This book was recommended as a Kickstarter project on a XOXO channel, and was delivered much earlier than general availability. I read it in one sitting, then immediately handed it to Jonathan, and said, "You should read this book."

I am so glad this book exists.

I don't believe I have anxieties at the level that people who self-describe themselves as anxious have anxiety. I would argue that I am decidedly not anxious about most things and about much of life. With that said, I had recently read The Anxiety Toolkit, and this book, so clearly something is triggering me to pick up these books and read them. And I am glad I did, because while I have coping skills, there's no reason not to continue to improve them, work on them, and (the best part) add new ones.

I suspect that when I meet Harper, she and I are going to bond over the Sailor Mouth™ style of speaking, as this book is full of f---s and f---ing and damns and many more in your face cussing. While it might have been intended as "Real Talk," it is a little overwhelming sometimes in the book. If you can read through the f--ks and the rest of it, and get to the coping skills, hooboy, yes, this book is gooooooood.

If you have anxiety, get this book. If you don't consider your coping skills to be ninja-esque, buy this book. If you can't afford a copy, let me buy you a copy, this book is that good. I am glad this book exists.

Needing coping skills is not a sign of weakness or mental illness. It means you are a normal human being navigation a truly abnormal culture.
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• There are no such things as wrong responses, only adaptive ones.
• What you have survived as wired your body to proceed with extreme caution, on a unconscious level at all times. This is called staying fucking alive and safe.
• ... You are not crazy; you have adapted to the environment around you with the only information you had at the time... your previous circumstances.

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You are absolutely accountable for your actions, no matter what bullshit has been foisted upon you. You may not have been the one who bought the ticket, but it now officially both your circus and your monkey.
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Psychologically, triggers are events, sensations, images, memories, etc., that facilitate the re-experiencing of any event that overwhelmed our ability to cope. (For those of you playing the home game, yes, that is a quick and dirty definition of trauma.)
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Being triggered means you are literally reliving a traumatic event in your body and mind and are not functioning in the present moment or dealing with your present experience.
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Despite the Navy's expertise in selecting candidates that are physically up to the task, the dropout rate for individuals attending SEAL school is really damn high (like 75% high). After years of this, the Navy commissioned psychologists to figure out what was different about the 25% that succeeded. And they found, unsurprising, that it was a form of mental ability, not physical ability. There were four essential abilities that were later termed "The Four Pillars of Mental Toughness..."
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Pillar One: Very Short Term and Very Specific Goal Setting
Navy SEALS who focused on getting through the training activity at hand rather than the course overall were far more successful in finishing the entire program.
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Pillar Two: Positive Mental Visualization
This means mentally watching yourself successfully complete the task you set out to accomplish or endure the bullshit you need to endure.
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Pillar Three: Positive Self-Talk
Remind yourself this ain't no than comparied to everything else you 've been through. And hell, your suvival rate thus far is 100% so the odds are in your favor, rock star.
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Pillar Four: Managing Self Arousal
Managing our cortisol and adrenaline production is a huge part of coping in general.... Breathing techniques are a big part of that, ...
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Are you bumped up against an unsolvable problem? Maybe it's the problem itself, not your inability to find a solution.
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Anyone who has laid down on the floor from the sheer weight of the awfulness of life can tell you that grief and loss are very real, physical things... and the reason we can't measure them is because they're far too large for any scale.
Page 92

We have a mechanism of communication about everything we think, feel, say, and do. Creation is hte sharing of that voice. You can paint a canvas, knit a scarf, play a song, plat a tree, or bake a cake. You can write and write and write. On your website, your Facebook, or the back of a napkin at a coffee shop. Creation in the face of destruction doesn't mitigate the loss, but it does help us take back power when we feel completely out of control. e=You are alowed your voice in the world..
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My mom used to make gentle fun of my brother. "Bless his heart, he still thinks he can change the world." My response? "Well, those are the people who usually do." Nothing ever go changed by sitting around, hoping that people come to their senses and make better choices. Nobody has gained rights by sitting around patiently waiting for someone to notice that they were getting fucked over.
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Things change when we change them. Or, at the very least, we empower ourselves to fucking try. I don't know about your, but I'm not about to sit by and do nothing when the world is on fire. I'll find a bucket of water. Or spit on it if that's all I got.
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Okay, this book was recommended in several places, both online and in a couple books I had recently read.

I really did not like this book. It was One. Giant. Book. Of. Hindsight. Bias. with elements of pop-psychology thrown in for good measure. It almost felt like Gladwell was ghost writing this book.

Hey, look, this company's company's founders worked really really hard and did something different and they succeeded ENORMOUSLY! They were original!

What about the other million company founders who worked really, really hard and didn't succeed enormously or even slightly? They weren't original? Weren't original enough?

Take Warby Parker, the eyeglasses company. They saw a monopoly and disrupted it. The founders were really really really unsure (according to the book) that the company would do as well as it has. That's great, good reporting. What about the other companies trying to disrupt the eyeglasses monopoly. How did they succeed (well, they aren't in this book, so clearly they didn't) or fail? How were they not original enough?

I understand what Grant is saying, that to be wildly successful you need to do something different and differently than what other people are doing. Sure, I get that. Hooray that all the companies in the book managed to Do Something Differently™ and succeeded. A lot of companies don't make it. A lot of "better" options are really stupid ideas that cannot and should not be monetized. Their ideas, like this book, are fluff.

Did not like this book, do not recommend this book, spend your time reading something else if you're looking for a rah-rah-rah I'm-an-entrepreneur book. Perennial Seller or The $100 Startup are far better than this one.

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.
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The starting point is curiosity: pondering why the default exists in the first place.
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When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people.
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Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.
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Child prodigies are hindered by achievement motivation.
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The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.
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As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.
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We view them as self-starters, but their efforts are often fueled and sometimes forced by others.
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Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.
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When hundreds of historians, psychologists, and political scientists evaluated America’s presidents, they determined that the least effective leaders were those who followed the will of the people and the precedents set by their predecessors.
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Originality is not a fixed trait. It is a free choice. Lincoln wasn’t born with an original personality. Taking on controversy wasn’t programmed into his DNA; it was an act of conscious will.
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their inner experiences are not any different from our own. They feel the same fear, the same doubt, as the rest of us. What sets them apart is that they take action anyway. They know in their hearts that failing would yield less regret than failing to try.
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the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection.
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Social scientists have long known that we tend to be overconfident when we evaluate ourselves.
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If originals aren’t reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece? They come up with a large number of ideas.
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They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality.
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In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences.
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In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.
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Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.
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The best way to get better at judging our ideas is to gather feedback. Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience.
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In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail.
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As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes.
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We often speak of the wisdom of crowds, but we need to be careful about which crowds we’re considering.
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Instead of attempting to assess our own originality or seeking feedback from managers, we ought to turn more often to our colleagues. They lack the risk-aversion of managers and test audiences; they’re open to seeing the potential in unusual possibilities, which guards against false negatives.
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This evidence helps to explain why many performers enjoy the approval of audiences but covet the admiration of their peers.
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instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas themselves. Just spending six minutes developing original ideas made them more open to novelty, improving their ability to see the potential in something unusual.
Page 43

Once you take on a managerial role, it’s hard to avoid letting an evaluative mindset creep in to cause false negatives.
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If we want to increase our odds of betting on the best original ideas, we have to generate our own ideas immediately before we screen others’ suggestions.
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“If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative,” Steve Jobs said back in 1982, “you have to not have the same bag of experience as everyone else does.”
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Research on highly creative adults shows that they tended to move to new cities much more frequently than their peers in childhood, which gave them exposure to different cultures and values, and encouraged flexibility and adaptability.
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In a digital world dominated by invisible bits and bytes, Jobs was enamored with the possibility that the next breakthrough innovation would be in transportation.
Page 51

As Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and decision expert Gary Klein explain, intuitions are only trustworthy when people build up experience making judgments in a predictable environment.
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In a rapidly changing world, the lessons of experience can easily point us in the wrong direction. And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis.
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The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment.
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In the words of Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, “Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts.”
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He excelled at creating brilliant solutions to problems identified by others, not in finding the right problems to solve.
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If we want to improve our idea selection skills, we shouldn’t look at whether people have been successful. We need to track how they’ve been successful.
Page 56

“It’s rare that originality comes from insiders,” Neil tells me,
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As Randy Komisar puts it, “If I’m hitting .300, I’m a genius. That’s because the future cannot be predicted. The sooner you learn it, the sooner you can be good at it.”
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When we judge their greatness, we focus not on their averages, but on their peaks.
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Leaders and managers appreciate it when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks, gather new knowledge, and seek feedback. But there’s one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions.
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When we climb up the moral ladder, it can be rather lonely at the top.
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Power involves exercising control or authority over others; status is being respected and admired.
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When people sought to exert influence but lacked respect, others perceived them as difficult, coercive, and self-serving. Since they haven’t earned our admiration, we don’t feel they have the right to tell us what to do, and we push back.
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When we’re trying to influence others and we discover that they don’t respect us, it fuels a vicious cycle of resentment. In an effort to assert our own authority, we respond by resorting to increasingly disrespectful behaviors.
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Status cannot be claimed; it has to be earned or granted.
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As iconic filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola observed, “The way to come to power is not always to merely challenge the Establishment, but first make a place in it and then challenge and double-cross the Establishment.”
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idiosyncrasy credits—the latitude to deviate from the group’s expectations. Idiosyncrasy credits accrue through respect, not rank: they’re based on contributions. We squash a low-status member who tries to challenge the status quo, but tolerate and sometimes even applaud the originality of a high-status star.
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But when you’re pitching a novel idea or speaking up with a suggestion for change, your audience is likely to be skeptical.
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The first advantage is that leading with weaknesses disarms the audience. Marketing professors Marian Friestad and Peter Wright find that when we’re aware that someone is trying to persuade us, we naturally raise our mental shields. Rampant confidence is a red flag—a signal that we need to defend ourselves against weapons of influence.
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“Unbridled optimism comes across as salesmanship; it seems dishonest somehow, and as a consequence it’s met with skepticism. Everyone is allergic to the feeling, or suspicious of being sold.”
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When people only touted the pluses of their ideas, she quickly concluded that “this idea is full of holes; they really haven’t thought it through, and they’ve constructed their slide deck to keep me from figuring it out. When people presented drawbacks or disadvantages, I would become an ally. Instead of selling me, they’ve given me a problem to solve.”
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People think an amateur can appreciate art, but it takes a professional to critique it.
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This is the second benefit of leading with the limitations of an idea: it makes you look smart.*
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The third advantage of being up front about the downsides of your ideas is that it makes you more trustworthy.
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A fourth advantage of this approach is that it leaves audiences with a more favorable assessment of the idea itself, due to a bias in how we process information.
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Just as presenting negatives can ironically make it more difficult for audiences to think of them, speaking up effectively depends on making the positive features easier to process.
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Overall, the evidence suggests that liking continues to increase as people are exposed to an idea between ten and twenty times, with additional exposure still useful for more complex ideas. Interestingly, exposures are more effective when they’re short and mixed in with other ideas, to help maintain the audience’s curiosity. It’s also best to introduce a delay between the presentation of the idea and the evaluation of it, which provides time for it to sink in.
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Building on a classic book by economist Albert Hirschman, there are four different options for handling a dissatisfying situation.
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decades of research show that you have a choice between exit, voice, persistence, and neglect. Exit means removing yourself from the situation altogether:
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Voice involves actively trying to improve the situation:
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Persistence is gritting your teeth and bearing it:
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Neglect entails staying in the current situation but reducing your effort:
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Fundamentally, these choices are based on feelings of control and commitment. Do you believe you can effect change, and do you care enough to try? If you believe you’re stuck with the status quo, you’ll choose neglect when you’re not committed, and persistence when you are. If you do feel you can make a difference, but you aren’t committed to the person, country, or organization, you’ll leave. Only when you believe your actions matter and care deeply will you consider speaking up.
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As much as agreeable people may love us, they often hate conflict even more. Their desire to please others and preserve harmony makes them prone to backing down instead of sticking up for us.
Page 81

It is often the prickly people who are more comfortable taking a stand against others and against convention.
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Research shows that when managers have a track record of challenging the status quo, they tend to be more open to new ideas and less threatened by contributions from others. They care more about making the organization better than about defending it as it stands. They’re motivated to advance the organization’s mission, which means they’re not so loyal that they turn a blind eye to its shortcomings.
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If you’re perched at the top, you’re expected to be different and therefore have the license to deviate. Likewise, if you’re still at the bottom of a status hierarchy, you have little to lose and everything to gain by being original. But the middle segment of that hierarchy—where the majority of people in an organization are found—is dominated by insecurity. Now that you have a bit of respect, you value your standing in the group and don’t want to jeopardize it. To maintain and then gain status, you play a game of follow-the-leader, conforming to prove your worth as a group member.
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The fall from low to lower hardly hurts; the fall from middle to low is devastating.
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Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original.
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security analysts were significantly less likely to issue negative stock ratings when they or the banks that employed them had middle status.
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it was more effective to voice ideas upward and downward, and spent less time attempting to make suggestions to middle managers.
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But when I looked at the evidence, I was dismayed to discover that even today, speaking while female remains notoriously difficult. Across cultures, there’s a rich body of evidence showing that people continue to hold strong gender-role stereotypes, expecting men to be assertive and women to be communal. When women speak up, they run the risk of violating that gender stereotype, which leads audiences to judge them as aggressive.
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Other studies show that male executives who talk more than their peers are rewarded, but female executives who engage in the same behavior are devalued by both men and women.
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Extensive research shows that when women speak up on behalf of others, they avoid backlash, because they’re being communal.
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For minority-group members, it’s particularly important to earn status before exercising power.
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the best way to handle dissatisfaction. In the quest for originality, neglect isn’t an option. Persistence is a temporary route to earning the right to speak up. But in the long run, like neglect, persistence maintains the status quo and falls short of resolving your dissatisfaction. To change the situation, exit and voice are the only viable alternatives.
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a major drawback of exit. Although it has the advantage of altering your own circumstances, it doesn’t make them better for anyone else, as it enables the status quo to endure.
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in the long run, research shows that the mistakes we regret are not errors of commission, but errors of omission. If we could do things over, most of us would censor ourselves less and express our ideas more.
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Employees who procrastinated regularly spent more time engaging in divergent thinking and were rated as significantly more creative by their supervisors. Procrastination didn’t always fuel creativity: if the employees weren’t intrinsically motivated to solve a major problem, stalling just set them behind.
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In ancient Egypt, there were two different verbs for procrastination: one denoted laziness; the other meant waiting for the right time.
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people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.
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Great originals are great procrastinators, but they don’t skip planning altogether. They procrastinate strategically, making gradual progress by testing and refining different possibilities.
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The pioneers were first movers: the initial company to develop or sell a product. The settlers were slower to launch, waiting until the pioneers had created a market before entering it.
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Surprisingly, the downsides of being the first mover are frequently bigger than the upsides. On balance, studies suggest that pioneers may sometimes capture greater market share, but end up not only with lower chances of survival but lower profits as well.
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Being original doesn’t require being first. It just means being different and better.
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When originals rush to be pioneers, they’re prone to overstep; that’s the first disadvantage.
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roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support.
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Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering.
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Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors.
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Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly.
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As physicist Max Planck once observed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”
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The time at which we reach our heights of originality, and how long they last, depends on our styles of thinking.
Page 109

Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along. They are at work on a particular problem, but they don’t have a specific solution in mind at the outset. Instead of planning in advance, they figure it out as they go.
Page 109

According to Galenson, conceptual innovators are sprinters, and experimental innovators are marathoners.
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conceptual innovators become less original once they’re entrenched in conventional ways of approaching problems.
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Conceptual innovators tend to generate original ideas early but risk copying themselves. The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, experiments enable us to continue discovering new ones.
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The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past. You learn from what you discover in your audience, on the canvas, or in the data.
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The key insight is a Goldilocks theory of coalition formation. The originals who start a movement will often be its most radical members, whose ideas and ideals will prove too hot for those who follow their lead. To form alliances with opposing groups, it’s best to temper the cause, cooling it as much as possible. Yet to draw allies into joining the cause itself, what’s needed is a moderately tempered message that is neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.
Page 117

We assume that common goals bind groups together, but the reality is that they often drive groups apart.
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Even if they care about different causes, groups find affinity when they use the same methods of engagement.
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Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why. If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us. This is excellent advice—and when you’re doing something original that challenges the status quo, you have to be careful about how you communicate your why. When people championing moral change explain their why, it runs the risk of clashing with deep-seated convictions. When creative non-conformists explain their why, it may violate common notions of what’s possible.
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Shifting the focus from why to how can help people become less radical.
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when people with extreme political views were asked to explain the reasons behind their policy preferences, they stuck to their guns. Explaining why gave them a chance to affirm their convictions. But when asked to explain how their preferred policies work, they became more moderate. Considering how led them to confront the gaps in their knowledge and realize that some of their extreme views were impractical.
Page 125

Steinman leveraged what psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the foot-in-the-door technique, where you lead with a small request to secure an initial commitment before revealing the larger one. By opening with a moderate ask instead of a radical one, Steinman gained allies.
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Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism.
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Psychologists call them ambivalent relationships. You might know them as frenemies—people who sometimes support you and sometimes undermine you.
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Negative relationships are unpleasant, but they’re predictable: if a colleague consistently undermines you, you can keep your distance and expect the worst. But when you’re dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you’re constantly on guard, grappling with questions about when that person can actually be trusted. As Duffy’s team explains, “It takes more emotional energy and coping resources to deal with individuals who are inconsistent.”
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psychologist Bert Uchino found that ambivalent relationships are literally unhealthier than negative relationships.
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But our best allies aren’t the people who have supported us all along. They’re the ones who started out against us and then came around to our side.
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Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters. And they’re a more credible source, because they haven’t just been Pollyanna followers or “yes men” all along.
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On average, a novel starting point followed by a familiarity infusion led to ideas that were judged as 14 percent more practical, without sacrificing any originality.
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Her actions offer two lessons about persuading potential partners to join forces. First, we need to think differently about values. Instead of assuming that others share our principles, or trying to convince them to adopt ours, we ought to present our values as a means of pursuing theirs. It’s hard to change other people’s ideals. It’s much easier to link our agendas to familiar values that people already hold.
Page 140

transparency isn’t always the best policy. As much as they want to be straightforward with potential partners, originals occasionally need to reframe their ideas to appeal to their audience.
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In her dying breath in 1893, Lucy Stone whispered four words to her daughter: “Make the world better.”
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According to eminent Stanford professor James March, when many of us make decisions, we follow a logic of consequence: Which course of action will produce the best result? If you’re like Robinson, and you consistently challenge the status quo, you operate differently, using instead a logic of appropriateness: What does a person like me do in a situation like this? Rather than looking outward in an attempt to predict the outcome, you turn inward to your identity. You base the decision on who you are—or who you want to be.
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When we use the logic of consequence, we can always find reasons not to take risks. The logic of appropriateness frees us up. We think less about what will guarantee the outcome we want, and act more on a visceral sense of what someone like us ought to do.
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Birth order doesn’t determine who you are; it only affects the probability that you’ll develop in a particular way. There are many other contributing factors, both in your biology and your life experience.
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Hundreds of studies point to the same conclusion: although firstborns tend to be more dominant, conscientious, and ambitious, laterborns are more open to taking risks and embracing original ideas. Firstborns tend to defend the status quo; laterborns are inclined to challenge it.*
Page 155

At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion.
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To challenge expectations and question core values, comedians must take calculated risks; to do it without offending the audience to the point that they tune out, comedians need creativity. The very choice to become a comedian means abandoning the prospect of a stable, predictable career.
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Psychologist Robert Zajonc observed that firstborns grow up in a world of adults, while the more older siblings you have, the more time you spend learning from other children.
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When older siblings serve as surrogate parents and role models, you don’t face as many rules or punishments, and you enjoy the security of their protection. You also end up taking risks earlier: instead of emulating the measured, carefully considered choices of adults, you follow the lead of other children.
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The larger the family, the more laterborns face lax rules and get away with things that their elder siblings wouldn’t have.
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If parents do believe in enforcing a lot of regulations, the way they explain them matters a great deal. New research shows that teenagers defy rules when they’re enforced in a controlling manner, by yelling or threatening punishment. When mothers enforce many rules but offer a clear rationale for why they’re important, teenagers are substantially less likely to break them, because they internalize them.
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They outlined their standards of conduct and explained their grounding in a set of principles about right and wrong, referencing values like morality, integrity, respect, curiosity, and perseverance. But “emphasis was placed upon the development of one’s ethical code,” MacKinnon wrote. Above all, the parents who raised highly creative architects granted their children the autonomy to choose their own values.
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Reasoning does create a paradox: it leads both to more rule following and more rebelliousness. By explaining moral principles, parents encourage their children to comply voluntarily with rules that align with important values and to question rules that don’t. Good explanations enable children to develop a code of ethics that often coincides with societal expectations; when they don’t square up, children rely on the internal compass of values rather than the external compass of rules.
Page 165

While the bystanders’ parents focused on enforcing compliance with rules for their own sake, the rescuers’ parents encouraged their children to consider the impact of their actions on others.*
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In general, we tend to be overconfident about our own invulnerability to harm.
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Robinson wrote. “He said it didn’t take guts to follow the crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being willing to be different.
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When our character is praised, we internalize it as part of our identities. Instead of seeing ourselves as engaging in isolated moral acts, we start to develop a more unified self-concept as a moral person.
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children between ages three and six were 22 percent to 29 percent more likely to clean up blocks, toys, and crayons when they were asked to be helpers instead of to help. Even though their character
Page 169

His team was able to cut cheating in half with the same turn of phrase: instead of “Please don’t cheat,” they changed the appeal to “Please don’t be a cheater.” When you’re urged not to cheat, you can do it and still see an ethical person in the mirror. But when you’re told not to be a cheater, the act casts a shadow; immorality is tied to your identity, making the behavior much less attractive. Cheating is an isolated action that gets evaluated with the logic of consequence: Can I get away with it? Being a cheater evokes a sense of self, triggering the logic of appropriateness: What kind of person am I, and who do I want to be?
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When we shift our emphasis from behavior to character, people evaluate choices differently. Instead of asking whether this behavior will achieve the results they want, they take action because it is the right thing to do.
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When Winstead went public with her rebellious political views, her father quipped, “I screwed up. I raised you to have an opinion, and I forgot to tell you it was supposed to be mine.”
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Remarkably, there are studies showing that when children’s stories emphasize original achievements, the next generation innovates more.
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groupthink—the tendency to seek consensus instead of fostering dissent. Groupthink is the enemy of originality; people feel pressured to conform to the dominant, default views instead of championing diversity of thought.
Page 176

groupthink occurs when people “are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group,” and their “strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”
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When a group becomes that cohesive, it develops a strong culture—people share the same values and norms, and believe in them intensely. And there’s a fine line between having a strong culture and operating like a cult.
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They observe that “the benefits of group cohesion” include “enhanced communication,” and members of cohesive groups “are likely to be secure enough in their roles to challenge one another.”
Page 179

“Minority viewpoints are important, not because they tend to prevail but because they stimulate divergent attention and thought,” finds Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth,
Page 185

Dissenting opinions are useful even when they’re wrong.
Page 185

The evidence suggests that social bonds don’t drive groupthink; the culprits are overconfidence and reputational concerns.
Page 185

While it can be appealing to assign a devil’s advocate, it’s much more powerful to unearth one. When people are designated to dissent, they’re just playing a role. This causes two problems: They don’t argue forcefully or consistently enough for the minority viewpoint, and group members are less likely to take them seriously. “Dissenting for the sake of dissenting is not useful.
Page 192

But when it is authentic, it stimulates thought; it clarifies and it emboldens.” The secret to success is sincerity, the old saying goes: Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. In fact, it’s not easy to fake sincerity. For devil’s advocates to be maximally effective, they need to really believe in the position they’re representing—and the group needs to believe that they believe it, too.
Page 193

“The greatest tragedy of mankind,” Dalio says, “comes from the inability of people to have thoughtful disagreement to find out what’s true.”
Page 195

Through the process of open-minded debate, Dalio expects employees to reconcile their differences. Instead of reaching consensus because some people are overconfident or others are afraid to speak up, the staff get on the same page by duking it out. In the language of futurist Paul Saffo, the norm is to have “strong opinions, weakly held.”
Page 195

If employees can get in sync about making sure that everyone speaks up, they don’t need to worry as much about groupthink.
Page 195

Decisions will be made based on an idea meritocracy, not a status hierarchy or democracy.
Page 196

Uh huh. Decisions are made by the person screaming loudest in the room, as much as Dalio wants to believe in his vision.

Hofmann found that a culture that focuses too heavily on solutions becomes a culture of advocacy, dampening inquiry. If you’re always expected to have an answer ready, you’ll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete, missing out on the chance to learn from a broad range of perspectives.
Page 197

Getting problems noted is half the battle against groupthink; the other is listening to the right opinions about how to solve them.
Page 199

Although everyone’s opinions are welcome, they’re not all valued equally. Bridgewater is not a democracy. Voting privileges the majority, when the minority might have a better opinion. “Democratic decision making—one person, one vote—is dumb,” Dalio explains, “because not everybody has the same believability.”*
Page 199

If you’re about to interact with a few Bridgewater colleagues for the first time, you can see their track records on seventy-seven different dimensions of values, skills, and abilities in the areas of higher-level thinking, practical thinking, maintaining high standards, determination, open-mindedness yet assertiveness, and organization and reliability. During regular review cycles, employees rate one another on different qualities like integrity, courage, living in truth, taking the bull by its horns, not tolerating problems, being willing to touch a nerve, fighting to get in sync, and holding people accountable.
Page 200

At any time, employees can submit dots, or observations—they assess peers, leaders, or subordinates on the metrics and give short explanations of what they’ve observed.
Page 200

When you express an opinion, it’s weighted by whether you’ve established yourself as believable on that dimension. Your believability is a probability of being right in the present, and is based on your judgment, reasoning, and behavior in the past. In presenting your views, you’re expected to consider your own believability by telling your audience how confident you are. If you have doubts, and you’re not known as believable in the domain, you shouldn’t have an opinion in the first place; you’re supposed to ask questions so you can learn. If you’re expressing a fierce conviction, you should be forthright about it—but know that your colleagues will probe the quality of your reasoning. Even then, you’re supposed to be assertive and open-minded at the same time.
Page 200

Karl Weick advises, “Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.”
Page 201

Even if your organization doesn’t currently embrace critical upward feedback, holding an open season on leaders might be an effective way to begin changing the culture.
Page 203

CEO Tom Gerrity asked a consultant to tell him everything he did wrong in front of his entire staff of roughly a hundred employees. By role modeling receptivity to feedback, employees across the company became more willing to challenge him—and one another.
Page 203

It’s easier to start a relationship with the door open than to pry open a door that’s already been slammed shut.
Page 204

I’d come to believe that no one had the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up about it, I explained to Dalio, and since that’s what their culture prizes, I wouldn’t pull any punches. “I’m unoffendable,” he replied, giving me the green light to go ahead.
Page 205

when organizations fail to prioritize principles, their performance suffers.
Page 205

few years earlier, Dalio had been asked whether it was his personal dream to have everyone live by the principles. “No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Nooo. Nooo. Absolutely not. No. Just please. No,” he replied emphatically.
Page 206

“Shapers” are independent thinkers: curious, non-conforming, and rebellious. They practice brutal, nonhierarchical honesty. And they act in the face of risk, because their fear of not succeeding exceeds their fear of failing.
Page 208

The greatest shapers don’t stop at introducing originality into the world. They create cultures that unleash originality in others.
Page 209

Although many originals come across as beacons of conviction and confidence on the outside, their inner experiences are peppered with ambivalence and self-doubt.
Page 212

Choosing to challenge the status quo is an uphill battle, and there are bound to be failures, barriers, and setbacks along the way.
Page 212

Strategic optimists anticipate the best, staying calm and setting high expectations. Defensive pessimists expect the worst, feeling anxious and imagining all the things that can go wrong.
Page 212

When self-doubts creep in, defensive pessimists don’t allow themselves to be crippled by fear. They deliberately imagine a disaster scenario to intensify their anxiety and convert it into motivation. Once they’ve considered the worst, they’re driven to avoid it, considering every relevant detail to make sure they don’t crash and burn, which enables them to feel a sense of control.
Page 213

Their confidence springs not from ignorance or delusions about the difficulties ahead, but from a realistic appraisal and an exhaustive plan. When they don’t feel anxious, they become complacent; when encouraged, they become discouraged from planning.
Page 213

“The trick is to make fear your friend,” he notes. “Fear forces you to prepare more rigorously and see potential problems more quickly.”
Page 214

To overcome fear, why does getting excited work better than trying to calm yourself down? Fear is an intense emotion: You can feel your heart pumping and your blood coursing. In that state, trying to relax is like slamming on the brakes when a car is going 80 miles per hour. The vehicle still has momentum. Rather than trying to suppress a strong emotion, it’s easier to convert it into a different emotion—one that’s equally intense, but propels us to step on the gas.
Page 216

Fear is marked by uncertainty about the future: We’re worried that something bad will happen. But because the event hasn’t occurred yet, there’s also a possibility, however slim, that the outcome will be positive. We can step on the gas by focusing on the reasons to move forward—the sliver of excitement that we feel about breaking loose and singing our song.
Page 216

When we’re not yet committed to a particular action, thinking like a defensive pessimist can be hazardous. Since we don’t have our hearts set on charging ahead, envisioning a dismal failure will only activate anxiety, triggering the stop system and slamming our brakes. By looking on the bright side, we’ll activate enthusiasm and turn on the go system.
Page 217

But once we’ve settled on a course of action, when anxieties creep in, it’s better to think like a defensive pessimist and confront them directly. In this case, instead of attempting to turn worries and doubts into positive emotions, we can shift the go system into higher gear by embracing our fear. Since we’ve set our minds to press forward, envisioning the worst-case scenario enables us to harness anxiety as a source of motivation to prepare and succeed.
Page 217

Originality brings more bumps in the road, yet it leaves us with more happiness and a greater sense of meaning.
Page 219

Just flying solo with an opinion can make even a committed original fearful enough to conform to the majority.
Page 225

The easiest way to encourage non-conformity is to introduce a single dissenter.
Page 225

Merely knowing that you’re not the only resister makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd. Emotional strength can be found even in small numbers.
Page 225

If you want people to go out on a limb, you need to show them that they’re not alone.
Page 226

Effective displays of humor are what Popovic calls dilemma actions: choices that put oppressors in a lose-lose situation.
Page 228

Instead of trying to decelerate the stop system, he uses laughter to rev up the go system. When you have no power, it’s a powerful way to convert strong negative emotions into positive ones.
Page 229

“Executives underestimate how hard it can be to drive people out of their comfort zones,” Kotter writes. “Without a sense of urgency, people . . . won’t make needed sacrifices. Instead they cling to the status quo and resist.”
Page 232

Now, we’re willing to do whatever it takes to avoid that loss, even if it means risking an even bigger one.
Page 233

If you want people to modify their behavior, is it better to highlight the benefits of changing or the costs of not changing?
Page 233

If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it—they’ll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work. They’re already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren’t attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t. The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.
Page 233

When deliberating about innovation opportunities, the leaders weren’t inclined to take risks. When they considered how their competitors could put them out of business, they realized that it was a risk not to innovate. The urgency of innovation was apparent.
Page 234

If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss.
Page 234

The audience was only prepared to be moved by his dream of tomorrow after he had exposed the nightmare of today.
Page 235

when we’re experiencing doubts on the way toward achieving a goal, whether we ought to look backward or forward depends on our commitment. When our commitment is wavering, the best way to stay on track is to consider the progress we’ve already made. As we recognize what we’ve invested and attained, it seems like a waste to give up, and our confidence and commitment surge.
Page 235

Once commitment is fortified, instead of glancing in the rearview mirror, it’s better to look forward by highlighting the work left to be done. When we’re determined to reach an objective, it’s the gap between where we are and where we aspire to be that lights a fire under us.
Page 236

Anger counteracts apathy: We feel that we’ve been wronged, and we’re compelled to fight.
Page 236

Deep acting dissolves the distinction between your true self and the role you are playing. You are no longer acting, because you are actually experiencing the genuine feelings of the character.
Page 237

Deep acting turns out to be a more sustainable strategy for managing emotions than surface acting.
Page 238

One of the fundamental problems with venting is that it focuses attention on the perpetrator of injustice. The more you think about the person who wronged you, the more violently you want to lash out in retaliation. “Anger
Page 241

Research demonstrates that when we’re angry at others, we aim for retaliation or revenge. But when we’re angry for others, we seek out justice and a better system. We don’t just want to punish; we want to help.
Page 242

Do diverse experiences really generate originality, or do original people seek out diverse experiences?
Page 322

Shared tactics only facilitate alliances up to a point. When the overlap in tactics between groups was more than 61 percent, coalitions became less likely. When their methods are pretty much the same, groups simply have less to learn and gain from one another; their efforts are more likely to be redundant.
Page 322

The representatives shared their perspectives, avoiding blaming each other and justifying their own views, and focusing on analyzing the effects of their interaction on the conflict. After all participants expressed their concerns and understood and acknowledged those posed by everyone else, they embarked on joint problem solving.
Page 322

As psychologists Andreas Mojzisch and Stefan Schulz-Hardt find, “knowing others’ preferences degrades the quality of group decisions.” Next, instead of discussing alternatives one at a time, they compared and contrasted each of the alternatives. Evidence shows that when groups consider options one at a time, a majority preference can emerge too early. It’s better to rank order the options, because comparing your third and fourth choice might surface information that shifts the entire decision. Psychologist Andrea Hollingshead finds that when groups are instructed to rank order the alternatives, instead of choosing the best alternative, they’re more likely to consider each option, share information about the unpopular ones, and make a good decision.
Page 322

Research shows that when American presidents’ inaugural addresses feature positive thoughts about the future, employment rates and gross domestic product decline during their terms in office. When presidents are too optimistic, the economy gets worse. Negative thoughts can direct our attention to potential problems, and the absence of those thoughts predicts a failure to take preventative and corrective actions.
Page 322

Psychologist James Pennebaker has demonstrated that expressing our thoughts and feelings about a stressful or traumatic event is most salutary after we’ve had some time to process the event, when we’re not blinded by anger or consumed by distress.
Page 322

Do not talk about things immediately after they happened. That will cement the trauma in your psyche. Give yourself time to process the trauma, minimum 6 days, then start talking, writing, sharing, discussing it, otherwise you risk never being able to process it.

This book is how to deal with anxiety, coping mechanisms and the like. Again, I have no idea how this ended up in my to-read pile, a problem I am becoming more anxious about fixing as I write that statement again.

The anxieties described in the beginning of this book are not anxieties I have. Public speaking in and of itself does not cause me to become a ball of anxious jelly. I know that my voice will crack and my throat will become dry when I first start talking in front of a crowd, but my heart doesn't race and I feel notice the voice and throat from outside of myself, not inside. Neither am I stuck by nerves about doing basic adult tasks or looking out for myself. I believe I have done a very good job at identifying my anxieties and addressing my anxieties.

As such, when I read this book, I wasn't overly enthusiastic about the techniques and suggestions in the book. I didn't relate to the "do you feel X?" questions in the beginning of each chapter. I am grateful for whatever place I am on the autism scale that allowed me to dodge those particular emotions.

I was thinking this was an interesting book, but not applicable in a meaningful way to me, until I read the chapter on rumination.

Hooboy. Hello, Kitt.

This is the chapter I paid attention to. This is the chapter that made the rest of the book worth reading.

And that's the thing, isn't it?

We all have different manifestations of our anxieties and different ways of processing anxiety. We all have different triggers and different soothing mechanisms. Some people have fantastic soothing mechanisms, others need help, guidance, and a direction.

Boyes comments early and frequently:

Like any book, take what you find useful from it and ignore the rest.

Which sums up my opinion of the book. It's worth reading if you have anxieties or want to hear about other people's coping mechanism. Drinking to numbness is not a valid solution, for example, it is abdication of responsibility to your own life and a crappy coping mechanism. This book lists other, better coping mechanisms. Worth a read if you need some.

Update: Read Faith Harper's Coping Skills first. It's a shorter and better read for those needing immediate coping skills. Come back to this one once the worst is over.

To better manage your anxiety, you don’t need to understand the average anxious person — you need to understand the multidimensional you.
Page 19

People who are agreeable tend to prioritize getting along with others. They may not be willing to make waves when they can see problems with other people’s ideas or plans. In contrast, people who are naturally disagreeable may underestimate the importance of getting along with others and not invest enough in relationship building.
Page 26

If you’re anxious and agreeable, you may find yourself overcommitting to things because you overestimate the potential negative consequences of saying no.
Page 26

When people overfocus on anxiety for a long time, they tend to lose confidence in their capacity to be anything other than a walking ball of worry and rumination.
Page 33

When anxiety becomes a major problem for someone, it’s usually because the person has become stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle where the things he or she does to reduce anxiety in the short term cause it to multiply in the long term.
Page 37

Find the Goals Where Pursuing Them Is Worth Tolerating Anxiety
Page 42

Goals Don’t Need to Be Giant to Be Important to You
Page 43

When you’re thinking about goals, keep in mind that more ambitious goals aren’t “better” than less ambitious goals. Many people would rather visit 30 countries in a lifetime than 200.
Page 43

Experiment: What’s one idiosyncratic goal that’s important to you?
Page 44

However, there are some instances when anxiety causes people to restrict their goals.
Page 44

People with shaky self-worth may hold back from setting ambitious goals because they worry that others will see them as too confident or full of themselves.
Page 44

Your worry might be that you won’t get the alone time you need to feel balanced.
Page 45

If you’re constantly thinking of new goals, there’s nothing wrong with that either. It suggests you’re hardwired with a high need for novelty and excitement.
Page 46

Feeling happy is like feeling warm. It’s a state of being that feels good. It might sound counterintuitive but focusing directly on pursuing happiness isn’t always the best approach to increasing it. This parallels the idea that focusing on reducing anxiety isn’t always the best way to decrease it.
Page 47

Self-esteem is composed of (1) a sense of self-worth and (2) a sense of being competent at things. 4 For example, sources of self-worth might involve loving and being loved by others; an ability to make other people feel comfortable and at ease; or positive contributions you make to society, your field, or your community. In contrast, a sense of competency might come from being good at computer tasks, being able to prepare a dinner party for 10, or paying your bills on time. Try coming up with three sources of self-worth and three things you’re competent at. Aim to recognize areas you’ve tended to underappreciate.
Page 48

Whenever you’re feeling anxious, use this feeling as your cue to practice articulating your negative prediction and an alternative. Try prompting yourself to think of the best possible outcome, instead of just the worst.
Page 59

When you change a habit, you don’t so much break a bad habit as build up and strengthen a new one.
Page 59

If you’re currently stuck in pause mode, and have been for a while, taking some action is usually better than taking no action. When you can recognize the value of acting with uncertainty, you’ll help your brain start to interpret uncertainty as a positive or not-so-terrible state, rather than it causing your alarm bells to ring loudly.
Page 60

Try to come up with three examples of your own. If coming up with three examples is intimidating, come up with just one example.
Page 60

Nope. Go for 10.
Page 60

the vast majority of failures aren’t catastrophes.
Page 63

Many people underestimate their capacity to cope with trying something and not succeeding. Anxious people often worry about later regretting decisions and finding it hard to deal with the ensuing emotions.
Page 63

Anxiety tends to make people think in dichotomous, either/ or terms. A common example is seeing success and failure as the only two potential end points, rather than seeing a zigzagging path toward success that is dotted with failures along the way.
Page 65

1. Have you had any past experiences where you ended up succeeding after initial failure? List one. 2. Identify one area in which you have a fixed mindset. It should be a skill/ capacity you see as important to your success, where you see yourself as not as good as you’d like to be, and where you see that skill/ capacity as fixed. 3. Identify a new growth mindset that you’d like to strengthen.
Page 65

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to wait for your thoughts to change before you try behavioral shifts. Mental and behavioral shifts go hand in hand. When you start making changes in your behavior (even subtle ones), you’ll notice that all kinds of thoughts, including your view of yourself, start to shift. Changing your behavior, without waiting for your thoughts to always shift first, is one of the best and fastest ways you can reduce your anxiety.
Page 69

The best way to instantly feel less anxious is to slow your breathing. Try this whenever you feel physically overaroused due to anxiety, or when your thoughts are either racing or frozen. Slowing your breathing will automatically slow down your heart rate.
Page 70

Here are some tips for slowing your breathing: 1. Before you try to slow your breathing, drop your shoulders. It’ll make it easier. Also, focus on breathing slowly rather than breathing deeply. 2. If you have an area of tension in your body, like your neck and shoulders are tight, imagine you’re breathing fresh new air into those areas. There’s nothing sciencey about this, but lots of people like this method.
Page 70

Deciding when and where you’re going to do something will dramatically increase the likelihood you’ll follow through.
Page 71

Intermittent reinforcement means sometimes getting rewarded but without being able to predict when you’ll score vs. when you’ll strike out. 5 Intermittent reinforcement results in behaviors being quickly acquired and creates behaviors that are very persistent—
Page 72

The take-home message: Even if you achieve only intermittent reinforcement—that is, you experience success only sometimes—having some successes will make your behavior much more resilient, and you’ll be less likely to give up.
Page 72

regularly interact with people who are already successfully doing what you want to do.
Page 73

if you surround yourself with people who are already acting in the ways you need to act, this will likely rub off on you. You’ll be more likely to take action.
Page 73

When an opportunity to act with uncertainty comes up, articulate the potential upsides of taking action:
Page 73

Look for small ways to practice hesitating a little less than you usually would.
Page 74

give yourself some criteria for making quicker decisions.
Page 74

Believe it or not, psychologists have a term to describe people who like to think a lot. The trait is called need for cognition. It refers to people who enjoy effortful thinking and feel motivated to attempt to understand and make sense of things.
Page 78

Ruminating can sometimes be a bit like daydreaming, in that people often get lost in rumination without realizing they’re doing it.
Page 80

Experiment: Jot down a list of the different topics of rumination you’re prone to. Use the following ideas to brainstorm, or just fill in the blanks: Replaying conversations with people in power positions in your life. For example, replaying conversations, including email conversations, with [insert names of people] . Replaying memories of experiences of failure from the past. For example, . Thinking about ways in which you’re not as perfect as you’d like to be. For example, thinking you’re not as good at as you’d like. Thinking about things you should be doing to be more successful, such as . Thinking about whether you’re too much of a loser to ever have success and happiness. Replaying small errors you’ve made, such as . Thinking about the path not taken, such as .
Page 80

when you’re ruminating: Don’t trust your memory. You might be ruminating about something fictional or at least magnified.
Page 81

Experiment: Do you have any current rumination topics where memory bias might be playing a role?
Page 81

Answer the following questions: 1. What’s your ruminating mind telling you? 2. What are the objective data telling you about whether your ruminative thoughts are likely to be correct?
Page 81

3. Are you recalling feedback as harsher than it was or recalling blips in your performance as worse than they were?
Page 82

However, because anxiety tends to make thinking negative, narrow, and rigid, it’s difficult to do creative problem solving when you’re feeling highly anxious.
Page 82

Reducing self-criticism is a critical part of reducing rumination.
Page 83

harsh self-criticism doesn’t help you move forward because it isn’t a very effective motivational tool,
Page 84

Acknowledging the emotions you’re feeling (such as embarrassed, disappointed, upset) and then giving yourself compassion will lead to your making better choices than criticizing yourself will.
Page 84

Identify a mistake or weakness that you want to focus on, and then write for three minutes using the following instructions: “Imagine that you are talking to yourself about this weakness (or mistake) from a compassionate and understanding perspective. What would you say?” Try this experiment
Page 84

Try to notice when you get caught in should/ shouldn’t thinking traps, in which you criticize yourself just for feeling anxious.
Page 85

Try this: Switch out any shoulds hidden in your self-talk and replace them with prefer. 7 For example, instead of saying “I should have achieved more by now” try “I would prefer to have achieved more by now.”
Page 86

Doing something useful then further helps lift you out of rumination.
Page 86

if you’re jumping to any negative conclusions about why the person hasn’t responded and try coming up with alternative explanations that are plausible.
Page 87

Often you won’t find out the reasons for other people’s actions, which is part of why this type of rumination tends to be so futile.
Page 87

Humans like to have explanations for why things happen. When we don’t have one, we tend to invent something. Sometimes the explanations involve personalizing. Personalizing is when you take something more personally than it was meant in reality.
Page 88

you need to learn to tolerate that you’re not always going to know why people behave the way they do.
Page 88

Recognize that if someone acts strangely, there’s a very high likelihood that the behavior has something to do with what’s happening for that person, rather than being about you, and you’re probably never going to know what the reason was.
Page 88

Start with three minutes of one of the following practices, and increase the time you spend meditating by 30 seconds each day: Pay attention to the physical sensations of your breathing. Lie down and put your hand on your abdomen to feel the sensations of it rising as you breathe in and falling as you breathe out. Sit or lie down and listen to any sounds and the silence between sounds. Let sounds just come in and out of your awareness regardless of whether they’re relaxing sounds or not. Walk for three minutes and pay attention to what you see. Walk and pay attention to the feelings of air on your skin. Walk and pay attention to the physical sensations of your body moving. Do three minutes of open awareness, in which you pay attention to any sensations that show up. Pay attention to anything in the here and now, which could be sounds, your breathing, the sensations of your body making contact with your chair, or the sensations of your feet on the floor. Spend three minutes paying attention to any sensations of pain, tension, comfort, or relaxation in your body. You don’t need to try to change the sensations; just allow them to be what they are, and ebb and flow as they do.
Page 89

When your thoughts drift away from what you’re supposed to be paying attention to, gently (and without self-criticism) bring them back. Expect to need to do this a lot. It’s a normal part of doing mindfulness meditation and doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. You’re likely to get
Page 90

forward. To shift out of rumination and into problem-solving mode, concretely and realistically define what your best three to six options are.
Page 91

Defining your options relieves some of the stress of rumination and helps you shift to effective problem solving. Keeping your list of options short will prevent you from running into choice-overload problems.
Page 91

Experiment: Practice concretely defining your best three to six options for moving forward with a problem you’re currently ruminating or worrying about. Write brief bullet points, like in the example just given. You can use this method for all sorts of problems.
Page 92

Imagery exposure is a technique in which you vividly recall a situation you’ve been ruminating about,
Page 92

To start, recall all the sights and sounds of the past situation (or feared situation) in as much detail as you can. For
Page 93

Deliberately keep the image in mind until your anxiety falls to half of where it started (or less). For example, if vividly recalling the situation triggers 8 out of 10 anxiety initially, hold the image in mind until your anxiety drops to about a level 4. Repeat the imagery exposure exercise at least once a day until you can bring the image to mind without it triggering more than about half of the peak anxiety you experienced the first time you tried imagery exposure.
Page 93

If you’re ruminating because you’ve been putting off dealing with an issue, taking any level of action to address what you’ve been avoiding will usually help alleviate your rumination.
Page 94

Move Ruminative Thinking Forward by Asking Questions
Page 95

Ask questions as a way of unclogging stuck thinking. When you ask questions, you may get useful new information, or just the process of asking the questions may stimulate your own thinking. Sometimes even getting unhelpful responses can help you move forward, because they prompt you to define your problem differently. This often happens when someone misunderstands your question and gives an unhelpful, irrelevant response, but this makes you reformulate your question in a clearer form.
Page 95

Thinking Shifts to Overcome Unhelpful Types of Perfectionism Anxiety-related thinking patterns can contribute to problems like prioritizing the wrong types of tasks, feeling burned out, and getting intensely frustrated when results aren’t coming as quickly or consistently as you’d like.
Page 101

If you can shift your thinking from a performance focus to a mastery focus, you’ll become less fearful, more resilient, and more open to good, new ideas. Performance focus is when your highest priority is to show you can do something well now. Mastery focus is when you’re mostly concerned with advancing your skills.
Page 104

A mastery focus can help you persist after setbacks.
Page 104

Mastery goals will help you become less upset about individual instances of failure.
Page 105

What’s your most important mastery goal right now? Complete this sentence: “My goal is to master the skills involved in
Page 105

How would people with your mastery goal: 1. React to mistakes, setbacks, disappointments, and negative moods? 2. Prioritize which tasks they work on? What types of tasks would they deprioritize? 3. React when they’d sunk a lot of time into something and then realized a particular strategy or idea didn’t have the potential they’d hoped it would? 4. Ensure they were optimizing their learning and skill acquisition? 5. React when they felt anxious?
Page 105

3. How would you talk to yourself differently if you had more acceptance of this? What would you say to yourself?
Page 107

More Useful Pattern Anxiety/ frustration “I need to work harder” thinking error Spot the thinking trap Take a break Resume and maintain the behavioral goal I know works for me
Page 109

Thoughts are just thoughts; the problem is that we accept thoughts as true, and confuse feelings with facts. Part of the reason this happens is memory bias: Your brain will tend to remember events from the past that match your current mood.
Page 111

Therefore, regaining confidence is often just a matter of being patient and waiting for a negative or anxious mood to pass.
Page 112

Excessive expectations plus anxiety get in the way of generating ideas.
Page 112

Instead, try asking yourself: What do I know that’s relevant to solving my problem or helping me answer my question? How could I replicate something I’ve already done successfully, but with a twist? How could I combine two concepts that could be combined but aren’t usually? (Like croissants + donuts = cronuts) How could I take a successful method and replicate it with different ingredients? (Such as you notice the title of a viral blog post and copy the form of the title for a blog post you’re writing about a different topic.) Experiment: Try thinking of a successful method and how the method could be replicated but with different ingredients.
Page 113

The following are some ways of making more willpower available to you: Reduce the number of tasks you attempt to get done each day to a very small number. Always identify what your most important task is, and make sure you get that single task done. You can group together your trivial tasks, like replying to emails or paying bills online, and count those as just one item. Refresh your available willpower by doing tasks slowly.
Page 114

Slowing down in this way is considered a form of mindfulness practice.
Page 115

Another way to refresh your willpower is by taking some slow breaths or doing any of the mindfulness practices
Page 115

Know Your Warning Signs That You’ve Persisted Too Long
Page 116

Define your overpersistence warning signs in objective and specific ways. This will make it harder to ignore them than if your definitions were fuzzy.
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We all have recency bias, meaning recent memories tend to be the most salient.
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Experiment with what it’s like to stop working while you’re in the zone and still enjoying a task rather than when you’re exhausted and frustrated.
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A behavioral experiment you can try is delegating or outsourcing tasks you feel overwhelmed by.
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To help you be less tempted to jump around, reduce your exposure to excessive information and alternatives.
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questions. Write down one specific example of each.
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Have you avoided seeking feedback early on only to later realize that earlier feedback would’ve saved you from continuing down the wrong track for so long? When? Have you avoided feedback only to later realize your fears of negative feedback were unjustified? How long did you worry unnecessarily? What was that like for you? Have you had times when your predictions of negative feedback came true, but it was a much milder experience than you’d anticipated? Have you had an experience where you realized that making the required changes was much easier than you thought, and you had endured extra worry for no reason? What cool opportunities have you opted out of because you didn’t want to expose yourself to even the possibility of negative feedback?
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One of the reasons anxious people fear feedback is that they tend to judge their performance more harshly than others judge them.
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Just like everyone has a vision blind spot, everyone has cognitive blind spots that can lead to making less than stellar choices.
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Think about a specific scenario in which you fear negative feedback. If your fears came true: How would you go about making the required changes? How could you be self-accepting of your sensitivity to criticism? How could you talk to yourself gently about the emotions you’re feeling instead of criticizing yourself for feeling upset? How could you be patient with yourself while you’re having those feelings? What self-care would you do while you wait for your hurt and upset feelings to pass? (Yes, rewatching episodes of ’90s TV is a totally acceptable answer. 3) What personal support would you access to cope with your emotions? For example, you’d talk to a friend.
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Anxiety can cause people to sometimes misinterpret feedback once they’ve received it. When people feel anxious, they tend to interpret ambiguous information (and lack of feedback) as negative.
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You need to train yourself to consider the possibility that whatever has happened might not be personal. The second is recognizing that negative feedback does not necessarily mean the person doesn’t like you, doesn’t respect your capabilities, or doesn’t recognize your potential.
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Anxiety (and stress) can make people more vulnerable to the hostility bias, a type of personalizing where you jump to the conclusion that other people have hostile intent.
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The hostility bias often crops up in the workplace and in other group settings. For example, others offer you suggestions. You experience those suggestions as being attacked or nitpicked.
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the best way to tackle the hostility bias in the moment is to slow your breathing to calm yourself physiologically, then use a behavioral strategy such as “canned responses” (see the next section).
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You can prepare some verbal canned responses for times when you need to stall, without appearing defensive while you’re mentally processing feedback. Some examples: I think you’ve got a good point about ____. I’ll think about everything you’ve said. I need to process your feedback and mull it over. That’s an interesting way to look at it. Let me think about how I can incorporate your feedback. Let me think about how best to proceed from here. I’ll email you with some thoughts.
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You can also have canned responses for when you feel embarrassed that a blind spot has been revealed. For example: I hadn’t thought of it like that. That’s really useful. Thanks for alerting me to that way of looking at it. That’s a great idea. I often come away from our conversations with a new perspective.
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Acting as if you feel relaxed is one of the fastest ways to actually feel more calm. If you get an anxiety spike when you receive feedback or tend to feel defensive, try making your body language more open.
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Drop your shoulders, lift your head, make gentle eye contact, and relax your hands. When you do this, your
Page 135

When you ask people to give you feedback, ask for it in the form of a “poop sandwich.” The poop sandwich is feedback given in the following order—something you did well, a problem or learning edge, something else you did well. Try to give and receive feedback using this technique.
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Sometimes anxious people need time to process a little bit of feedback before they’re open to receiving more.
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Avoidance will eat you alive psychologically if you don’t work on it.
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How avoidance coping manifests for you will depend on what your dominant response type is when you’re facing something you’d rather avoid. There are three possible responses: freezing, fleeing, or fighting.
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By recognizing the gap between your values and your behavior, you can find the motivation to overcome your avoidance.
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Guilt is psychologically healthy. Shame is not. The difference between guilt and shame is that guilt is about feeling bad about a behavior; shame is about feeling bad about who you are.
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If you up your belief in your ability to cope with facing an upsetting reality, you’ll experience less desire to avoid.
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Examples That’s Me (indicate with a ) All or nothing thinking / Rigid thinking / Unrelenting standards / Perfectionism You need to clean a whole room but don’t have the energy. You do nothing rather than clean one or two things in the room. You believe that everything needs to be done to an excellent level. If you can’t do something to an excellent level, you tend to avoid it completely. You set unrealistic productivity goals for how much you can get done. This causes you to avoid everything completely because you feel overwhelmed. Negative predictions You expect that if you try something you’ll fail. You put off asking for things because you think other people won’t be interested or expect they’ll say no (mind reading). You put off getting user feedback because you expect it will be negative / You avoid testing products with real customers. You overestimate how difficult or unpleasant a task will be. Underestimating your ability to cope You underestimate your ability to cope with boring, stressful, or anxiety-provoking tasks. Personalizing: personalizing your difficulty with a task rather than seeing the task itself as difficult, which gives you an excuse to avoid You think the reason you struggle with something is because you’re too stupid to figure it out rather than thinking it’s inherently challenging and has a learning curve. You think you’re the only one who has problems with something.
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You make a list of all the situations and behaviors you avoid due to anxiety. You then assign a number to each item on your list based on how anxiety provoking you expect doing the avoided behavior would be. Use numbers from 0 (= not anxiety provoking at all) to 100 (= you would fear having an instant panic attack).
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Aim to construct a list that has several avoided actions in each 10-point range.
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Make a plan for how you can work through your hierarchy, starting at the bottom of the list. Where possible, repeat an avoided behavior several times before you move up to the next level.
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During the 30 days, take as many opportunities as you can to be less avoidant than you usually would be.
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As situations come up, focus on taking some action, even if you’re not certain what the absolute right action is.
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Don’t be too all-or-nothing about overcoming avoidance coping. We all have only so much willpower available for dealing with things we’d prefer not to do.
Page 152

When you’re avoiding something, try identifying the next action you need to take to move forward. Do that action.
Page 152

After you’ve worked on a task you’ve been avoiding, allow yourself to enjoy the fruits of your labor by taking some time to relax.
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assume that if you don’t plan when and where you’re going to do something, you’re probably not going to do it. If you avoid choosing when and where you’ll do a task, take that as a clue that you’re not committed to doing it.
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Pick a smaller action for which you are willing to plan when and where you’ll do it.
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Antiprocrastination strategies that can work well for a while can stop working. Accept that you’ll need to switch strategies in and out.
Page 158

Some areas in which you can set up your life to fit your temperament are: Have the right level of busyness in your life.
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Pick the physical activity level that’s right for you.
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Having pleasurable activities to look forward to and enough physical activity will help protect you against depression. Have the right level of social contact in your life, and have routines that put this on autopilot.
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Allow yourself the right amount of mental space to work up to doing something—enough time that you can do some mulling over the prospect of getting started but not so much time that it starts to feel like avoidance of getting started.
Page 170

Have self-knowledge of what types of stress you find most difficult to process. Don’t voluntarily expose yourself to those types without considering alternatives.
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It’s sometimes easy to forget other people’s emotional needs when you’re putting so much hard work into your own.
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Also make sure that the first thing you say to your loved one when you reunite at the end of the day is something positive rather than complaining, whining, or handing out honey do’s
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use feeling anxious, stuck, or overwhelmed as your cue to ask yourself whether any of your most common behavioral traps are the culprit.
Page 174

Make sure you have a plan for an alternative action you can take when you notice yourself sucked into your most frequent behavioral traps.
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Many of the anxious people I’ve met are prone to excessive responsibility taking. They really don’t like to let anyone down and typically work hard to avoid conflict or other people being potentially unhappy with them. And they usually have high standards for self-performance.
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problem solving should generally involve concretely defining what the problem is, generating a short list of your best options for moving forward, picking something, and deciding when and where you’re going to implement that solution.
Page 184

Being in thinking-only mode for long periods is comforting in the same way that overeating junk food for long periods is. It feels comfortable in the moment, but in the long term, you end up far from where you wanted to be.
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Anxious people sometimes spend too much time and energy trying to change other people. Be aware if you’re doing this as a way of avoiding focusing on yourself and your own goals. Of course it’s easier to shift focus to what others could change rather than deal with the psychological work that’s sitting on your own plate.
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It’s really important that you like who you are. Provided you’re not a serial killer, no one deserves the emotional pain of going through life not liking themselves
Page 196

List your top five strengths as a person. Since you’re free to revise your list at any point (it’s yours after all), don’t get too perfectionistic about it. Once you have your list, identify a task you currently need to do. How could you apply one of your top five strengths to approach that task in a new way?
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While in large need of self-soothing and anxiety reducing, I went to every paper store in Nottingham that I could map out within walking distance of where I was. One of the places was a bookstore at the top of a flight of winding stairs with walls plastered with lots of NO and DO NOT DO THIS THING OR THAT THING. The entrance was more than a little off-putting, but the store itself was full of lots of quirky books and design books that seemed right in line with my style. I saw many books that I owned, which was favorable to me.

The proprietor saw me soon after I walked in, and wandered over to talk with me. He offered the usual greetings, which I answered with my own greetings. I expected him to let me wander after the pleasantries, but he continued speaking. He kept talking about the book store and other things, then asked what I liked to read. I explained my current non-fiction kick, and he started handing me books as suggestions.

And kept handing me books.

And talking.

I kept setting the books down where-ever I happened to be standing.

And turning around in clear social norms indicating that I wanted not to be talking.

He kept talking.

I really wanted him to stop talking, so that I could look at the books at my own speed. He didn't stop talking.

So, I listened to a couple of his suggestions, bought The Consolations of Philosophy, along with The Consolation of Philosophy, of which the former is a riff, and left.

I read Consolations this week.

The timing of it was great for me.

The book has six consolations: consolations for unpopularity, consolations for not having enough money, consolations for frustration, consolations for inadequacy, consolations for a broken heart, and consolations for difficulties. Each section has a philosopher featured, a short essay on his philosophy, and a section for, hey, things aren't so bad, here's what he thought and how it is relevant to your situation.

I enjoyed the book, I enjoyed the introduction to the new philosophers and descriptions of the ones I knew. Not sure I was particularly consoled per se, but I was entertained. Worth reading.

In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth.
Page 7

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
Page 7

Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one should behave in order to avoid suspicion and unpopularity.
Page 9

If we refrain from questioning the status quo, it is – aside from the weather and the size of our cities – primarily because we associate what is popular with what is right.
Page 16

[W]hich suggests that we pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
Page 148

There are, so Montaigne implied, no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax, nor does an audience benefit from being wearied.
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Carefully used, boredom can be a valuable indicator of the merit of books.
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But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
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Yet in Montaigne’s schema of intelligence, what matters in a book is usefulness and appropriateness to life; it is less valuable to convey with precision what Plato wrote or Epicurus meant than to judge whether what they have said is interesting and could in the early hours help us over anxiety or loneliness. The responsibility of authors in the humanities is not to quasi-scientific accuracy, but to happiness and health.
Page 160

It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them,
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries. Statements which might be acceptable when they issue from the quills of ancient authors are likely to attract ridicule when expressed by contemporaries. Critics are not inclined to bow before the grander pronouncements of those with whom they attended university.
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We may take this in two ways: that no one is genuinely marvellous, but that only families and staff are close enough to discern the disappointing truth. Or that many people are interesting, but that if they are too close to us in age and place, we are likely not to take them too seriously, on account of a curious bias against what is at hand.
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The philosopher might have offered unflattering explanations of why we fall in love, but there was consolation for rejection –the consolation of knowing that our pain is normal. We should not feel confused by the enormity of the upset that can ensue from only a few days of hope.
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Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine. To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply.
Page 194

We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors.
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In every clumsy attempt by one person to inform another that they need more space or time, that they are reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is striving to intellectualize an essentially unconscious negative verdict formulated by the will-to-life.
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It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan. The darkest thinkers may, paradoxically, be the most cheering:
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What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing of us.
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The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains:
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Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment.
Page 215

Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful. Christians had wished to enjoy the real ingredients of fulfilment (a position in the world, sex, intellectual mastery, creativity) but did not have the courage to endure the difficulties these goods demanded. They had therefore fashioned a hypocritical creed denouncing what they wanted but were too weak to fight for while praising what they did not want but happened to have.
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I picked up this book after expressing enthusiasm for Snyder's much shorter book, On Tyranny, and being told, oh, right, that shorter book was written while writing this book, and this book is also recommended. And I concur with the recommendation. Strongly.

Recognize that this book was written before Cheetoh had gained the insane head of steam he has now, and just how awful our situation can get once he gets going. Okay, so, we know that Russia helped elect Cheetoh. We know that they have been interfering with not only our political systems, but pretty much every other political system in the world. A super power like the USSR does not go down quietly, and Russia as emerged as a worthy successor.

In order to do that well, you need that whole nationalist thing. And in that light, we have Putin who has set himself up to be a god. How does one do that? Well, tell you what, I have no idea, but Synder does. And here's where this book comes in: a history of Russia sufficient to understand just how much shit we are in, how the soft pudgy of America and the rise of white nationalism has allowed America to be torn apart from the inside, with careful nudging from the outside by Russia. The fat, happy cow being led to the slaughter.

Except, except, hell, I really don't know enough about Russian history to know how much of this is true, and how much of it is, in itself, propaganda. I have no idea. Which is why I asked Rob to read the book when I was done, and let me know just how justified my newly found dislike for the country is. He said he'd let me know.

In the meantime, I strongly recommend the book.

During self-inflicted catastrophes of this kind, a certain kind of man always finds a way to blame a woman. In Vladimir Putin’s case, that woman was Hillary Clinton.
Page 53

The only escape from the alternatives of inevitability and eternity was history: understanding it or making it.
Page 109

To think historically is not to trade one national myth for another,
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No other land attracted as much colonial attention within Europe. This reveals the rule: European history turns on colonization and decolonization.
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This was an important moment in Ukrainian history; it confirmed democracy as a succession principle. So long as the rule of law functioned at the heights of politics, there was always hope that it might one day extend to everyday life.
Page 122

The reflex of protecting the future, triggered in the minds of students by the fear of losing Europe, was triggered in others by the fear of losing the one generation raised in an independent Ukraine.
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Once again the word went out, and Kyivans of all walks of life decided to put their bodies in front of batons. A young businesswoman recalled that her friends “were shaving and putting on clean clothes in case they should die that night.”
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The history of the Maidan between November 2013 and February 2014, the work of more than a million people presenting their bodies to the cold stone, is not the same thing as the history of the failed attempts to put it down. Bloodshed had been unthinkable for protestors within Ukraine; only bloodshed made Americans and Europeans notice the country; bloodshed served Moscow as an argument to send the Russian army to bring much more. And so the temptation is strong to recall Ukraine as it was seen from the outside, the arc of narrative following the arc of bullets.
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For those who took part in the Maidan, their protest was about defending what was still thought to be possible: a decent future for their own country.
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The violence mattered to them as a marker of the intolerable.
Page 127

Kyiv is a bilingual capital, something unusual in Europe and unthinkable in Russia and the United States. Europeans, Russians, and Americans rarely considered that everyday bilingualism might bespeak political maturity, and imagined instead that a Ukraine that spoke two languages must be divided into two groups and two halves.
Page 128

Hrytsak and others recalled the French philosopher Albert Camus and his idea of a revolt as the moment when death is chosen over submission.
Page 130

Poland and Lithuania were not in fact enemies of Russia in the Great Northern War. Getting one’s own history wrong is essential to eternity politics.
Page 133

On January 9, 2014, the Russian ambassador to Ukraine informed Yanukovych that Ukrainian riot policemen would be given Russian citizenship after the coming operation to crush the Maidan. This was a very important assurance, since it meant that these policemen did not need to fear the consequences of their actions. If the opposition won in the end, they would still be safe.
Page 134

Russian military intelligence created fictitious personae on the internet to spread these stories.
Page 138

She claimed that Western objections to the Russian invasion of Ukraine were a matter of “double standards.” This common Russian argument made of law not a general principle but a cultural artifact located among non-Russian peoples. Because Western states do not always follow every law, it ran, law had no validity. Russia, too, might violate laws; but since Russia did not accept the rule of law, this was not hypocritical. Since Russia was not hypocritical, it was innocent. If there are no standards, went the reasoning, then there are no double standards.
Page 143

This was Ilyin’s politics of eternity: a cycle back to the past replaces the forward movement of time; law means what Russia’s leader says it means; Russia is repairing God’s failed world with violence. Putin was the redeemer from beyond history who emerged to alter time.
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This was a new variety of fascism, which could be called schizofascism: actual fascists calling their opponents “fascists,” blaming the Holocaust on the Jews, treating the Second World War as an argument for more violence. It was a natural next step in a Russian politics of eternity, in which Russia was innocent and thus no Russian could ever be a fascist. During the Second World War, Soviet propaganda identified the enemy as the “fascists.” According to Soviet ideology, fascism arose from capitalism.
Page 145

Russians, Europeans, and Americans were meant to forget the students who were beaten on a cold November night because they wanted a future.
Page 150

Putin returned to the office of president with a parliamentary majority in violation of the laws of his own country. The leader who came to power by such means had to divert attention, blame, and responsibility to external enemies.
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A coup involves the military or the police or some combination of the two.
Page 153

Yanukovych’s flight to Russia placed Ukrainian citizens and lawmakers in an unusual situation: a head of state, during an invasion of his country, sought permanent refuge in the invading country. This was a situation without legal precedent. The agent of transition was a legally elected parliament.
Page 153

It makes a difference whether young people go to the streets to defend a future or arrive in tanks to suppress one.
Page 154

At the crucial junctures, an innocent Russia is always repelling a sinful West.
Page 155

It became official Russian policy, as it had been official Soviet policy, to recall the Second World War as having begun in 1941 rather than in 1939. The year 1941 is a moment of Russian innocence only if it is forgotten that the Soviet Union had begun the war in 1939 as Germany’s ally, and that between 1939 and 1941 had undertaken policies in occupied lands that were not so very different from Germany’s own.
Page 155

The Russian supreme court later confirmed that a Russian citizen could be convicted of a crime for a re-posting of elementary facts about Russian history on social media.
Page 156

The future held only more ignorance about the more distant future. As he wrote in Almost Zero: “Knowledge only gives knowledge, but uncertainty gives hope.”
Page 160

As Ilyin had done, Surkov invoked familiar biblical verses in order to invert their meanings. In his novel, he has a nun refer to First Corinthians 13: 13: “Uncertainty gives hope. Faith. Love.” If citizens can be kept uncertain by the regular manufacture of crisis, their emotions can be managed and directed. This is the opposite of the plain meaning of the biblical passage Surkov was citing: hope, faith, and love are the trinity of virtues that articulate themselves as we learn to see the world as it is.
Page 160

The first thing we learn when we see from the perspective of another is that we are not innocent.
Page 160

Its employees and those of other Russian state networks were taught that power was real but that the facts of the world were not.
Page 161

RT, Russia’s television propaganda sender for foreign audiences, had the same purpose: the suppression of knowledge that might inspire action, and the coaxing of emotion into inaction.
Page 161

The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis.
Page 164

In the Russian invasion, the strong used the weapons of the weak—partisan and terrorist tactics—in order to pretend to be the weak.
Page 165

Seeing violent death made people vulnerable to stories that imparted to these deaths some larger sense. These stories were provided by Russian television. It was impossible to know who had launched the shell that landed in your neighborhood;
Page 173

Once separatists had brought about the same kind of death that they had seen, the stories of innocence became unimpeachable truth. It is hard to resist lies for which one has already killed.
Page 173

Armies usually evacuate civilians from an artillery range so that they will not be killed by the enemy’s return fire. Russian authorities gave no such orders, presumably because they were confident no counterstrike was coming.
Page 176

Some local Russians felt ill at ease about this one-way war, in which their farmsteads were used to rain down death on people not so different from themselves.
Page 177

Russia needed a monopoly on martyrdom. In order to preserve it, Russia would make war on a nation with a far greater record of suffering (the Ukrainians), while abusing the memory of a people with a still greater record of victimhood (the Jews).
Page 186

Anton Tumanov’s family received a report: the place of death was listed as “location of unit”; the time of death as “time of performing military service”; the cause of death as “blood loss after having lost his legs.” His mother learned more about how her son died because one of his comrades took the risk of telling her. “What I don’t understand,” Tumanov’s mother said, “is what he died for. Why couldn’t we let people in Ukraine sort things out for themselves?” It pained her that her son was killed in a war that was not officially taking place. “If they sent our soldiers there, let them admit it.” When she posted the facts of her son’s death on social media, she was attacked as a traitor.
Page 188

Despite promises of safe passage, Ukrainian soldiers attempting to exit the pocket were killed.
Page 190

He meant that factuality was the enemy. This was the case made by the Izborsk Club in its manifesto and by the Russian commander Antyufeyev before the summer invasion: facts were “information technologies” from the West, and to destroy factuality was to destroy the West. Opinion polls suggest that the denial of factuality did suppress a sense of responsibility among Russians.
Page 194

The underlying logic of the Russian war against Ukraine, Europe, and America was strategic relativism. Given native kleptocracy and dependence on commodity exports, Russian state power could not increase, nor Russian technology close the gap with Europe or America. Relative power could however
Page 195

What Europeans and Americans had that Russians lacked were integrated trade zones and predictable politics with respected principles of succession. If these could be damaged, Russian losses would be acceptable since enemy losses would be still greater. In strategic relativism, the point is to transform international politics into a negative-sum game, where a skillful player will lose less than everyone else.
Page 195

Russia would bomb Syria to generate refugees, then encourage Europeans to panic. This would help the AfD, and thus make Europe more like Russia.
Page 198

In her decision to accept Syrian refugees, Merkel was motivated by the history of the 1930s, when Nazi Germany made its own Jewish citizens into refugees. The Russian response was in effect to say: If Merkel wants refugees, we will provide them, and use the issue to destroy her government and German democracy.
Page 199

The undesired exposure of private conversations was incipient totalitarianism, in a country that had been a focal point of Nazi and Soviet aspirations during the twentieth century. This point was rarely made. Polish memories of German and Soviet aggression tended to congeal around heroism and villainy. What got lost was the memory of how totalitarianism endured into the 1970s and 1980s: not by atrocities where the distinction between the perpetrator and victim is clear, but by an erosion of the line between private and public life that demolishes the rule of law and invites the population to participate in the demolition. Poles returned to a world of bugged conversations, unexpected denunciations, and constant suspicion.
Page 202

Public life cannot be sustained without private life. It is impossible to govern, even for the best of democrats, without the possibility for discreet conversations. The only politicians who are invulnerable to exposure are those who control the secrets of others, or those whose avowed behavior is so shameless that they are invulnerable to blackmail.
Page 202

By accepting that the private lives of public figures are the same thing as politics, citizens cooperate in the destruction of a public sphere.
Page 203

If Russians believed that all leaders and all media lied, then they would learn to dismiss Western models for themselves. If the citizens of Europe and the United States joined in the general distrust of one another and their institutions, then Europe and America could be expected to disintegrate. Journalists cannot function amidst total skepticism; civil societies wane when citizens cannot count on one another; the rule of law depends upon the beliefs that people will follow law without its being enforced and that enforcement when it comes will be impartial. The very idea of impartiality assumes that there are truths that can be understood regardless of perspective.
Page 208

A few weeks earlier, on Russian state television, a Russian anchor had claimed that Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves; and her interlocutor, Alexander Prokhanov, had agreed. Putin’s government paid the anchorwoman, and Putin himself made media appearances with Prokhanov (who also took a joyride in a Russian bomber, a rather clear expression of official support). These people were not condemned.
Page 212

Pilger wrote his article under the influence of a text he found on the internet, purportedly written by a physician, detailing supposed Ukrainian atrocities in Odessa—but the doctor did not exist and the event did not take place.
Page 213

None of these influential American and British writers visited Ukraine, which would have been the normal journalistic practice. Those who spoke so freely of conspiracies, coups, juntas, camps, fascists, and genocides shied from contact with the real world. From a distance, they used their talents to drown a country in unreality; in so doing, they submerged their own countries and themselves.
Page 214

When Moscow brought to bear in the United States the same techniques used in Ukraine, few on the American Right or the American Left noticed. And so the United States was defeated, Trump was elected, the Republican Party was blinded, and the Democratic Party was shocked. Russians supplied the political fiction, but Americans were asking for it.
Page 215

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. —OLIVER GOLDSMITH, 1770
Page 217

“Donald Trump, successful businessman” was not a person. It was a fantasy born in the strange climate where the downdraft of the American politics of eternity, its unfettered capitalism, met the rising hydrocarbon fumes of the Russian politics of eternity, its kleptocratic authoritarianism. Russians raised “a creature of their own” to the presidency of the United States. Trump was the payload of a cyberweapon, meant to create chaos and weakness, as in fact he has done.
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Russia is not a wealthy country, but its wealth is highly concentrated. It is thus common practice for Russians to place someone in their debt by providing easy money and naming the price later.
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In June 2017, after Russia’s victory, Putin spoke for himself, saying that he had never denied that Russian volunteers had made cyberwar against the United States. This was the precise formulation he had used to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine: that he had never denied that there were volunteers. Putin was admitting, with a wink, that Russia had defeated the United States in a cyberwar.
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American exceptionalism proved to be an enormous American vulnerability.
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Unlike Ukrainians, Americans were unaccustomed to the idea that the internet might be used against them.
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In 2016, about a million sites on Facebook were using a tool that allowed them to artificially generate tens of millions of “likes,” thereby pushing certain items, often fictions, into the newsfeeds of unwitting Americans.
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An important scholarly study published the day before the polls opened warned that bots could “endanger the integrity of the presidential election.” It cited three main problems: “first, influence can be redistributed across suspicious accounts that may be operated with malicious purposes; second, the political conversation can be further polarized; third, spreading of misinformation and unverified information can be enhanced.”
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Having used its Twitter bots to encourage a Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, Russia now turned them loose in the United States.
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As in Poland in 2015, so in the United States in 2016: no one considered the totalitarian implications of the selective public release of private communications. Totalitarianism effaces the boundary between the private and public, so that it is normal for us all to be transparent to power all of the time.
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More fundamentally, it was a foretaste of what modern totalitarianism is like: no one can act in politics without fear, since anything done now can be revealed later, with personal consequences.
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Of course, citizens play their part in creating a totalitarian atmosphere. Those who chose to call and threaten were in the avant-garde of American totalitarianism.
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If they take as knowledge only what is revealed by foreign hackers, citizens become beholden to hostile powers.
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The drama of revelation of one thing makes us forget that other things are hidden.
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This was a telling omission, since no American presidential campaign was ever so closely bound to a foreign power. The connections were perfectly clear from the open sources.
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One success of Russia’s cyberwar was that the seductiveness of the secret and the trivial drew Americans away from the obvious and the important: that the sovereignty of the United States was under visible attack.
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In important respects, American media had become like Russian media, and this made Americans vulnerable to Russian tactics.
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The United States once boasted an impressive network of regional newspapers. After the financial crisis of 2008, the American local press, already weakening, was allowed to collapse.
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Where there are local reporters, journalism concerns events that people see and care about. When local reporters disappear, the news becomes abstract. It becomes a kind of entertainment rather than a report about the familiar.
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The internet is an attention economy, which means that profit-seeking platforms are designed to divide the attention of their users into the smallest possible units that can be exploited by advertising messages. If news is to appear on such platforms, it must be tailored to fit a brief attention span and arouse the hunger for reinforcement. News that draws viewers tends to wear a neural path between prejudice and outrage.
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Some Americans wished to believe that what is private must be mysterious, and they were coaxed along by Russia.
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Russians exploited American gullibility.
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Everyone who liked, followed, and supported Heart of Texas was taking part in a Russian intervention in American politics designed to destroy the United States of America. Americans liked the site because it affirmed their own prejudices and pushed them just a bit further. It offered both the thrill of transgression and a sense of legitimacy.
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The internet is a bit like this. It knows much about us, but interacts with us without revealing that this is so. It makes us unfree by arousing our worst tribal impulses and placing them at the service of unseen others.
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Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.
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Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair. If so, democracy produces a sense of time, an expectation of the future that calms the present. The meaning of each democratic election is promise of the next one. If we anticipate that another meaningful election will take place, we know that the next time around we can correct our mistakes, which in the meantime we blame upon the people whom we elect. In this way, democracy transforms human fallibility into political predictability, and helps us to experience time as movement forward into a future over which we have some influence. If we come to believe that elections are simply a repetitive ritual of support, democracy loses its meaning.
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The essence of Russia’s foreign policy is strategic relativism: Russia cannot become stronger, so it must make others weaker. The simplest way to make others weaker is to make them more like Russia. Rather than addressing its problems, Russia exports them; and one of its basic problems is the absence of a succession principle.
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The rule of law requires that the government control violence, and that the population expects that government can do so. The presence of guns in American society, which can feel like strength to some Americans, appeared in Moscow as a national weakness.
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Russia’s support of the NRA resembled its support of right-wing paramilitaries in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
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Democracy depends upon the free exchange of ideas, where “free” means “without the threat of violence.”
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An important sign of the collapse of the rule of law is the rise of a paramilitary and its merger with government power.
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Puerto Rico has more inhabitants than twenty-one of the fifty American states, but its American citizens have no influence on presidential elections.
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As a result of gerrymandering, Democratic voters in Ohio or North Carolina in effect have, respectively, about one-half or one-third as much ability to elect a representative in Congress as do Republican voters. Citizens did not have an equal vote.
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When a minority president and a minority party control the executive and legislative branches of government, they can be tempted into a politics where victory depends not upon policy that pleases majorities but upon further limitation of the franchise.
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In 2016 in Florida, some 23% of African Americans were denied the vote as convicted felons. Felonies in Florida include releasing a helium balloon and harvesting lobsters with short tails.
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The Republican majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, made clear that the Senate would not consider any nominee of Barack Obama. This broke one of the most important conventions of the federal government of the United States, and was commented upon in Moscow.
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Moscow was attacking, and Congress declined to defend the country.
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Even as Kasich and Rubio took a stand on Russian foreign policy, the crucial Republican legislators surrendered in advance to Russian cyberattack. It was more important to humiliate a black president than it was to defend the independence of the United States of America. That is how wars are lost.
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It is easy to see the appeal of eternity to wealthy and corrupt men in control of a lawless state. They cannot offer social advance to their population, and so must find some other form of motion in politics.
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Demoralized by their inability to change their station in life, they must accept that the meaning of politics lies not in institutional reform but in daily emotion.
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Russian oligarchy emerged in the 1990s, but was consolidated as the kleptocratic control of the state by a single oligarchical clan under Putin in the 2000s.
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The appeal of the politics of eternity to such men is all too understandable. Far better to shackle a nation and rattle the world than to risk the loss of so much.
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address. Russians used shell companies to purchase American real estate, often anonymously.
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Since the 1980s, the tax rates paid by the top 0.1% of American earners fell from about 65% to about 35%, and for the top 0.01% from about 75% to below 25%.
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In the 2010s, the United States approached the Russian standard of inequality.
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Oligarchy works as a patronage system that dissolves democracy, law, and patriotism. American and Russian oligarchs have far more in common with one another than they do with their own populations.
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The problem was that American leaders took globalization as the solution to its own problems, rather than as an invitation to reform the American state.
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Persistent opioid use makes it harder for people to learn from experience, or to take responsibility for their actions.
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The politics of eternity triumphs when fiction comes to life.
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In the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle.
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His spokesman Sean Spicer claimed that Hitler did not kill “his own people.” The idea that German Jews were not part of the German people is how the Holocaust began.
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The politics of eternity demands that effort be directed against the enemy, which can be the enemy within.
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of eternity takes racial inequality and makes it a source of economic inequality, turning whites against blacks, declaring hatred normal and change impossible.
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Americans living in the countryside tend to believe that their taxes are distributed to people in the cities, although the opposite is the case.
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Trump was a loser since he could only win thanks to Russia; Republicans were greater losers since he had trapped their party; Democrats were still greater losers since they were excluded from power; and the Americans who suffer from deliberately engineered inequality and health crisis were the greatest losers of all.
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Trump was called a “populist.” A populist, however, is someone who proposes policies to increase opportunities for the masses, as opposed to the financial elites. Trump was something else: a sadopopulist, whose policies were designed to hurt the most vulnerable part of his own electorate.
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On another level, such a voter is changing the currency of politics from achievement to suffering, from gain to pain, helping a leader of choice establish a regime of sadopopulism.
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Moscow won a negative-sum game in international politics by helping to turn American domestic politics into a negative-sum game.
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Some Americans can be persuaded to live shorter and worse lives, provided that they are under the impression, rightly or wrongly, that blacks (or perhaps immigrants or Muslims) suffer still more.
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If people who support the government expect their reward to be pain, then a democracy based upon policy competition between parties is endangered.
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In the long term, a government that cannot assemble a majority through reforms will destroy the principle of rule by majority.
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The electoral logic of sadopopulism is to limit the vote to those who benefit from inequality and to those who like pain, and take the vote away from those who expect government to endorse equality and reform.
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The temptation Russia offered Trump was the presidency. The temptation Trump offered Republicans was that of a one-party state, government by rigged elections rather than by political competition, a racial oligarchy in which the task of leaders was to bring pain rather than prosperity, to emote for a tribe rather than perform for all. If all the federal government did was maximize inequality and suppress votes, at some point a line would be crossed. Americans, like Russians, would eventually cease to believe in their own elections; then the United States, like the Russian Federation, would be in permanent succession crisis, with no legitimate way to choose leaders. This would be the triumph of the Russian foreign policy of the 2010s: the export of Russia’s problems to its chosen adversaries, the normalization of Russia’s syndromes by way of contagion.
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Politics is international, but repair must be local. The presidential campaign
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To break the spell of inevitability, we must see ourselves as we are, not on some exceptional path, but in history alongside others.
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To experience its destruction is to see a world for the first time. Inheritors of an order we did not build, we are now witnesses to a decline we did not foresee.
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Inevitability and eternity are not history but ideas within history, ways of experiencing our time that accelerate its trends while slowing our thoughts.
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The virtues of equality, individuality, succession, integration, novelty, and truth depend each upon all the others, and all of them upon human decisions and actions. An assault upon one is an assault upon all; strengthening one means affirming the rest.
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All of the virtues depend upon truth, and truth depends upon them all.
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Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing. At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.
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To seek the truth means finding a way between conformity and complacency, towards individuality.
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If it is true that we are individuals, and if it is true that we live in a democracy, then each of us should have a single vote, not greater or lesser power in elections as a result of wealth or race or privilege or geography.
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A fascist says “the people” and means “some people,” those he favors at the moment.
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If there is no truth, there can be no trust, and nothing new appears in a human vacuum.
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In conditions of distrust and isolation, creativity and energy veer towards paranoia and conspiracy, a feverish repetition of the oldest mistakes.
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