Words That Changed Our Lives

Some of the highlights from our discussion:

Taimur

Charitable – Whilst the literal meaning of charitable relates to giving to charity, Taimur considers the word more in the sense of how it has changed the way that he reacts and considers his own statements in terms of being charitable towards other people’s intentions. It has become a default response - whenever he is reacting to something, part of his thought process will be ‘is this a charitable interpretation’ of another person's statements or intentions.

Comrade (non-political) – One of Taimur’s main takeaways from the book ‘The Courage to be Disliked’ was to try and view other human beings as his comrade – not in a political sense but in the sense of a common humanity and kinship. There are many explicit instances within our lives where comradeship is more evident – Ali mentions the shared purpose and sense of appreciation for other staff on night shifts at work, for instance. Bringing this shared sense of appreciation and understanding for one another to all instances in our lives would only have positive effects in how we react and view other people.

Intrinsic / Extrinsic Motivation – This gets at the idea of identifying whether your motivation is coming from within you or driven by external forces, such as societal pressures, external values and expectation. In essence, whether you intrinsically want to do something or whether you’re doing it for extrinsic reasons. Taimur describes how it helped him come off the ‘prestige bandwagon’ – that of trying to collect badges of prestige. When it came to applying for jobs, the intrinsic mindset can help get you out of the pressure to try and get a job at a prestigious company that you might not care about other than for its prestige.

Ali

Deferred Life Plan – This idea, put forward by Tim Ferriss in the 4-Hour Work Week, describes the invisible life script that we are all expected to live by whereby we go to school to get good grades to go to a decent university to get good grades to get a good job to then have a career and then retire and then have fun. This conceptualisation brings negative connotations to this assumed life plan that many people travel down and this negative veneer is helpful in making us reconsider whether this really is what we want to do with our lives.

Growth Mindset – The growth mindset is the idea that everything we do is part of the growth process – it’s all a growth trajectory. A fixed mindset, on the other hand, is the idea that if you get something wrong or fail a test, you feel as if you’re a failure. This is a very fixed view of the world in terms of viewing your abilities as limited and any threat to that is going to cause pain and anguish. Developing a growth mindset enables you to more consciously develop a positive attitude towards all your experiences in terms of learning from them – regardless of whether they are positive or negative.

Hedonic Treadmill – Describes the phenomenon that we’ve all experienced of when wanting something, getting it, acclimatising to a new normal and then starting to want more in order to get that same level of satisfaction or happiness. This idea is particularly pertinent for when we are buying anything – it forces us to stop and consider whether that purchase will actually make us happier. Ali describes how this has helped him rethink potential purchases.

Bonus

Stoicism – Some of the quotes from this school of Greek philosophy that have stood out for Ali have been:

It’s not the events that cause us unhappiness but the story that we tell ourselves about those events.

In between stimulus and response there is a space and that space is for us to choose our response.

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.

Become a Not Overthinker

We've got a fun little members-only community where we have a private Slack channel, and host weekly (ish) Zoom hangouts. Click here if you fancy joining.

Leave us a Review

If you enjoy listening to the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes / Apple Podcasts. Here's a link that works even if you're not on an iPhone :)

Send us an Audio Message

We really want to include more listener comments and questions in our episodes. If you've got any thoughts on this episode, or if you've got a conundrum or question you'd like us to discuss, send an audio file / voice note to [email protected].

• For any non-audio comments, please comment on our YouTube channel.
• Alternatively, feel free to drop us a tweet or DM on Twitter - https://twitter.com/noverthinking.