Be Water: On becoming anti-fragile, finding contentment, and accepting your world.
The relentless chatter of advertisements, a 24-hour news cycle, and obnoxious social media posts have all but overtaken the quiet moments of our lives. We are overwhelmed by content yet paradoxically bored to death from it. We are tethered to our sources of anxiety, and every new leap in technology strives to bring that anxiety closer and closer to our very bodies. The result? We're paralyzed against making even the smallest changes in our lives.
As a culture, we now spend more than eight hours a day consuming content of some type. Netflix, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook dominate our free time. If we get 8 hours of sleep and we consume 8 hours of content, we have just 8 hours left to live our lives. That's plenty of time so long as you don't work a job, have children, or have any other adult responsibilities. What happens when we finally break free and try to experience something new? A fleeting sense of happiness washes over us as we take a couple of pictures, maybe make a couple of posts to social media, and then we restart the cycle. We go back to work, back to bed, back to our regularly scheduled lives, and dream about the next big thing. No experience ever seems to fill us up.Life seems like a giant waiting game sometimes. We are waiting for that big vacation, waiting for that night out with friends, waiting for our luck to turn around. In an age where the next best thing is just around the corner, waiting for fulfillment has become second nature. Just a couple more months until the next season of Game of Thrones. Just a couple weeks until the release of the next generation iPhone.
If the past has taught us anything, shouldn't it be that waiting on fulfillment always leaves us feeling empty? We fall for it every single time, don't we? We can't help it. We're hard-wired to chase fulfillment.What if fulfillment wasn't something for which we had to wait? What if it's something we could have today-and have in perpetuity-every day? So many new ideas and schools of thought for how to live our lives are out there that we've discarded the things that we know worked. Focusing on the here and now. Prayer. Faith. Being mindful. Meditating and seeking out enjoyment and meaning from the small things in life. History has provided us with the tools to deal with stress, anxiety, and depression; all we have to do is adapt these tools for today's world. Billions of people have made their way from the cradle to the grave on this rock, and they have told us what works and what doesn't. They cast their votes by way of the religions they followed, the philosophies to which they adhered, and the things they chose to do with their free time.
To find the best techniques on being happy, we need only look for the ideas that have withstood the test of time. We must especially pay attention to ideas that overlap and things that show up in various philosophies and religions. Be Water is a collection of sage advice collected over my brief time on earth. This isn't a growth-hacking manual, or a get-rich-quick scheme, or a side-hustler's guide to success. This book contains the things that your Grandmother told you when you were 12 yet you didn't listen. It contains the things that your first boss tried to teach you but you weren't ready to hear. It contains advice that is tried, true, and verified over generations of human experience.
In this book you'll learn
How to stop chasing things that cause you grief How to create massive change in your life How to accept things that have plagued you for years- How to form habits that actually work- The difference between grit and willpower (it's bigger than you think)Customer Reviews
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