Life strategy: Change your lifestyle gradually

Any change of status quo may incite an immediate counterreaction. This is true for any form of governance of citizens, and it is true for changing the habits that prevent you from improving your life. We make resolutions to change with great immediacy, trying to make up for lost time. We may go on the most stringent diet and the most demanding exercise regime. These resolutions fail in the long-run, because results rarely come immediately, will power is finite, and we revert back to our old habits. If you want to change your life and adopt a new lifestyle, consider taking a piecemeal approach. You take small steps, and only increase change once you see the benefits of doing so. Slowly you exchange your bad habits for good ones, but these good habits will stick without creating a counterreaction from within yourself.

Albert Ellis: avoid the three main irrational beliefs

Albert Ellis is the founder of the rational therapy movement, now known as Rational Emotive Beviour Therapy (REBT). Ellis broke off from traditional Freudian therapy by abandoning extensive introspection into the past of the patient. Instead focusing on the irrational thoughts and beviours that lead to the patient’s psychological suffering. This laid the foundation for Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy movement.

Oscar Wilde on love

The very essence of love is uncertainty.

Algernon, in Oscar Wilde’s play The importance of being earnest.

We often fear the uncertain outcome in the beginning of any relationship. It inspires too much anxiety. We thereby rush through the motions, trying to reach a positive outcome as quickly as possible. Often this results in an unsuccesful mess, but even if succesful, it bypasses the opportunity for a pleasurable courtship. Uncertainty inspires the other person to think of you, not to take you for granted. It gives them the pleasure of trying to figure out your motives and intentions. It makes them more involved. And any delayed climax will induce a greater release of emotions.

Attraction tip: Love is a play, and tension its lifesource

Love and attraction can harp on our greatest insecurities and needs. The obstacles, uncertainty, and potential pain in this game are too intense for many to handle, and they then rush through it and make a mess of it. But tension is the lifeblood of a good play. If you approach seduction as a play remote from the real world, with both of you playing a role, then these sources of insecurities become the lifeblood of your seduction.

Attraction tip: the other person has not read your script

Many times we do or say something and then feel surprised when it does not have the desired effect on the other person. This just reflects how self-involved we are in the love game and how we fail to truly understand the other person. The person has not read the script that you wrote in your head. Spend more time entering the spirit of your target, adapting to his/her taste and nature, rather then coming up with ideas on how (s)he should act.

Robert Greene quote on our perception powers

We humans have a particular limitation to our reasoning powers that causes endless problems: when we are thinking about someone or about something that happened to us, we generally opt for the simplest, most easily digestible interpretation. An acquaintance is good or bad, nice or mean, his or her intentions noble or nefarious; an event is positive or negative, beneficial or harmful; we are happy or sad. The truth is that nothing in life is ever so simple. People are invariably a mix of good and bad qualities, strengths and weaknesses. Their intentions in doing something can be helpful and harmful to us at the same time, a result of their ambivalent feeling towards us. Even the most positive event has a downside. And we often feel happy and side at the same time. Reducing things to simpler terms makes them easier for us to handle, but because it is not related to reality,it also means we are constantly misunderstanding and misreading. It would be of infinite benefit for us to allow more nuances and ambiguity into our judgements of peop,e and events.

Robert Greene (2006). The 33 strategies of war, p. 428, Penguin Books Ltd.

Thomas Hardy on looking at the worst

[I]f a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

Thomas Hardy, In Tenebris – II, source.

Entire poem

WHEN the clouds’ swoln bosoms echo back the shouts of the many and strong
That things are all as they best may be, save a few to be right ere long,
And my eyes have not the vision in them to discern what to these is so clear,
The blot seems straightway in me alone; one better he were not here.
The stout upstanders say, All’s well with us; ruers have nought to rue!
And what the potent say so oft, can it fail to be somewhat true?
Breezily go they, breezily come; their dust smokes around their career,
Till I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.
Their dawns bring lusty joys, it seems; their evenings all that is sweet;
Our times are blessed times, they cry: Life shapes it as is most meet,
And nothing is much the matter; there are many smiles to a tear;
Then what is the matter is I, I say. Why should such a one be here?…
Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by the clash of the First,
Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here.