I shall precede with this riveting John Locke quote: “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” Hopefully, that’s enough to convince you that these lessons have a unique recipe you won’t get anywhere else: my brain chemicals.
From fictional romance novels to mysterious and fantastical ones, I have had my wild share of book traveling. However, I recently lost the urge for fiction and took a deep dive into self-help books. I get the feeling it’s an offshoot of being at an age where I’m looking for so many answers to life. My first encounter was Brianna Wiest’s “101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think” and I decided to go for it despite a strange mix of good and bad reviews on Amazon. At the end of the day, you’re not a product on Amazon if you don’t have a bad review.
101 Essays wound up changing a lot of my core thoughts as a 21-year-old, revealing things I didn’t realize would intuitively influence my life as I navigate my 20s. I’m sharing my top 5 lessons here but the knowledge in this book is massive, so you have a lot yet to gain if you read it yourself.
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1. It Is Healthy To Have An Array Of Feelings
“Real emotional maturity is how thoroughly you let yourself feel anything. Everything. Every feeling is worthwhile. You miss so much by trying to change every one of them away, or thinking there are some that are right or wrong or good or bad or that you should have or shouldn’t.”
Happiness is not a sustainable state of joy. I learned from another of Brianna’s writings that true mental strength is not the ability to be happy or content all the time, but the ability to process complex emotions like anger, fear, anxiety, frustration, grief, sadness, and so on. This helped me create a new way of thinking where instead of feeling defeated that I was angry, anxious, or sad, I would lean into the curiosity of wanting to see what I’d do about it.
“Emotionally intelligent people are those who allow themselves time to process everything they are experiencing. They don’t withhold their feelings and they don’t confuse a bad feeling for a bad life”. It is deceptively easy to let a negative feeling magnify into something bigger than it is, believing that it constitutes what your day, week, year or entire life has amounted to. In truth, it is just another passing, transitory experience. Soon, it will be gone as quickly as things tend to go, and you need only have used it to grow.
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2. You Need Three Types Of Happiness To Feel Complete
“Happiness is a byproduct of doing things that are challenging, meaningful, beautiful, and worthwhile. It is wiser to spend a life chasing knowledge, or the ability to think clearly and with more dimension, than it is to just chase what ‘feels good.’ It is wiser to chase the kind of discomfort that only comes with doing something so profound and life-altering that you are knocked off your orbit.”
The book points out three primary forms of happiness:
The happiness of pleasure | The happiness of grace | The happiness of excellence
The happiness of pleasure is largely sensory. Like a good meal when you’re hungry or the cool rush of ocean water on a sunny day. The happiness of grace is gratitude. It is looking over to see the love of your life sleeping next to you and being thankful. Lastly, the happiness of excellence is fulfillment. It is the kind of happiness that only comes from the pursuit of something great. It is meaningful work. Flow. One happiness cannot replace the other. They are all necessary and important to thrive.
What was most significant for me was the happiness of excellence. It’s been a rarity for me because of the unforgivable amount of time I spend on planning and introspection. “When introspection becomes your means of avoiding a problem, you’ve probably convinced yourself that life begins when all the pieces are in place”. In reality, life is the act of doing just that. Without the happiness of excellence, no amount of pleasure or amusement can ever be enough to fulfill us.
As long as you know what the life of your dreams is, make it your business to be excellent at it. There is a “peace of mind that comes from knowing we are becoming who we want and need to be. That’s what we receive from pursuing the happiness of excellence: not accomplishments, but identity. A sense of self that we carry into everything else in our lives.”
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3. Self-Esteem Lies In A Confidence Only You Can Build
“The two fundamental elements self-esteem boils down to are self-efficacy, which is ‘a sense of basic confidence in the face of life’s challenges,’ and self-respect, ‘a sense of being worthy of happiness’.”
I used to have a skewed idea of the word ‘self-esteem’. I thought it to be complete confidence, a poise you can only attain if everything in your life is perfect and deserving; even more so physically than any other aspect. But real self-esteem is “the very inherent sense that everything is going to be alright, because we are capable of making it alright.”
Self-esteem is knowing that we can determine our own course or path in life and travel that course. It isn’t how much confidence you have in how well people perceive you, but how much confidence you have in whether or not you can manage your life. It isn’t an emotion that fluctuates from moment to moment, but a continuing experience of a sense of efficacy and respect for oneself.
What’s interesting about having true self-esteem is that it eliminates the need to focus on how we’re superior to others. Because we feel in control of our lives, we stop focusing on “how much better things are than someone else” just to placate the feeling of failure.
One pillar of self-esteem that stuck out to me here was self-acceptance. The coming to believe that you’re worthy of loving and being loved despite not being supremely, completely good all the time. True self-acceptance is not aggrandizing yourself or being willfully ignorant of the natural balance of traits and characteristics every person possesses, it is seeing your whole self without judging or condemning any parts of it.
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4. You Are Not Inherently Made To Be Extraordinary
“You probably can’t be whatever you want, but if you’re really lucky and you work really hard, you can be exactly who you are.”
One of the bad reviews I saw mentioned this part of the book. “You aren’t going to be extraordinary”, they quoted, asserting that such a book should never be gifted to teenagers and young adults. Even more calibrating, the next paragraph said to “stop assuming you’re at the beginning of your life because it isn’t guaranteed that you would live a long life”. Oh, the reviewer got mad.
In context, Brianna Wiest was talking about ‘Expectations To Let Go Of In Your 20s’. Many of us grow up thinking we will be extraordinary. Typical, seeing as the only head we’re in is ours and from our perspective, things are always happening around us, not others. We think solely of how we fit into the narrative, because we can’t view life from anyone else’s mind. But growing up is realizing there are 7.999+ billion other narratives. It is realizing that it takes one in a million to be extraordinary, otherwise the word loses its meaning. That no one who dies sooner than normal anticipated dying young.
We may hope for a long life. We may hope that it becomes an extraordinary one. But it is also important to dissolve the illusions we have about what it means to be our whole selves and live our best lives. Working hard does not mean that success is a guarantee. In fact, most people are rarely successful in the way they first set out to be. Rather than work toward an end goal, “work toward liking the process of getting there. Whether success is a product of chance or fate, all you can control is how much work you put in (not exactly what comes out)”.
You are not going to be the exception to everything. You are not going to escape the consequences of not wearing sunscreen or saving money. You are not going to have a wondrously perfect retirement if you don’t plan it now. You are not going to have a community-filled life if you don’t learn to treat people respectfully. Your circumstances are not magically different from everyone else’s. Your purpose may or may not be something existentially profound; the only given, is that your purpose is to be here on this earth doing whatever job you find yourself doing. And you do not have to be consciously changing the world to fulfill it. In many ways, that is a relief. To know that the world isn’t your responsibility, only your corner of it.
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5. Now Is All You Have
“I have the issue of seeing parts of my life as just precursors of time to facilitate getting to where I want to be next. And the sickening reality of that is, given enough of those days, your entire life becomes a waiting game.”
Forgetting that now is all we have comes from the idea that one day, there will be a happily ever after. But life’s complexities are endless and the waves never stop curling, swirling, and crashing. “There is no swift motion of starting in darkness and moving toward the light indefinitely…there are days you’re so far back you can’t believe you let yourself get there, and then there are days you forget you were ever miserable to begin with.”
In the end, all we are going to have is the awareness of moving from one experience to another. “What we see in each experience is what we have to appreciate before we’re lifted away. We need to stop making a bad life out of a few bad experiences because we weren’t able to check off the list of things we had in our minds as prerequisites” for living.
Somehow, we convince ourselves that there is a happily ever after we are entitled to after we’ve suffered enough, and that joy is in planning for tomorrow. We continue to believe this despite knowing it’s illogical and the future is unpredictable. It’s often said that we can have it all in life, just not at once. There is something beautiful about today that you’re not even going to have tomorrow.
It’s terrific to aim for a better life but not at the cost of today. Today, my friend, is all you have.
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‘101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think’ helped me immensely as a girl in her 20s and a human in a bewildering world. Dear Brianna Wiest, just as you wrote and hoped in the foreword of your book, a plethora of your essays left me thinking: this idea changed my life.
