The Third Doortakes readers on an unprecedented adventure–from hacking Warren Buffett’s shareholder’s meeting to chasing Larry King through a grocery store to celebrating in a nightclub with Lady Gaga–as Alex Banayan travels from icon to icon, decoding their success. After remarkable one-on-one interviews with Bill Gates, Maya Angelou, Steve Wozniak, Jane Goodall, Larry King, Jessica Alba, Pitbull, Tim Ferriss, Quincy Jones, and many more, Alex discovered the one key they have in common: they all took the Third Door.
Gaslighting is portrayed as a type of diligent control and mentally programming that makes the unfortunate casualty question her or himself, and at last lose her or his feeling of recognition, personality, and self-esteem.
Do you have someone in your life who keeps belittling your concerns and making you feel like your concerns about something are invalid?
Does it always feel like you are always misunderstanding him/her because any time you point out something they said, they always turn things around to make you look like you have no idea of what you are saying?
If this is where you find yourself, then you are definitely dealing with a gaslighter. A gaslighter usually wants to manipulate you by doing or saying things that will question your reality, perceptions, and memory. They will make it seem like you are always misunderstanding them or misquoting them, you are always making a mountain out of a molehill, that your concerns are not valid. You may then end up not being free to express yourself, which can negatively affect your self-esteem, and make you doubt everything about yourself.
“Narcissism, like strong drink, has its place and its purpose; it braces and emboldens and offers a wonderfully primal pleasure. Indulging in it too deeply, however, leaves you sorry and sick and wishing you’d been more moderate in your pleasures.”
Author and senior writer at Time magazine, Jeffrey Kluger, in his illuminating book – The Narcissist Next Door writes: Narcissists are everywhere – They are politicians, entertainers, business people, your spouse, family members, friends, peers, colleagues, relationships. Recognizing and understanding them is crucial to your not being overtaken by them.
Narcissists are, in a sense, emotional muggers, people who assault their victims with a combination of stealth and misdirection—leaping out at them in situations and at times when they have a right to feel safe and taking what they want.
Narcissism, like strong drink, has its place and its purpose; it braces and emboldens and offers a wonderfully primal pleasure. Indulging in it too deeply, however, leaves you sorry and sick and wishing you’d been more moderate in your pleasures. We would feel poorer in a world without liquid spirits, just as we would without the manifold elements of the human spirit. But they are all volatile spirits. They effervesce and enliven or they singe and scald. The difference, as with so many things, is in knowing how to control them.
Common sense is like money and health, once you have it, you have to work to keep it.
Academy Award-winning actor, Matthew McConaughey takes the reader on a journey of his life – lessons learned, raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, prescriptions, and a playbook based on adventures in McConaughey’s life.
In the The Big Leap, author Gay Hendricks shows the readers how to go beyond their internal limits, release outdated fears and learn a whole new set of powerful skills and habits to liberate their authentic greatness.
Favorite Takeaways – The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks.
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a 2014 book by the American entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel co-written with Blake Masters. It is a condensed and updated version of a highly popular set of online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups, as taught by Thiel at Stanford University in Spring 2012.
The book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.
You can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
“Midlife is missing out not just on other lives but on the meaning for one’s present life of having them as options.”
“It is a work of applied philosophy: philosophical reflection trained on the challenges of midlife. And it takes the form of a self-help guide. The trials of middle age have been neglected by philosophers, but they are philosophically interesting, and they are amenable to therapy by the tools philosophers use.”
For most of us, midlife is not too late to start something new, though it often feels that way. Don’t be fooled by the foreshortening of time that accompanies middle age. You have more time than you think.
The most elusive challenge of midlife is not to cope with the past or the future, but with the emptiness of the present, the sense that satisfaction is deferred or left behind, that one’s relentless striving is self-destructive.
After living in Japan for six months and noticing differences in her own behavior, Sarah became fascinated by how small details and incremental change were given more emphasis in Japanese daily life. In Kaizen: The Japanese Secret to Lasting Change―Small Steps to Big Goals, author Sarah Harvey shows how to apply kaizen to health, relationships, money, career, hobbies, and home—and how to tailor it to your personality.
The Kaizen philosophy: you can change your life by making lots of small steps.
Favorite Take-Aways: Kaizen: The Japanese Secret to Lasting Change―Small Steps to Big Goals by Sarah Harvey
Kaizen
Roughly translating from Japanese into ‘good change’ or ‘improvement’, the philosophy of Kaizen isn’t about change for change’s sake, but about identifying particular goals – both short-term and long-term – and then making small, manageable steps to achieve those goals. Rather than forcing us to make big dramatic changes, the method emphasizes doing things incrementally.
“Nobody deserves to be abused. The truth is, it is not your weaknesses that they target—it is your strengths.”
All around us, every single day, human beings devoid of empathy are wreaking havoc and destroying lives in the coldest, most heartless ways imaginable. In constant pursuit of money, sex, influence, or simple entertainment, psychopaths will do whatever it takes to gain power over others. They hide behind a veil of normalcy, arranging their friends and partners like pawns in a game of chess.
In The Sociopath Next Door, Dr. Martha Stout highlighted various ways of identifying a sociopath and Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life. In Outsmarting the Sociopath Next Door, She uncovers the psychology behind the sociopath’s methods and provides concrete guidelines to help navigate these dangerous interactions.
Sociopaths are human beings who look like everyone else—so well camouflaged that their true nature may have gone unrecognized for years or even decades.
The more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you.
Blogger Joshua Becker shares strategies, tools, and insights for becoming minimalist. In the more of less, he offers a plan for living more by owning less. Joshua writes “Not only are my possessions not bringing happiness into my life; even worse, they are actually distracting me from the things that do!”
“Minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of anything that distracts us from them. It’s for everyone who wants more out of less.”
“True freedom is being without anxiety about imperfection.” —Sixth-century Zen master Sengchan
Zen Buddhist monk Haemin Sunim argues that by only accepting yourself–and the flaws that make you who you are–can you have compassionate and fulfilling relationships with your partner, your family, and your friends. Love for Imperfect Things shows how the path to happiness and peace of mind includes not only strong relationships with others but also letting go of worries about ourselves.
There are more sociopaths among us than people who suffer from the much-publicized disorder of anorexia, four times as many sociopaths as schizophrenics, and one hundred times as many sociopaths as people diagnosed with a known scourge such as colon cancer.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.
“4 percent of the general population has antisocial personality disorder (ASPD, sociopathy, or psychopathy).”
Kintsugi Wellness is based on the philosophies of Japanese life and is organized into four parts: Strengthen, Nourish, Lifestyle, and Heart. At the core of Kintsugi Wellness is Self-Care, we are all broken but we can embrace our imperfections through self-acceptance, self-love, and self-care.
“In Japan, rituals are an important part of everyday life. These practices are prompts that remind you of what’s important, and ground you in the present while honoring the past.”
We don’t ship the work because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship the work.
The Practice is based on the Akimbo Creative Workshop pioneered by author Seth Godin. Seth insists that writer’s block is a myth, that consistency is far more important than authenticity, and that experiencing the imposter syndrome is a sign that you’re a well-adjusted human.
“The practice is there if we’re willing to sign up for it. And the practice will open the door to the change you seek to make.”
I am a super fan of Seth Godin’s work and from reading his very insightful books: Purple Cow, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Linchpin, The Dip, listening to his podcast (Akimbo), reading his blog, and his other great projects such as alt MBA. The book is a compilation of 219 nuggets for creatives and writers.
“The practice doesn’t care when you decide to become an artist. What simply matters is that you decide. Whether or not your mom is involved in the decision.”
