Mark Manson on Self-Knowledge
About this book
The Greeks are said to have inscribed “Know Thyself” on their ancient temples, inviting their people to take a moment and question their motivations and their actions on occasion. The pursuit of self-knowledge is at the heart of most religions and philosophical pursuits across the world. It seems that an unfortunate side effect of the brain’s marvellous ability to question everything is the brain’s ability to question itself. “Who am I? Why do I do the things I do? Can I change?” These are questions that inevitably plague us all in one form or another. And while I don’t believe there’s ever a permanent answer to any of them, we can become better at investigating ourselves.(That sounded kind of dirty.) It turns out that psychology has uncovered numerous ways in which our beliefs about ourselves affect not only our behaviours ut our successes in this world. People who believe they are smarter actually do better on tests, even though they aren’t smarter and haven’t studied any more than the average student. People who believe they are given an energy drink are able to lift more weight than normal, even though the drink they were given contained nothing special. People who believe they need less sleep actually do perform better under less sleep than those who do not. Beliefs are powerful. And because they are powerful, we must learn to train our mind to observe them and question them. This short ebook contains three ideas that are designed to help you do that:1. Your Two Minds2. Believe What’s Helpful, Not What’s True3. The Prime BeliefHopefully, by the end, you will find yourself much morecomfortable questioning yourself and opening to new ideasyou had never considered before.Enjoy.