Zen Habits Favorites

I highly recommend that, if you haven’t yet, you develop the daily habit of reflection, in your own way. It could have profound changes on your life.

Most of us feel bad when we make mistakes, beat ourselves up about it, feel like failures, get mad at ourselves. Yet mistakes make walking possible for the smallest toddler, make speech possible, make works of genius possible.

As grown ups, we’ve lost this childlike sense of life. And that’s actually a sad thing. It’s not just about happiness and innocence either — being more childlike also helps us to be more creative, more imaginative, more innovative and open to worlds of possibilities.

We’re endlessly looking at how others do things, for inspiration and ideas … but we end up wanting to try those things too. That sounds harmless until you realize that you’ll buy almost anything because someone wrote about it and made it sound amazing.

If you’re going to do anything interesting in the world, criticism is an unavoidable fact. The trick to navigating the icebergs of criticism is to figure out which are helpful, and steer clear of those that aren’t.

One of the driving forces of my life for many years was the need to improve myself. So what’s the problem? You could say it’s great that people are constantly trying to improve themselves, but where does it end? When is anyone ever content with who they are?

You don’t need to be a monk to find solitude, nor do you need to be a hermit to enjoy it. Some of my favorite activities include sitting in front of the ocean, still, contemplating … walking, alone with my thoughts … disconnecting and just writing.