thegreenmarker

→If your complaint about other people involves your belief that you can deduce their inner thoughts, you might be in a mental prison. We humans think we are good judges of what others are thinking. We are not. In fact, we are dreadful at it. But people being people, we generally believe we are good at it while also believing other people are not.

→THE MIND READING ILLUSION

→If you have a background in psychology, you are probably better equipped than the average person in seeing past the common illusions that influence our perceptions. For the purposes of this book, I’ll focus on the illusions that I see most commonly displayed on social media and in the news.

→Thinking Like a Psychologist

→CHAPTER 3

→My original loserthink approach involved complaining any time I was in the mood to do so, under the theory that I was just being me. In my complaining years, I didn’t realize I was grinding away on the positive feelings of friends, romantic partners, and coworkers. Now I realize I have a choice not only about how others perceive me but also in creating myself. If I don’t want to be a negative person, I simply remind myself to consider the positive in situations as often as I can. Once it becomes habit to do so, that’s the person I have become. And I like that person.

→One day a friend explained to me with brutal honesty (alcohol might have been involved) that I was too negative and it was a drag. I was surprised to hear that my continuous complaining about just about everything wasn’t being well received by the people I liked most. So I set out to change that with a simple technique that I borrowed from another friend: if I need to talk about something negative, I pair it with at least one positive thought. I’ve made such a habit of this over the years that I feel uncomfortable expressing pure criticisms without a healthy dollop of optimism about something—anything—to balance things out.

→One of the best mental habits you can develop is to think in positive terms even when you don’t feel positive.2 For example, I was a negative person in my twenties, but I didn’t know it. I thought I was humorously pointing out the flaws in everything around me. I wasn’t aware of how damaging it was to the people who had to listen to it. Nor did I realize how the negativity affected my own sense of happiness. Dwelling on the negative is expensive in terms of your social life, your mental health, and even your career success. People like to be around positive people, for all the right reasons.

→Our DNA does program us to a huge degree. But a more productive way of thinking about your experience in this life is that you are what you do. And you have some executive control over what you do. In other words, you can change who you are by changing what you do. For example, learning good manners and making it a habit to use them often will turn you into a polite person even if you weren’t “born that way.”

→This line of thinking imagines your mind is who you are, and there isn’t much you can do about it. You were born with a certain personality, either good or bad, and that’s the person you will always be. Case closed.

→One of the most dangerous forms of loserthink is the notion that people should “be themselves” or be “authentic”—whatever that means.

→“BE YOURSELF”