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Serenity prayer printable version free3/16/2024 Would you rather save 10,000 people by focusing on the details of one war, or save one billion people by reducing on the causes of war and other suffering? Shit, what kind of question is that?.Has war and suffering been a permanent fixture of human civilization since before we had swords? Umm.Does understanding the details of each instance of human suffering help me alleviate it? Well, no.How does this help me with my goal of helping people? By allowing me to understand their suffering, like what’s going on in Syria.Why do I feel that watching the news helps me to be a better human? Because I want to stay informed about world events.For example:Ĭoncern: I try to keep up with the daily happenings around the world, and what I hear worries me quite a bit. You simply identify each concern in your life, analyze it and decide if it is something you can affect, then either ditch it or get to work on it. With these directives, it becomes much easier to decide what to include in your Circle of Concern. Make a difference whenever possible by helping others.Have plenty of close and happy relationships with fellow humans.And the very beginning is your goal in life.įor me, this exercise might look like this: To accomplish this, it helps to start from the beginning and work outwards. This is called taking a Proactive stance. It is to shrink your circle of concern (ignoring the daily news and concentrating on deeper sources of information), while using the newly liberated brainpower to work only on items within your circle of control. Money Mustache angry messages about his health insurance calculations.Īlthough this is the default human condition, there is another way to live. A health condition develops and you react by typing Mr. A traffic jam snarls up your commuting, and you react by honking the horn and complaining to coworkers when you finally arrive. Crappy weather shows up, and you react with a bad mood. ![]() Life throws stuff at you, and you must react to it. If you live your life in this manner as most people do, you become a reactive person. But any time and effort spent on the red boxes subtracts directly from time you can invest into the green ones. Whenever you read complaints on a blog or a news article, they are usually targeted at these red boxes.Įven a beginner can take control over many things, which are highlighted in green boxes in the middle. Many worries are buzzing around in his mind, and yet they are things he cannot control. ![]() ![]() Whether it happens in my comments section or at the table in my back yard surrounded by beers and fellow liberal-minded hippie do-gooders earnestly repeating conspiracy theories, the offense is equally severe. The concepts are so religiously ingrained in my mind at this point, and have proven to be accurate through so many real-life tests, that I tend to go into a mouth-frothing rant if I see someone not following them. I first read this thing about 20 years ago, and I’ve reviewed it about ten times since then*. These terms come from Stephen Covey’s ridiculously powerful classic called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s a book so old, so wise, and so essential that you are probably living a pointless life if you have not yet internalized its concepts. And sure, we could dismiss a few other people as hopeless complainers who will whine about anything – there’s no changing their minds without a good set of boxing gloves.īut among the intelligent dissenters, the biggest part of the chasm of misunderstanding seems to be coming from a hole in their grasp of the ideas of the Circle of Concern, versus the Circle of Control. I can blame some of the misunderstanding on my own lack of skill – I try to write these things to be as clear as possible, and the success is measured by the percentage of people who write angry responses based on missing a key concept. This response threw me off-balance, since the whole purpose of this blog, and most of my life in general these days, is supposed to be the opposite: Decreasing Ignorance, in the form of trying to educate the rich world about the consequences of our current lifestyle and its effect on the rest of the planet, and show an alternative way of living that leads to better results. Money Mustache and any who dared to agree with him for “Celebrating Ignorance”. While some readers offered their double high-fives of agreement, others came out with pitchforks and torches, scolding both Mr. That recent article on the Low Information Diet (which I probably should have called the Low Irrelevant Information Diet) stirred up quite a debate.
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