This week's book: "Don't Believe Everything You Think" by Joseph Nguyen.
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
William Shakespeare
We're encouraged to trust our thinking. Think harder, try harder, analyze more, figure it out, and you'll be fine. This little book challenges all of that and makes an uncomfortable claim: our thinking is itself the root of most of our suffering.
The author draws a line between two things we usually lump together. First, thoughts, the ones that simply arrive on their own, are harmless and unavoidable. Second, thinking, the way we spin up those thoughts, the replaying, the rehearsing, the stories we tell ourselves, is where the suffering comes from. His point, borrowed from a lot of old wisdom, is that the thought itself is usually neutral. It's what we think about it that turns an ordinary moment into a hard one. As he puts it, pain in life is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
Here's the promise for the week: by Saturday you'll understand that one distinction, why it matters, and one simple way to catch your own thinking before it runs off and ruins an afternoon. I'll also give you my honest take throughout the week, because a claim this big deserves honest consideration.
Quick question before we start: what's one worry your mind keeps replaying that hasn't actually come true? It could be something from your past, that might be easier. Hit reply, I read every one.
I'll go first: for a good chunk of my life, my thinking told me I was behind, that everyone else had it figured out and I didn't. Almost none of it turned out to be true.
Reading ahead?
Next week we're reading "What's Your Dream?" by Simon Squibb. If you like to follow along, now's a good time to grab a copy so it's on your shelf by Monday. Forgot to order in time? The Kindle version is instant.
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Talk tomorrow,
Mike
Practical wisdom for the life you're building