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Today marks the six year anniversary of the Weekly Wisdom Newsletter!
In honour of this milestone, I want to summarize my top six articles from the past year:
I gained joy and insight by reviewing past wisdoms, and I hope you will too.
My goal with learning philosophy is to live a happier life, and arguably the biggest factor to a happy life is having happy relationships. Within all our relationships, arguably the most important and foundational one is our relationship with parents. Therefore, I picked this article as the most important one from my past year. It not only talks about having better relationships with parents, but also its extended effects on our health and world peace.
Some key messages from that article:
Having parents in our lives is a joyful thing, and when we feel that joy, we'd naturally love and respect them. If we've lost that joy, then we should try to recover it. We can do that by contemplating parents' sacrifices for us and by noticing their loving intentions towards us.
When we love and respect our parents, we can naturally extend that love and respect outwards towards siblings, other elders, and other people outside the family. Hence the saying, "society is like one big family".
If someone treats their parents poorly but treats other people well, then they don't have true respect, they are merely treating you well because you can benefit them. Once you cannot benefit them, they won't treat you well anymore.
One of the most important ways to show our love and respect towards parents is to reduce and prevent their worries. Parents most easily worry about our health, so we should take good care of our health.
Speaking of taking good care of our health to prevent our parents' worries, this is a major reason why I study Chinese medicine in my free time. This past year, I had the opportunity to visit my Chinese medicine doctor at her family's Chinese medicine hospital in China, and I got to experience all their various treatments and talk to many doctors there. I asked these doctors about the most common problems they see in patients and how we can prevent them.
Here's a quick summary of their advice:
Posture is very important for our neck and back. Practice good posture.
After sitting down for a while, get up and do some quick neck and shoulder exercises.
Exercise enough.
Avoid having AC blow directly onto your skin, especially the neck and upper back.
Eat a healthy and balanced diet suitable for your body constitution.
Healthy emotions are key to a healthy body. Manage negative emotions, cultivate positive emotions, and nurture good relationships.
I think a lot of people would agree that eliminating pain is more important than gaining joy. Perhaps you might think, "I'm not asking for a super wonderful life. I'd just like a life without so much trouble and suffering."
One of the biggest pains we have is illness and physical ailments, so taking care of our health is really important, as mentioned in the second article. Another major pain is the emotional pain that comes from relationship conflicts, and the first article addresses that. A third major pain is the pain of mistakes and failures, and this third article talks about that.
I've certainly experienced that knot in my stomach after making a stupid and embarrassing mistake, and then that incident keeps popping up in my head over and over again afterwards. I've also experienced great disappointment and listlessness after a major failure. How can we reduce the negative blow of mistakes and failures? The key lies in how we think, and this article is about upgrading our way of thinking towards mistakes and failures.
Specifically, it mentions:
Mistakes are only mistakes if you don't learn from them. If you learn from them, they become lessons (which is fuel for your future success).
Mistakes are an opportunity for growth and joy. It means you're attempting at progress, so you have the potential for the joy of growth.
Failure is the mother of success. Those who are more successful than us have also failed a lot more than us. Accumulated failures (and lessons from them) are necessary for success.
Fail small. Adjust fast.
Do your best. Let go of the rest.
Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know in the past because you couldn't have known it anyway.
Mistakes and failure are normal. The important thing is how you respond to them.
Although eliminating pain and suffering is probably most desirable, gaining joy is a close second. Besides, the two aren't mutually exclusive; they overlap. If we intentionally try to improve ourselves, we'll naturally gain joy and reduce suffering. If we don't try to improve ourselves, we'll degrade without realizing it, and then problems will arise and catch us off guard. It's kind of like building muscle or learning a language: if we don't persist in working out, our muscles will become weak, and if we don't keep practicing a language, we'll quickly regress.
There are two major areas of improvement: virtues and abilities. Virtues relate to our moral character and include qualities like kindness, respect, humility, diligence, discipline, and wisdom. Abilities are important for our work and career. Both are important, but virtues should come first. Virtues are like the foundational soil for plants. We can plant different plants (i.e., different abilities and careers) in the ground, but that soil (i.e., virtues) needs to be fertile for those plants to flourish. If we only focus on abilities and neglect virtues, then our plant simply cannot thrive.
This article talks about five big obstacles towards our self-improvement:
Blaming others
Self-deception
Ego
Blind spots
Aversion to discomfort
I still struggle with them, but the struggle is worth it. After all, self-improvement isn't a nice-to-have, it's a must have if we want inner joy and success in life.
Global leadership expert Sheila Murray Bethel said:
"Of all the communication you do, none is more important than how you talk to yourself. Your internal confidence has more to do with your success in life than any other factor."
A lot of us have negative self-talk. We doubt ourselves and our ability to achieve our goals and wants. Our self-confidence plummets in the face of mistakes, failures, or criticisms. It might increase in the face of success or praise, but deep in the back of our mind, we worry about whether or not we can maintain this success and whether we really have the ability that others think we have.
I know from personal experience that doubting ourselves is extremely painful and exhausting. If we want to have stable emotions, it's of utmost importance that we build a type of self-confidence that is permanent and independent of external circumstances or how others think of us.
How can we do that? This article talks about three ways:
Focus on your innate potential. If it's humanly possible, you can do it too.
Retrain your thoughts. For example, change "I can't. I'm a failure." to "I can do anything so long as I am patient and persist. I'm not a failure, I'm a learner on a learning journey."
Re-select your values. Don't value things that we cannot control, such as wealth, status, intelligence, beauty, success, and other's opinions. Instead, value things that are fully in our control, such as our self-improvement and kindness.
It seems like we all have this tendency to notice other people's faults and problems, and we can't help but focus on them, but we have trouble noticing other people's good points. The problem with that is, what we focus on, grows.
When we focus on other people's faults, we will have negative energy, and then we easily blame and criticize them, which makes them defensive and unwilling to change for us. It's a negative spiral. If we can instead focus on their good points, and this takes conscious training, then we'd have positive energy. When we praise them for their good points, they will naturally feel motivated to grow those good qualities.
For example, if we want our partner to do more chores, we shouldn't criticize them for not doing enough chores. We also shouldn't take it for granted that they should do the chores, as if it's something they "should" do and thus doesn't require appreciation. Entitlement is also negative energy, and people are repelled by it. If we want them to do more chores, we should focus on all the times they did do the chores and sincerely thank them and let them know it means a lot to us. Then they'll feel motivated to do more for us. From this one example, we can infer other examples and relate to our own situations.
Conclusion
As I looked through the previous articles from this past year, I see two major focus points. One is improving relationships, especially towards parents first. The second is strengthening self-confidence. I am still working on both, and I hope my experience can be helpful to others. Thank you to all readers for your support, and let's all have an even better year to come!
Weekly Wisdom #312
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