.

While I was always fixated on both physical and mental freshness, I was careful never to say to a player, “You look tired,” even if I thought that he did. I knew that if I uttered the phrase he would immediately feel tired. Instead I’s say to him, “You’re so strong, nobody is ever going to be able to keep up with you.”

In Mulcaster’s time, when the prestige of English was low, many people felt the urgent need to enrich the language by adopting foreign words, and today English has many thousands of originally foreign words in its vocabulary: ease from French, for example, and area from Latin. It is now the turn of English to supply words to other languages.

Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won’t really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They’ll be things you’ve already noticed but didn’t let yourself think.

For as the image of God was composed of goodness piled on goodness, power piled on power, it became insufferable and monstrous. But in conceiving the image of the Devil there were no laws to be kept, and the creative imagination could run riot, emptying all its repressed and sensuous contents. Hence the persistent allure of Satanism and the fascination of evil.

Theo ta thấy thì chỉ nên đấu trí với y. Lão Độc Vật tuy giảo hoạt nhưng mười phần tự phụ, tự phụ thì không suy nghĩ sâu xa, muốn y mắc lừa vốn cũng không phải khó lắm.

By and large, the naturalistic religions hold out for man no greater hope than a philosophic acceptance of the inevitable, a noble but sorrowful resignation to the truth that nature is beyond good and evil, and that death is the necessary counterpart of life, as pain of pleasure. But this sacrifices the most human thing about man — his eternal, childlike hope that somehow, someday, the deepest yearnings of his heart will come true. Who is so proud and unfeeling that he will not admit that he would not be deliriously happy if, by some strange magic, these deep and ingrained longings could be fulfilled? If there were everlasting life beyond death after all? If there were eternal reunion with the people we have loved? If, forever and ever, there were the vision and the union of hearts with a God whose beatitude exceeds immeasurably the most intense joy that we have known — somehow including all the variety of form and color, uniqueness and individuality, that we value so much upon earth? Christianity alone, it would be argued, has the audacity to affirm this basic hope which the wisdom of the world represses, and so is the only fundamentally joyous religion.

But injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven.

Interestingly enough, when you make the decision that no matter what happens, you will never give up, your self-esteem increases immediately. You respect yourself more. Your self-confidence skyrockets. Even though you have not yet stepped out of your office, the very act of making the decision that you are going to succeed, that you can do it, that you will never quit, no matter what, improves your “reputation” with yourself. You see yourself in a more positive light. You feel more like a winner. You are more composed and self-assured. You become more capable of dealing with the ups and downs of daily selling life. The very act of resolving to persist until you succeed changes your personality and makes you a stronger and more powerful person.

Again, the more you like yourself, the more you enjoy others and the more they like you. The more you like yourself, the easier it is for you to get along with a great variety of people.

The individual with high self-esteem is the one who has the greatest facility for making friends wherever he goes. Because he likes himself, he is naturally and spontaneously fond of others. When people feel that someone genuinely likes them, they are more open to listening to that person and to buying what he is selling.

What we feel is to an enormous and unsuspected degree dependent on what we think, and the basic contrast of thought ordinarily strike us as the basic contrast of the natural world. We therefore take it for granted that we feel an immense difference between pleasure and pain. But it is obvious in some of the milder forms of these sensations that the pleasure or the pain lies not so much in the feeling itself as in its context. There is no appreciable physiological difference between shudders of delight and shudders of fear, nor between the thrills of rapturous music and the thrills of terrifying melodrama. But the context of the feeling changes its interpretation, depending on whether the circumstances which arouse it are for us or against us.

Suffering and death — all that dark and destructive side of nature for which Shiva stands — are therefore problematic for the ego rather than the organism. The organism accepts them through ecstasy, but the ego is rigid and unyielding and finds them problematic because they affront its pride. The ego is the social image or role with which the mind is shamed into identifying itself, since we are taught to act the part which society wants us to play — the part of a reliable and predictable center of action which resists spontaneous change. Death and agony are therefore dreaded as loss of status, and their struggles are desperate attempts to maintain the assumed patterns of action and feeling.

To act or grow creatively we must begin from where we are, but we cannot begin at all if we are not “all here” without reservation or regret. Lacking self-acceptance, we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity. Apart from self-acceptance as the groundwork of thought and action, every attempt at spiritual or moral discipline is the fruitless struggle of a mind that is split asunder and insincere. It is the freedom which is the essential basis of self-restraint.

Even the chairs, tables, and household ornaments were suggestively bulged and curved — the chairs wide-shouldered and then waisted at the back, the seat broad, and the legs so obviously thighs or calves that squeamish housewives made the resemblance all the stronger by fitting them with skirts. For when sexuality is repressed in its direct manifestation, it irradiates other spheres of life to scatter on every side symbols and suggestions of its all the more urgent presence.

But the cool calculators in Peking did not see it this way. They did not believe their security enhanced by unenforceable obligations; they recognized the potential for a misleading euphoria in a document purportedly devoted to preventing nuclear war.

The second major obstacle to selling and closing is the fear of rejection. This is the fear that the potential buyer might say no. The fear of rejection is triggered by the possibility of rudeness, disapproval, or criticism toward the salesperson by the prospect.

The rule is that 80 percent of sales calls will end in a no, for a thousand different reasons. This does not necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with the salesperson or the product being sold. People say no because simply they do not need it, do not want it, cannot use it, cannot afford it, or some other reason. If you are in sales and you fear rejection, you’ve picked the wrong way to make a living. The fact is that you are going to get a lot of rejections. As they say, “It goes with the territory.” Every experience of failure or rejection affects your self-esteem. It hurts your self-image. It makes you feel bad about yourself and triggers your worst fear: “I’m not good enough.”

If it were not for the fear of rejection, we would all be terrific salespeople. We would all make twice as much, and maybe even five or ten times as much.

When is the best time to make a sale? Right after making a sale. Why? Right after you make a sale, your self-esteem soars. You feel terrific about yourself as a salesperson. You like yourself more. You feel like a winner. When you walk in to speak to the next prospect, feeling terrific about yourself, you will perform at your very best. There will be something about you that has a powerful effect on the customer. Your positive attitude and confident bearing will trigger a desire, at a subconscious level, to buy from you.

Always treat the receptionist with courtesy and respect. Treat everyone as if he or she is really important and valuable. Behave toward each person as if he or she is a million-dollar customer or has the potential to become one.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of all from treating people well is this: whenever you do anything to raise the self-esteem of another person, your self-esteem goes up to the same degree. When you are polite and respectful, you like and respect yourself more, while causing other people to like and respect themselves more at the same time.

You have been betrayed, hurt, and disappointed. You have become distrustful even of hope itself, as your hope has been repeatedly shattered (and that is the very definition of hopelessness). The last thing you want is to know more. Better to leave what is enshrouded in mystery. Better, as well, to avoid thinking too much (or at all) about what could be. When ignorance is bliss, after all, ’tis folly to be wise.

If your wife or husband (or whomever else you are tangled up with, unhappily, at the moment) says something that comes to close to the painful truth, then a sharp and insulting remark will often shut them up — and is therefore very likely to be offered. This is partly a test: does the person being insulted care enough about you and your suffering to dig past a few obstacles and unearth the bitter truth? It is also partly, and more obviously, defensive: if you can chase someone away from something you yourself do not want to discover, that makes your life easier in the present. Sadly, it is also very disappointing if that defense succeeds, and is typically accompanied by a sense of abandonment, loneliness, and self-betrayal. You must nonetheless still live among other people, and they with you. And you have desires, wants, and needs, however unstated and unclear. And you are still motivated to pursue them, not least because it is impossible to live without desire, want, and need. Your strategy, under such conditions? Show your disappointment whenever someone close to you makes you unhappy; allow yourself the luxury and pleasure of resentment when something does not go your way; ensure that the person who has transgressed against you is frozen out by your disapproval; force them to discover with as much difficulty as possible exactly what they have done to disappoint you; and, finally, let them grope around blindly in the fog that you have generated around yourself until they stumble into and injure themselves on the sharp hidden edges of your unrevealed preferences and dreams. And maybe these responses are tests, too — tests deeply associated with the lack of courage to trust: “If you really loved me, you would brave the terrible landscape that I have arrayed around myself to discover the real me.” And perhaps there is even something to such claims, implicit though they may be. A certain testing of commitment might have its utility. Everything does not have to be given away for free. But even a little unnecessary goes a long way.

And you still must live with yourself. In the short term, perhaps you are protected from the revelation of your insufficiency by your refusal to make yourself clear. Every ideal is a judge, after all: the judge who says, “You are not manifesting your true potential.” No ideals? No judge. But the price for that is purposelessness. This is a high price. No purpose? Then, no positive emotion, as most of what drives us forward with hope intact is the experience of approaching something we deeply need and want. And worse, when we are without purpose: chronic, overwhelming anxiety, as focused purpose constrains what is otherwise likely to be the intolerable chaos of unexploited possibility and too much choice.

Insolence is the armor of the weak; it is a device to induce courage in the face of one’s own panic.

The act of admiration is your recognition that you have met someone who is better in whatever that happens to be driving your admiration. You have unconsciously elevate them in the dominance hierarchy whether you like it or not.

He found 4 main symptoms of incompetence governing the outcome of battles: overconfidence, underestimation of the enemy, the ignoring of intelligence reports, and wastage of manpower.

Groupthink exacerbated the problem by contributing 6 additional symptoms: a shared illusion of invulnerability, an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, stereotyping the enemy as too evil for negotiation (or too weak to be a threat), a collective illusion of unanimity in a majority viewpoint (based on the false assumption that silence means consent), and self-appointed censors to protect the group form information that might weaken resolve (such as reports from spies).

In retrospect, the decision to invade seemed extraordinary. “How could I have been so stupid as to let them proceed?” President Kennedy repeatedly asked later.

The answer was clear. It was arrogance, “egos so tall that the eyes and ears can shut out whatever one prefers not to see or hear.” Kennedy, the final decider, desperately wanted to avoid being called “chicken.” Everyone around him thought he had the Midas touch and could not lose.

This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years.

We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous. We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.

If you find yourself criticizing other people, you’re probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own.

Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.

What does Resistance feel like?

First, unhappiness. We feel like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. We’re bored, we’re restless. We can’t get no satisfaction. There’s guilt but we can’t put our finger on the source. We want to go back to bed; we want to get up and party. We feel unloved and unlovable. We’re disgusted. We hate our lives. We hate ourselves.

Unalleviated, Resistance mounts to a pitch that become unendurable. That this point vices kick in. Dope, adultery, web surfing.

Beyond that, Resistance becomes clinical. Depression, aggression, dysfunction. Then actual crime and physical self-destruction.

A victim act is a form of passive aggression. It seeks to achieve gratification not by honest work or a contribution made out of one’s experience or insight or love, but by the manipulation of others through silent (and not-so-silent) threat. The victim compels others to come to his rescue or to behave as he wishes by holding them hostage to the prospect of his own further illness/meltdown/mental dissolution, or simply by threatening to make their lives so miserable that they do what he wants.

We get ourselves in trouble because it’s a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is faux form of fame. It’s easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman’s wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics.

By accepting life’s suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.

A person who is not well put together overreacts to the slightest hint of frustration or failure. He cannot enter into productive negotiations, even with himself, because he cannot tolerate the uncertainty of discussing potential alternative futures. He cannot be pleased, because he cannot get what he wants, and he cannot get what he wants because he will not choose one thing instead of another. He can also be brought to a halt by the weakest of arguments. One of his multiple, warring subpersonalities will latch on to such arguments, often contrary to his best interest, and use them, in the form of doubts, to buttress its contrarian position. A deeply conflicted person can therefore be stopped, metaphorically, with the pressure of a single finger exerted on his chest (even though he may lash out against such an obstacle). To move forward with resolve, it is necessary to be organized — to be directed toward something singular and identifiable.

We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.

They had set themselves the impossible task of trying to turn lead into gold, but had got it into their heads that the value of something lies solely in what it is. This was a false assumption, because you don’t need to tinker with atomic structure to make lead as valuable as gold — all you need to do is to tinker with human psychology so that it feels as valuable as gold. At which point, who cares that it isn’t actually gold?

People didn’t want low prices — they wanted concrete savings. One possible explanation for this is that we are psychologically rivalrous, and like to feel we are getting a better deal than other people. If everyone can pay a low price, the thrill of having won out over the other people disappears; a quantifiable saving makes one feel smart, while paying the same low prices as everyone else just makes us feel like cheapskates. Another possible explanation is that a low price, unlike a discount, does not allow people any scope to write a more cheerful narrative about a purchase after the event — “I saved $33,” rather than “I spent $45.”

I think it is reasonable to posit that it is often the people who have too easy a time — who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem — who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment. You can encounter people, contrarily, who have been hurt virtually beyond all hope of repair who are not resentful and who would never deign to present themselves as victims.

Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop.

They’re busy, and they stay busy as a way of avoiding something they do not want to face. Nobody has to tell them. Deep down they know. In fact, if you remind them, they often respond with anger or irritation.

Deep down they know they are avoiding something important. That’s the most common form of laziness: laziness by staying busy.

The hardest financial skill is getting the goalposts to stop moving.

Michael Moritz, the billionaire head of Sequoia: I think we’ve always been afraid of going out of business.

No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.

The question worth pondering is: are you seeking out the imperfect to justify your habit of being unhappy? Does something have to happen in the outside world for you to be happy inside? Or, to put it differently: Is there a narrative of your reality that supports your mood?

If you work in an organization, the underlying rule is simple: People are not afraid of failure, they’re afraid of blame.

When things get dicey, we notice that some people are feeling the heat. Others are just fine, doing their work, unfazed by the situation. The thing is, it’s not the heat that’s actually the issue. It’s the feeling. How we process what’s happening is up to us, isn’t it?

Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them. The wanting centers in the brain are large. By contrast, the liking centers of the brain are much smaller.

The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

I think Teddy Kennedy has a deep conviction that business is greedy, nefarious and undisciplined, that all business men are sons of bitches. It’s the kind of attitude that one so often finds in people who inherited a lot of money. They feel guilty about their inheritance, and you’ve got to remember that Joe Kennedy made much of his money in gambling, in liquor, in areas that kept him from gaining real social acceptance in the WASP world. The boys were of it, at Harvard and Palm Beach, but not yet in it, and there was always a Kennedy chip on the shoulder toward business, particularly big business. If he were in the White House, Teddy would probably succeed where Jack failed in passing punitive measures and taxes, and putting so many restrictions and regulations on the conduct of business that it would jeopardize the whole economy. I think he’s a dangerous man. Not by intention; he’s a warm human being and his sympathy for the have-nots is real. But I don’t think you accomplish their betterment by hamstringing business, and I do think Teddy Kennedy is motivated partly by some malice in his heart.

The individual seeks confirmation, on the part of his fellows, of the evaluation he puts upon himself. It is only in the tribute which others pay to his goodness, intelligence, and power that he becomes fully aware of, and can fully enjoy, what he deems to be his superior quality. It is only through his reputation for excellence that he can gain the measure of security, wealth, and power which he regards to be his due. Thus, in the struggle for existence and power, which is, as it were, the raw material of the social world, what others think about us is as important as what we actually are. The image in the mirror of our fellows’s minds, that is, our prestige, rather than the original, of which the image in the mirror may be but the distorted reflection, determines what we are as members of society.

If they viewed the social pyramid as a whole, they had always to look up much farther than they were able to look down. Yet, while they were not actually at the bottom of the social pyramid, they were uncomfortably close to it. Now inflation pushed them down to the bottom, and in the desperate struggle to escape social and political identification they found succor in the theory and practice of national socialism. For national socialism offered them lower races to look down upon and foreign enemies to feel superior and conquer.

The average Russian worker and peasant has nobody to look down upon, and this insecurity is intensified by the practices of the police state as well as by a standard of living so low as to threaten at times his physical survival. Here, too, a totalitarian regime projects these frustrations, insecurities, and fears onto the international scene where the individual Russian finds in the identification with “the most progressive country in the world,” “the fatherland of socialism,” vicarious satisfaction for his aspirations for power. The conviction, seemingly supported by historic experience, that the nation with which he identifies himself is constantly menaced by capitalist enemies serves to elevate his personal fears and insecurities onto the collective plane.

By accepting life’s suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.

It is difficult and painful because it takes courage and even some foolhardiness to continue a discussion when you have been told in no uncertain terms by your partner to go the hell away. It is a good thing, however — an admirable act — because a person bothered by something they do not wish to talk about is very likely to be split internally over the issue at hand. The part that wants to avoid is the part that gets angry. There is a part that wants to talk, too, and to settle the issue. But doing so is going to be cognitively demanding, ethically challenging, and emotionally stressful. In addition, it is going to require trust, and people test trust, not least by manifesting anger when approached about something touchy just to determine if the person daring the approach cares sufficiently to overcome a serious barrier or two or three or ten to get to the horrible bottom of things. And avoidance followed by anger is not the only trick in the book.