Every day of our life is filled with a lot of things and problems that will need our attention, but we have a limited supply of time and energy. Solving unnecessary problem not only drains our energy but distracts us from the major problems which require attention. So we need to answer:

1. Can there be a life without problems?
2. If Life is full of problems and how we can be happy with the problems we have?
3. What happens when we try to give attention to each and every problem?
4. Why should we solve only certain problems and ignore the rest?
5. On what basis do we select certain issues and ignore others?
6. There can be many solutions to the problem and from which neither of them is perfect. In this case which one should we choose and why?
7. Why do these things matter if we are eventually going to die?

Human life is suffering. There cannot be a life without struggle, problems, and sadness. It is part of being a human. You can not run away from it. Running away will never give you happiness, it will just delay the suffering.

Most people have two kinds of mentality when it comes to problems:

1. Denial mentality: We don’t have any problem i.e. running away from our problems
2. Victim mentality: We start blaming others for their problems.

True happiness lies in solving problems in life.

If you are going to chase happiness you are not going to get it. Chasing happiness means you will run away from suffering and pain. But pain is existential and it’s going to be there. Running away from pain won’t give you happiness, instead, it should be embraced.

Everything worthwhile in life is achieved in life by surmounting the associated negative experience. Avoiding suffering is a form of suffering in itself.

Embracing pain gives happiness and running towards happiness leaves you only with pain.

We have a tendency to do wrong/bad things as we are not an expert at everything. Failing at something makes us feel bad. The feedback loop from hell is that we start to feel miserable about feeling bad and in return, we start making more bad decisions because when we are in our bad state of mind we can’t think straight as emotions have taken over our brain.

Solving all problems or problems which we have little to no control over eventually will lead to a bad feedback loop. And intelligence is to understand not all problems are solvable.

Problem: Where people believe that they deserve special treatment. Reasons?

The problem with today’s generation is having a false sense of achievement i.e. feeling successful even when they are not. Participation trophies, giving medals to everyone, diluted grading system all of this lead to people with a false sense of achievement and which gives them a false belief that they are entitled to something irrespective of whether they made effort/sacrifice for it or not.

• People who feel entitled often will be very confident, great talkers and presenters but not doers i.e they will make several promises but never deliver on them.
• People like these often create a lot of charm across, and everyone feels like they can achieve, but in fact, they fail constantly and don’t learn from them.
• They also live in an illusion of a narcissistic bubble that would eventually pop

It’s the anti-entitlement that makes us great, realizing that we are mediocre at something and working hard towards making it perfect and making us achieve success.

People have a victim mentality and blame others for their problems. These people often have a feeling that they are entitled to special behavior as it’s not their fault.

Entitlement is a form of high, that keeps us from achieving our true goals in life. Any sort of entitlement will always keep us away from true happiness.

We are eventually going to die, and the average person lives only 80 years. We are too much occupied with the mortal life problems that we ignore the biggest problem of our life, which is the legacy/contribution to mankind we are going to leave behind (the immortal problem). No one talks about it because it’s really hard to solve.

Having realization of things to give fuck about is called practical enlightenment. It is being comfortable with idea that some suffering is always inevitable. To overcome the pain we must know how to bear it.

Emotions are the way to guide us. Negative emotions mean something is wrong or we have a problem that requires fixing. Positive emotions are the reward for fixing the problem

1. First layer: Simply understanding one’s emotion. We all have our emotional blind spots, due to our experience and conditioning. Recognizing one’s emotion is the first step toward it. This would take years of practice but is worth the effort.
2. Second layer: Asking why we feel certain emotions. These why questions often take years to answer consistently and accurately. Most people go to the therapist to get the answer to this question. But we ourselves can do it by the chain of questioning, i.e. by becoming our own therapist.
3. Third layer: How do we measure an emotion. How do we categorize an emotion as a positive emotion or a negative emotion? For example, a young guitarist who got to perform with a well-known band (let’s say Metallica) gets kicked out. This could both be a positive emotion that he got to perform with Metallica and he needs to brush up just a little more to achieve success. But a negative emotion could be that he got kicked out and might not become that successful again.

It’s because of our conditioning, values, and experience that people perceive emotions differently. The ability to unravel all the layers of emotions is the key to become self-aware. Not becoming self-aware is another classic example of running away from your problems and thus not achieving true happiness. Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We can control what a problem means based on what we choose to think about them.

The key here is defining key values that determine our success and happiness.

1. Pleasure: Pleasure give temporary happiness. Chasing pleasure doesn’t give happiness, rather it is the effect. If you chase the right metric pleasure will come as a by-product.
2. Material Success: After your basic needs are fulfilled, no matter how much you gain the level of happiness will remain the same. Sure you will become happy for a few moments after getting a new Mercedes, but like all pleasures, this is also temporary.
3. Always Being Right: Having a feeling of always being right would prevent you from growing and learning. Such people lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others.
4. Staying Positive: Staying always positive also has side effects. Denying negative emotions is similar to avoiding them. Running away from your problems and emotions would never give you happiness. As we have learned before true happiness comes from solving your problems not avoiding them. The trick to dealing with your negative emotions is by expressing them in a socially acceptable healthy manner and in a way that it aligns with your values.

Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not positive, not successful, not known, and not pleasant.

Good values are: reality-based, socially constructive, immediate, and controllable. For example honesty, innovation, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, and creativity.

Bad values are: superstitious, socially destructive, not immediate, and non-controllable. For example dominance, violence, being popular, being rich to show off, and sacrificing others for self-gain.

When we have poor values, that is we create poor standards for ourselves and others. This leads us to focus on problems that don’t matter and makes our life miserable.

“Self-improvement” is all about having good metrics and values in our life, against which we validate our emotions and life events. Having good metrics leads to having better problems. Better problems lead to a better life.

When we set poor life standards or metrics we are essentially giving fucks about things that don’t matter.

1. Not giving fuck doesn’t mean being different, this means being comfortable with being different

   You can’t be successful without failing and being comfortable with failing or being made fun of, having embarrassed in public is fine. Not giving fuck about everything is also wrong, we eventually will have to choose something to give fuck about. Art is choosing what to and what not to.

2. Not to give fuck about adversity, and instead, give fuck about something more important than adversity

   People in life give fuck about certain things which you never might. like some coupon not working or losing 100rs note etc. etc. The reason is people don’t have important problems in life to solve.

   If you start having fuck about random things chances are you don’t have enough important problems to solve in your life

3. Whether you realize it or not you are always choosing what to give fuck about.

   Maturity is choosing less unimportant things to give fuck about. As we age we understand that these things don’t matter and having an important problem to give fuck about is necessary.

Our beliefs are understanding/ neurological pathways built in our minds and are built acc. to how we grew up. Our brain is an imperfect machine as:

1. We are mistaken to see and hear things, we forget things quite often and misinterpret them.
2. We create meaning /belief for ourselves, and once the belief is made we can’t let go of it even if we see evidence that contradicts it.

There is a lot of conventional wisdom to trust yourself. But perhaps the answer is to trust yourself less. And being skeptical about your brain

Having uncertainties is a good thing and removes all the biases and avoids unnecessary stereotyping. Having uncertainties removes our biases. Having uncertainties and seeing if our beliefs are right or not is they way to create new metrics and values in our life.

1. Ask your self what if I am wrong about this?

   Being skeptical about yourself that you might be wrong about something gives you an option to correct your path. But this doesn’t mean that you should become underconfident. There is a fine line here.

2. What would it mean if I was wrong?

   Only very few ask themselves this question. What would it mean if they were wrong?

3. Would wrong create a worse or a better problem for me and others?

   The goal here is to look at which outcome is better

   For example, in the family or office, there is a common problem that you realize someone is making a bad choice.

   1. You choose to block them and force them to change their decision. But this would create friction for you and them, would not create a good relationship, and eventually lead to relationship failures
   2. You choose to not intervene and be okay with their choice. Even if it is going to affect you and them, try to be okay with it. The problem here is that it would affect you, even knowing that this is going to be a failure and you are doing nothing even knowing about it. But as a side effect, you will keep your relationship with them.

If someone is more successful than you that means he/she has failed more often than you. And if someone is worse than you, it’s likely that he hasn’t been through all the painful learning experiences you have.

We grow up avoiding failure and our society & family also advise us to avoid them. Instead, failure is the way forward to achieving success. Sustaining pain is part of the process to achieve better. We should not run away from it, instead welcome it.

Do something rule: if you do something every day about some problem, then you will eventually be successful.

• Successful Writer thinks of writing 200 words/day no matter what
• Athlete thinks of working out every day no matter what

These people have process-oriented metrics rather than goal-oriented ones. The idea is when the goal is a big target, doing smaller tasks will eventually complete it. Like if I have to redesign my whole website I will start with redesigning the header, footer, page by page, and bam!! website done.

We can’t have many values and work on each of them. Need to learn the art of rejecting values as well. Entitled people don’t have this art and end up accepting all the values and they fail eventually. Saying no is very important for both short-term and long-term success

Being too involved in a relationship, and having no boundaries has problems.

1. Victim mentality: One expects the other partner to take care of her problems.
2. Solver mentality: One takes too much interest in another person’s problems and tries to solve them.

Entitled people take either of these approaches to get highs and avoid solving their own problems.

Other people can’t solve your problems. Even if they do, it won’t give you happiness. You should solve your own problem and your partner should also understand this. Their only task is to be there for you, and give the required help.

The victim needs a problem solver, and a problem solver needs a victim to give them a high in their life. Ironically if two emotionally healthy people go on a date they won’t be attracted to each other, Problem solver is attracted to a victim and vice versa as it creates a lot of highs for each.

Without conflict, there can be trust. By being fake and being nice to everyone you can be popular and make a lot of friends but will you trust any one of them, probably no. No one trusts a Yes-Man. Having disagreements and conflicts is necessary to build trust in each other. Being honest is necessary for a healthy trustful relationship. Though people might not like your views at times. That’s how you build trust, by being honest. If you are not being honest you are trying to manipulate.

Trust-building takes time, it requires being reliable and being responsible for self problems or self-assigned problems. Keep on solving them and you build trust. But building trust is like a china plate. You can fix it by repairing it, but further breakage will shatter the plate into much smaller pieces making it harder to repair.

We are all driven by giving fuck about random things because it distracts us from the reality that we are going to die someday. Truly not giving a single fuck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one own existence and in that state, one is far less likely to get caught up in the various forms of entitlement.

But we are all chasing something which will eventually go away. Death is inevitable and we are going to die for sure. That is the biggest and only truth. Everything else is temporary.

And we should choose our values free from immortality and values should embrace that death is inevitable and death is the end goal.

Nothing makes you more mindful and present when being mere inches away from your own death. Stoics implored people to keep death in mind all the time and this keeps them humble and let them appreciate life more. Buddhism is the practice of meditation often taught as means of preparing oneself for death.

A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Instead of making up all these false values and beliefs, you should ask yourself what’s your legacy. How will be the world different after you were gone or how did you contribute to the betterment of humanity

This is a hard question that no one focuses on, rather everyone focuses on random mortal projects making huge money buying big cars and houses. This is something we should think about as death is certain.

The only way to live fearless is to realize death is inevitable and have this realization every day. This would free you from all the entitlement as you won’t give a fuck about what problems you have in life and how everyone should give you special treatment. If you are going to die why would it matter if you are entitled or not?

The population is full of people having a high sense of superiority without making sacrifices in life. Everyone has this false sense and keeps running away from what’s important.

1. Have metrics & values in your life to determine if a problem is worth solving or not.
2. You can never solve anyone else’s life problem, they have to do it themself. And making an effort here is not fruitful.
3. Don’t run away from problems as they are inevitable. Instead, embrace and filter them out.
4. After deciding the problem to solve, keep focusing on it and ignore the noise of other issues.
5. Take responsibility for something which you can deliver on, otherwise don’t take them.
6. Happiness comes from solving problems, keep solving them and you will have a wonderful life.
7. Self-awareness is important to understand the problems you have.