Paradoxical Pragmatism
I've been noticing a lot more paradoxes (A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true) in my life lately. Being aware of them is extremely important for making the most of them:
- Your greatest strengths can be your greatest weaknesses and vice-versa. Writing was my worst subject in high school and I was petrified the few times that I did speak, yet I'm now the author of a book and speak fairly regularly. "All the great speakers were bad speakers at first (Ralph Waldo Emerson)."
- What you resist, persists. One day while I was still in grade school, I remember trying to clear as many dishes as I could in one run after having dinner at a family friend's house. When my mom saw this the first thing she said was, "Don't drop those!". The next thing I knew, I lost control and dropped all the expensive dishes on the ground.
The only way I could understand what my mom said was by putting a picture of myself dropping the dishes in my head and trying to resist it. I believe that our mind has a weird way of making these pictures come true. If only my mom had said, "Michael, I admire your creativity. I believe that you can easily carry all those dishes to the sink. Keep up the good work."
- The more you give, the more you get. For one of the best essays ever written on this subject read Emerson's Laws of Compensation essay for free online. Each time you read it, I promise you that you'll get new insights.
- The most successful people fail the most. The average millionaire entrepreneur has gone bankrupt 3.75 according to Robert Kriegal, the author of If It Ain't Broke...Break It. "Those who give up liberty for the sake of security deserve neither liberty nor security (Ben Franklin)."
- The more you get, the more you want. In a weird way, when we get what we want, we want something bigger. And when we lose what we want, we appreciate what we had. If we can focus our attention on appreciating every moment, then we can achieve success from fullness and not from striving.