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Values to Live By: Know What Matters Most and Let It Be Your Guide

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Frank Sonnenberg

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“Every time I fail the Prima exam... it feels like my life as an Undine is being negated. It's painful, stressing, and makes me sad. I get more and more scared. Before I know it, it feels like I've shriveled up. But that's not right. If I allow myself to shrivel and harden, I won't be able to changed who I am now. I won't be able to learn from and absorb the world around me. You can't change other people, but you can change yourself. If I'm too unexperienced and unskilled to pass... then I just need to gain more experience and skills. That's why I want to become flexible. If I'm flexible, I can take on any form and absorb anything. Then, I feel like I'd be able to do anything. I think I'd be able to become the full-fledged Undine I've always wanted to be!”

“A Navy study revealed a number of things that people with grit do—often unknowingly—that keep them going when things get hard. One of them comes up in the psychological research again and again: “positive self-talk.” Yes, Navy SEALs need to be badass, but one of the keys to that is thinking like The Little Engine That Could. In your head, you say between three hundred and a thousand words every minute to yourself. Those words can be positive (I can do it) or negative (Oh god, I can’t take this anymore). It turns out that when these words are positive, they have a huge effect on your mental toughness, your ability to keep going. Subsequent studies of military personnel back this up. When the Navy started teaching BUD/S applicants to speak to themselves positively, combined with other mental tools, BUD/S passing rates increased nearly ten percent. Getting through BUD/S is a lot of physical hardship, but quitting is mental. What does this have to do with insurance salesmen, you ask? Think about how people usually respond when asked to think about insurance salesmen: “Ugh.” It’s not just SEALs who take a battering; insurance salesmen face constant rejection. While you may think that the key to being a good salesperson is people skills or being extroverted, research shows that salespeople can be hired based on optimism alone. Researchers found that “agents who scored in the top 10 percent [of optimism] sold 88 percent more than the most pessimistic tenth.” It makes sense that optimism keeps us going, but it’s hard to believe that it has such powerful effects.”

“Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess When did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss?”

“The difference between love and will, although only formal, is fatal regarding the worldview or outlook of the philosopher in question. Everything must be joyous for the one coming from the principle of love, but for the one coming from the principle of will, as a blind force and strife, the world is less rosy and cheerful. This pessimism comes less from two inherently different models that would imply two different sets of rules (happiness, among other things) but more from the inability of the world to get rid of its will, which is to say, to commit suicide, to get rid of itself. In the case of love, this proposition is impossible because that is a joyous and lovely world. Still, in the case of blind will, the main characteristic of the world is existence at any cost, regardless of hardship, misery, and pain.”