A new guide to rational living

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1. yesenadamDec 2021
   Hi, I'm a bit confused - you describe getting into new interests, but also 'projects'. It seems you love getting into new things, but also have an idea that you should produce something in the field before moving on. And feeling guilty for becoming interested in something else?! Makes no sense to me.

   I've spent my life frequently getting into new things, all kinds of things. I've never thought of it as a bad thing. What I do regret is not making good records for the first 25+ years of that! Of the things I was learning, books/people/inspirations etc in the various fields. I have old notebooks filled with stuff, but they're a big mess of many topics, impossible to use again really. I started making LaTeX books about 5 years ago, starting with one for each year, then chapters separating to form new books once they got big enough. e.g. there's PDF books on maths, image processing/graphics, programming languages, my programs, a programming language I created, my writing etc. So now I have lovely, well-organised records, and next time I'm into a particular thing—I can only be into 1 or 2 things at a time!— it's there waiting for me to take up again. I love that feeling of returning to a field after a long time and getting a lot further than I'd gotten before!

   Also I could never think it's a waste learning something about a field, even if you never return. I've found lately can talk to almost anyone I meet for hours about what interests them or about their job, because I've been into so many things that nothing is unrelated or that distant from my interests. And you notice similarities and connections between different areas. Blah blah. In short, I can't see this as a bad thing at all, don't know why you're beating yourself up. Enjoy!

   p.s. Maybe try cognitive behavioral therapy? (e.g. Albert Ellis' book New Guide to Rational Living) and look at what you are saying to yourself, what are your beliefs, that make you feel bad about this—sounds like guilt or shame or something—and change them. I've found changing beliefs like that, thought-habits, isn't very hard, and is fun. And of course magically transforms your life for the better. Good luck.

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2. yesenadamOct 2021
   I'm a jazz musician, and often used to do a lot of negative self-talk while playing in public. Like "Oh no, omg that was terrible, oh yuk, oh geez I can't play at all, oh that sounds awful!" etc. I read this book Effortless Mastery that mainly said, never criticize yourself on a gig—do that when you practise but never ever on gigs. So I stopped, and ever since have just had fun. The change was amazing.

   I'm not sure but I think that affected my life in other areas too. Although I read a lot of self-help, psychology, new agey, etc books in my 20s, no one thing helped as much as that. I guess it's part of learning to love yourself. I was trained as a kid and young adult to treat others well, but never to treat myself well! The idea of yourself being one of these people you should treat well, never appeared. You can be so mean to yourself, say truly horrible things you'd never say to a friend or loved one, and hardly notice, if it's something you've always done. And I was bullied a lot at home and school, so treating me badly was something it was easy to also do myself, until I learned just to stop, to never do it. Then when you are kind to yourself, it's natural to be kind to others.

   Some books I remember helping with this: New Guide to Rational Living by Albert Ellis (on becoming aware of your habitual thoughts and self-talk, and changing them for the better where necessary), Wayne Dyer's first two books Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings (similar to Ellis), Louise Hay on loving yourself, SARK's first 8 books, everything by Robert Fulghum, A Life of One's Own and An Experiment in Leisure by Joanna Field/Marion Milner (psychological self-explorations). Emerson's essays. Also keeping a diary was very useful for seeing patterns, e.g. I'd describe some emotion for what seemed the first time, then see I'd described the same thing 10 times before!

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3. yesenadamJul 2020
   It sounds like you were into those things, now you're not. No big deal. So find something else you are now into and do that, maybe come back to those other things later.

   I'm into a lot of different things, but only 1 or 2 at a time. I can't force myself to do something I'm not naturally into at the moment. I'm taking better notes now (started a couple of decades late) so when I go back to a subject months or a year later, it's all there waiting for me to continue.

   You seem to be trying to force yourself, and seeing it as a problem with you that's it's not working. Be kinder to yourself! If you were treating someone else that way, trying to force them to focus on something they didn't want to, day after day, you would seem very mean, wouldn't you? One thing I've learnt is, we're taught to be nice to other people, but not to be nice to yourself, which is perhaps most important, as treating others well is difficult at best without that, and we're with ourselves 24/7. Treat yourself like someone you really love.[1] Sounds like you're blaming yourself, torturing yourself! The Albert Ellis' classic New Guide to Rational Living[2] was also very helpful to me, to become aware of how I was treating myself, what things I was saying to myself, and changing the negative things.

   John Perry's essay on procrastination might be helpful too[0] – in short, have such a great list of To Dos that even if you're procrastinating by doing things much lower on the list, they still add up to an awesome life! I thought it was genius.

   Good luck!

   [0] http://structuredprocrastination.com/

   [1] I think I got that from Louise Hay's How To Love Yourself.

   [2] Also Wayne Dyer's excellent first 2 books Your Erroneous Zones and Pulling Your Own Strings cover similar ground, and might be more to your taste.

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4. yesenadamJan 2020
   For Ellis, see his classic New Guide to Rational Living. It's about observing the things you say to yourself and believe, and changing them to more positive things if necessary. Which is surprisingly simple and easy to do.
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5. yesenadamJan 2019
   >Feeling Good is by David Burns, a Stanford professor who developed Cognitive Behavior Therapy.

   Uh no, I don't think so. The wiki page on CBT [0] doesn't mention Burns. (I did read Feeling Good years ago, don't remember anything about it - maybe because I'd read Ellis and a lot of others first.)

   I did get a lot from, and have recommend to others with success, Albert Ellis' book The New Guide to Rational Living, about what he called rational emotive therapy - many subsequent methods are very similar, because it works. In short, observe your negative thoughts and change them. No woo or huge cost involved. From [1] :

   "REBT is the first form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and was first expounded by Ellis in the mid-1950s; development continued until his death in 2007. ... Psychology Today noted, "No individual — not even Freud himself — has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy" ... In his first major book on rational therapy, Ellis wrote that the central principle of his approach, that people are rarely emotionally affected by external events but rather by their thinking about such events, "was originally discovered and stated by the ancient Stoic philosophers" "

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_emotive_behavior_ther...

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6. yesenadamJan 2019
   OMG, you've been working for 3 whole years and haven't done anything ground-breaking?! Seriously though, maybe you aren't 'great', whatever that means exactly, and I doubt it's necessary for you to believe that, whether it's true or not.

   You might find (books like) Albert Ellis' New Guide to Rational Living useful - I did! It's about observing and recording your recurring thoughts, particularly ones that make you feel bad, and replacing them with more accurate, helpful ones - stopping the self-sabotage. It's amazing how mean we can be to ourselves without noticing. We're trained to be nice to others, without including ourselves in that. I used to do a lot of extremely negative, paralyzing self-talk - saying nasty things to myself I'd never dream of laying on someone else; sounds like you do this too, maybe. This falls under "How to love yourself", something I had to learn to do. Louise Hay has a great 12-point list of things under that heading, stuff like "Treat yourself like you'd treat someone you really love." Then as you get older, you realize you aren't so terrible, and others aren't so great..

   I think 'self-belief' comes naturally with untangling that stuff, and otherwise isn't always a good sign, e.g.

   "Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." ...I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.." - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

   http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130-images#id00026

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