8 Mindset-Changing Takeaways From “101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think”

Reading “self-help” books are always a reflective experience. Whether you breeze through them or take detailed notes in the margins, there’s bound to be something between the pages that makes you sit back and think.

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101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think is no different. The book explored many different topics all relating back to the core theme of finding happiness and what that means. It encourages readers to look internally at societal, cultural, and environmental factors that play a role in life’s experience.

As a new reader to the self-help and introspection space, the most beneficial aspect of the book was that throughout the 101 essays core concepts were repeated over and over again, drilling into the minds of readers exactly how they can start working towards mentally liberating themselves from the struggles of everyday life.

Every relationship you have is a reflection of yourself.

The book spends quite some time explaining how every experience we have with people externally is a reflection of our personal feelings towards ourselves and experiences with ourselves.

The idea that every relationship is a mirror essentially means that the traits we see the strongest in others are likely traits we hold ourselves. This concept is powerful because it creates greater awareness.

The friend that you get frustrated with because they always have to be right might just be showing you that you could be more forgiving of differences in opinions or that you don’t have to make every statement a challenge of accuracy.

The admiration you have for the sibling that brought home high grades on report cards might be showing you that you are also determined and intelligent and admirable in that way to others.

Having the awareness that the aspects of others we see most clearly are also traits or habits we carry ourselves gives the freedom back to you to decide the person you want to become. It can also help you develop more healthy relationships because as you work on the parts of yourself that you may not admire as much, you will also draw more people into your life that reflect the internal work.

Happiness is a choice.

This is probably the most difficult concept to come to terms with because in life there always seems to be another goal to reach, more places to see, and more to experience. We grow up under the impression that things only happen to us and we’re not in control in the slightest. However, living for happy moments or circumstances that we think will bring eternal happiness is what can cause unhappiness.

Happiness starts with the bare necessities of life but then continues with your mindset. Emotions are fleeting, so placing the entirety of your energy into trying to make a temporary emotion permanent will only make you feel defeated.

Placing the power of happiness into the emotions and experiences outside of your control gives your personal power away. Instead, you have to practice embracing challenging emotions and savoring the happy ones, knowing that challenges will come and you’re strong enough to work through them.

It seems crazy that being happy is just something we can decide to do, but think of it more as not allowing the misfortunes that you can’t control define your day, month, or life. We may not be able to control everything that happens in our lives, but we can control how we move forward from it.

Pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice.

Everyone will face challenges in their lifetime. No matter how big or small, we’ve all had to deal with the negative emotions of sadness, anger, disappointment, etc.

Unfortunately, we condition ourselves to think we have to suppress these emotions or relive them over and over again in our minds. This is what causes us to suffer.

The book notes that in order to move on from emotions you have to feel them genuinely. Choosing not to deal with a feeling will just prolong feeling it because it will need to be dealt with at some point or another.

We can also suffer by creating scenarios in our minds about how we think a circumstance may play out, or by thinking of the worst case in every situation. Because we have no clue how things will actually turn out, we make ourselves suffer by projecting past experiences into the present moment.

You have to feel your emotions.

As mentioned in the previous point, feeling all of your emotions is essential to living a fulfilled and happy life.

We’re often taught what “good” and “bad” feelings are from a young age and are conditioned to not want to feel “bad” feelings. This only leads to people trying to tuck away the negative emotions as they come and constantly trying to chase external things or experiences that make them feel “good”.

The book mentions that part of suppressing negative emotions is because we feel like we have no control over them. However, we have full control over our minds and dissect why we feel certain ways and how we can process those emotions. Without feeling the emotions fully, it’s impossible to ever figure out how to process and move beyond them.

Our mind is a powerful place. We can control our thoughts (as hard as it may seem) and we can lessen the false narrative our brains may tell us when we project our fears or past experiences into the current emotions we feel.

Understanding the control we can have over our minds and emotional processing gives us power over our circumstances instead of the other way around.

It’s okay to not have a plan.

From birth it always feels like there’s some plan in place. We’re born and stay home until we’re old enough to go to daycare or school, and then we continue with school until we’re old enough to enter the workforce. There is so much societal structure for youth that when we finally reach the age of having a choice we’ve never truly had experience with making choices.

It will seem like everyone has it together except you, but that’s not the truth. Even the people who have direction in the short term, may feel lost when it comes to passions and purpose in life.

The more time we spend focusing on what we think we should be doing, the less time we actually have to do what feels right. At the end of the day, no one really knows what lies ahead, so it’s best not to pretend you have it all figured out.

Once you forgive yourself for not knowing what you’re doing with your life, you can finally start living.

Live for the moments not the synopsis.

We evaluate our choices from an outsider’s perspective and try to predict what someone outside of our circumstances may think of the path we’ve chosen.

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The book mentions how when we think to ourselves and make decisions, we often talk to ourselves in the third person. We evaluate our choices from an outsider’s perspective and try to predict what someone outside of our circumstances may think of the path we’ve chosen.

“She graduated college with honors” “He drives a nice car” “She travels to the coolest places”

This type of thinking creates a world where you live for people who will never spend a day in your shoes. Instead of buying a car that you personally think is cool, you might consider trends and how the car might look on social media. Any decisions you make should have yourself and loved ones at the forefront, not random people and acquaintances.

The only person that will have to live with the memories you create and the decisions you make is you. So why not fully embrace the now and the beautiful moments that are created when you consider how YOU feel instead of others.

The individual day-to-day moments and memories are what will fill your life and help you reach true happiness, not the summary of your book or the final sentence in a chapter.

You’ll never be fulfilled if you look to the exterior for validation.

Building off the last takeaway, looking for others to validate your decisions will only make you powerless. To be truly happy you have to want to embrace the ups and downs of life and be okay with not pleasing everyone.

True happiness comes with peace and security. The security to know that your life is in the now and that the challenges will pass. The peace of knowing that your thoughts are under your control and you can relearn how to think with positive intentions and a growth mindset.

There is no way to please everyone, and in trying to do so you’ll only feel defeated. The sooner you realize that the only person that has to live with your decisions is you, the sooner you’ll realize how insignificant most of the opinions you hear are.

You can only want things that you’ve experienced, so you don’t know what you truly want in life.

The human mind can only comprehend what it knows. It can only know something from having experienced it in some capacity. Having an experience with something can come from reading about it, learning something in school, or even from the tons of media we consume on a daily basis.

This means that I might think my dream life consists of traveling across the world with no responsibilities, but the only reason I may have that impression is because I’ve consumed highlight reels of travel influencers doing just that.

In order to know what actually brings you fulfillment and peace in life you have to embrace new challenges and try the things you so badly think you’ll love. You’ll never know if you’re chasing a passion or desire authentically or because of a fabricated idea of what life could be.

Living in the what ifs can take away the joy from the present moment. You’ll never truly know what you want from life, so you may as well enjoy the journey.

Sometimes all it takes is to hear a concept once for it to change the way you look at the world. While none of the concepts can be implemented instantaneously and they might not work for all, I do think that 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think can impact the way you look at the world.