Quotes About Mindset

Watch your thoughts-listen to them because they shape your life and evolve into words. They tell a story about you and how you perceive your life.

What I was doing, I was sabotaging myself. Well, it was time I stopped.

Some vicious thing inside me stirred. I felt it in my gut, the back of my neck, my hands. I thought of Musashi, the master swordsman, who wrote, You must think of neither victory nor of defeat, but only of cutting and killing your enemy.

After about fifteen minutes he walked over to me. "Randori?" he asked, in a tone that was more a challenge than an invitation. I nodded, averting my eyes from his hard stare. In my mind, our contest was already underway, and I prefer my opponents to underestimate me.

Sun Tsu: When strong, feign weakness. When weak, feign strength.

Why did bad things, things she had no control over, make her unable to enjoy good things?

You must think of neither victory nor of defeat, but only of cutting and killing your enemy.

I thought of Musashi, the master swordsman, who wrote, You must think of neither victory nor of defeat, but only of cutting and killing your enemy.

Happiness is a choice

keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we've made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones.

We could go a long way toward improving the experienced well-being of people in our society if we could find a way to stop the process of adaptation.

The key thing to appreciate, though, is that what is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of decisions, but the subjective results.

the dissatisfaction that comes with social comparison can be fixed by teaching people to care less about status.

We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions

The research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression.

Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they tend to do worse subjectively.

The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better.

Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable.

you will never find yourself unless you quit preconceiving what you will be when you have found yourself.

It's how we see the world that keeps the darkness beyond at bay. Keeps it from pouring through and devouring us. I think all of us might know that, way down deep.

Shiny happy people don't hold guns in their laps that way.

He was in that mostly empty-headed state of grace which is sometimes such fertile soil ; it's the ground from which our brightest dreams and biggest ideas (both good and spectacularly bad) suddenly burst forth, often full-blown.

I must accept those things over which I have no control. I must turn my adversities into advantages.

eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business