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How to prepare for the flood?

Even if things are going really well for you now there's going to be a time in the future where things are rough. You're gonna be ill, family members are gonna be ill, a dream is gonna fall apart, you're going to be uncertain about your employment status... The flood is coming. The apocalypse is coming. It's always the case in life and you have to be prepared for it. And the question is - how to prepare for it? And the answer to that is to find a way of being that works even under the diarist of circumstances

Where is the meaning to be found?

Life is hard. It's tainted by malevolence and betrayal. That can make you bitter. You need a meaning to offset that. Where is the meaning to be found? Not in rights, not in impulsive pleasure but in responsibility. You take responsibility for yourself so you take care of yourself.
If you're good at it you have some excess left over to take care of your damn family.
If you're good at both of those then you have some excess left over to take care of your community. Those are heavy burdens. You pick up the burdens and you find that's meaningful.
The best way to pick up the burden is to continually improve yourself. And that's where the meaning is to be found. That meaning is in the continual self transcendence. That's letting your old self die and the new self be reborn

What's the best thing you can do?

You need some reason to get the hell out of bed on a terrible day because you've got something good to do. What's the best thing you can do? - Transcend your current wretched and miserable self. There's meaning to be found in that. That's a meaning that's associated with responsibility

Tragedy combined with betrayal and malevolence makes life even worse. Especially if it's self induced. You need something to set against that so you don't get bitter and resentful. What do you set against that? Doing something worthwhile!

Things are tragic and difficult but there's always some stupid thing that you could do or someone else could do that could make it even worse than it has to be. So, that's life

What's the right way of being in the world? - It's not acting according to a set of rules. It's attempting continually to transcend the flawed thing that you currently are. Meaning in life is to be found in that pursuit

Could you be slightly better tomorrow than you're currently flawed self?

I'm a flawed person and I've got all my problems. Could I be as good as person X? - It's not the right question. The right question is - "could you be slightly better tomorrow than you're currently flawed self?" and the answer to that is - if you have enough humility to set the bar properly low then you could be better tomorrow than you are today.
What you also have to do is you have to say - well here's all my flows and insufficiencies and the best that someone that flawed and insufficient could do to improve and actually do it is this!

What is personal responsibility?

Personal responsibility is to compete with yourself. It is to be slightly better than yourself the next day

What is lesser self? The lesser self world be resentful and bitter and aggressive and vengeance seeking and all of those things that go along with having a negative moral character and those are things that interfere with your ability to progress as you move forward through life

If you are improving yourself then what you are doing is competing with your lesser self

If you want to compete fairly with someone then you should be competing with you

The question is - who should you defeat in the final analysis?
The answer is - you should defeat your former self. You should be constantly trying to do that. And you are the right control for yourself to because you're the one who's had all your advantages and disadvantages. So if you want to compete fairly with someone then you should be competing with you

Victory is really the victory over the lesser you

If you lost and blame referees

If you lose the match and then whine, what you have done is sacrifice the higher order principle of constant improvement of your own skills. Because you should be analysing the loss and saying - the reason I lost insofar as it's relevant to this particular time and place is the insufficiencies I manifested that defeated me and I need to track those insufficiencies so that I can rectify them in the future. And if I am blaming it on you or the referees or the situation that I am not taking responsibility and I am not pushing myself forward

What does the person who loses something important with grace do? The answer is fairly straightforward - he accepts the defeat and thinks - okay what is it that I have left to improve that will decrease the possibility of a similar defeat in the future

The great athlete and the great person is not only someone who's exceptionally skilled at what they do but who's trying to expand their skills at all times and the attempt to expand their skills at all times is even more important than the fact that they're great to begin with because the trajectory is so important

The response is much more negative from the fans if you lose a fight and complain about it. It's ruthless because they understand that you've made a huge character error

You're not going to score on every shot. It doesn't mean you shouldn't take the shots. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try to hit the goal. But part of being able to continue to take shots is to have the strength of character to tolerate the fact that in that instance you weren't on top

Life is not a championship. Life is a whole bunch of championships. It's a whole sequence of them

Life is not a game, even a game is not a game. Because most of the time game is the beginning of a series of games.
Let's say that you're on a soccer team. Winning a championship and winning a game are not the same thing. If you want to win a game the best thing to do is to let your star player make all the moves. But if you want to win a championship maybe the best thing is for your star player to do everything he or she possibly can to develop all the other team members. That's a different strategy and the reason it's different is because it iterates across time

"everything you do dear is okay" - that's the terrible devouring mother from a psychoanalytic perspective. No! It's not okay!

Hierarchies are complex tools to attain necessary goals but they dispossess people

Low IQ is good predictor of poverty. If you are less cognitively gifted, and you have children, they are going to be in a less enriched environment. These things spiral

One way to not do very well in any hierarchy is to have a low IQ. If you have an IQ of less than 85 it's hard for you to read well enough to follow instructions. that's about 10% of the population. Might even be higher than that