1. The best meditation is walking meditation. It’s much more mentally and spiritually rewarding than sitting in a chair with your eyes closed for 20 minutes. Walking ceases to be meditation as soon as you start browsing your phone or listening to music/podcasts or audiobooks.
2. No matter how bad you might feel now, remember that everything in life eventually passes. So try not to get too happy or too sad, it won’t make a difference.
3. I love to read about the saints because a similar pattern emerges amongst many of them, they were down and out, then by giving their lives to Christ they become some of the best examples of what it means to be virtuous/holy. Saint Moses of Ethiopia was a gang leader who even murdered someone before giving up his life for Christ. By giving up your life to Christ, the impossible becomes possible.
4. Some things I regularly do to help boost my mood are , listen to Frank Sinatra, pray, write, and go on distraction-free walks.
5. I find monastic life deeply intriguing, for example, Saint Anthony the Great, the founder of monasticism, proved through his life and the other desert fathers’ lives that you can be happy and deeply fulfilled even with nothing from a material point of view.
6. You can easily determine the quality of your life by how alive you feel.
7. I gain much more value by reading the classics than I do from any commentary on the classics.
8. Trust the pilot when you board a plane, trust the surgeon when you have surgery. Trust the experts, you don’t always know best.
9. Modern yoga and flexibility/mobility shtick fails to realise that we humans shouldn’t aim for stretched-out, hypermobile muscles and joints, but strong ones that work through a functional range of motion.
10. Stay away from things that aren’t good for you, no matter how alluring they may seem at first.
11. The only way to understand yourself is through trial and error.
This image is of Bryan Johnson who is promoting the don’t die movement.
Have you heard of Bryan Johnson? He’s the guy who’s trying to never die, he wants humans to be able to live forever. If you’ve seen his content he takes a crazy amount of pills every day, scrutinises his sleep, and is extremely restrictive with his diet, I think his whole lifestyle is a joke. He’s so focused on being alive in the future that his routine is optimised so that his current life results in him living like a robot, and living like a robot is no life.
Imagine life never drinking a glass of wine, or never enjoying some cheesecake or going to bed late? That is no life, and he’s shortening it because he’s wasting it trying to live longer.
With all the monstrosities going on in the world someone was bound to try and become immortal. That person is Bryan.
I was reading Seneca
The ancient Roman stoic Seneca who was one of the wealthiest men in the Roman Empire wrote many letters on stoicism to his friend Lucilius, in one of his letters he mentions how it doesn’t matter how long we live, compared to how well we live.
As I’m writing this I’m thinking of some people I’ve met or read about who lived short lives but well lived ones, I imagine you can think of a few as well.
For example, Jesus died young in his 30s and he changed the world. On the other hand, some people live long lives in years, but short lives because few of those years were lived well.
It’s tough to live a life well-lived if you don’t look after your health
Someone I look up to is Jack LaLanne, who was coined the godfather of fitness, he lived a long life up until his 90s and he was in tip-top shape until the day he died. He lived well because he looked after himself. I first heard about Jack Lalane when I was in my mid teens and his life inspired me to look after myself, but I ended taking health and fitness too far, it’s good to look after your health but not too much. You can get too much of a good thing.
The lesson what Jack’s life teaches us is that if we look after our bodies we’ll give ourselves the opportunity to live well. Because it’s much harder to live well when you’re unfit, in pain and weak. A fit body is the foundation for a life well-lived.
What I’ve noticed about some Catholic priests
Not all priests are in good shape and that’s okay, what matters most is that they’ve got a good heart, but some of the priests I follow online who take health and fitness seriously all confess how much of a difference it makes in not only improving your physical health but your mental and spiritual health. Because the body doesn’t work in isolation so when you work on your physical health you also improve your mental and spiritual health.
What does it mean to live a life well-lived
A life well-lived means living according to your conscience. For example, some of the worst moments in my life were when I’ve went against my conscience. In my last relationships I knew I was with the wrong women, but I went against myself and it caused a lot of unhappiness.
Now that I listen to myself more, I feel better. Following your conscience is simple you need to avoid anything that your soul doesn’t agree to. If you bypass your conscience, don’t be surprised if mentally and spiritually you feel terrible, because that’s what happened to me.
Don’t live a life that your younger 18 year old self wouldn’t approve of
Sometimes we can get into invidious positions in our lives. Maybe you’ve stayed in that dead end job for too long, or have been neglecting your physical, mental or spiritual health and feel awful. We all get into tricky situations, but it doesn’t mean we need to stay in those situations. If you’re not living a life that your 18 year old self would be proud of then that’s a good sign you’re doing life wrong.
What do you dislike in others?
Whatever we dislike in others we dislike in ourselves. Therefore when we notice patterns of behaviour or lifestyle choices other people make which invoke disgust, we can do well to avoid these same things if we want to make our lives good ones.
What do you envy in others?
When I’m in a rut I like to admire more erudite and successful people than me, which always gives rise to some envy/ jealousy but in a positive way, so I try and learn from them so I can improve my life.
Working BS jobs is not a life well-lived
I’ve worked many jobs and I’ve noticed that some of them can ruin your life because they burn you out mentally, that when you have free time you’re too tired to do anything.
Instead of working BS jobs like many office jobs, try and learn a valuable skill that you can use for the rest of your life. Jobs like plumbers, dentists, dermatologists give you a job for life and you’re free to practice on your own terms.
On the other hand when you work an office job you’re just one merger away from being made redundant.
A life well-lived is a life of freedom
I’m not very interested in fancy cars or marble counter tops, but I am interested in freedom. If you want to live well, you have to aim at freedom.
Many people when they start earning money get greedy and that can lead to being in debt.
So I remember to focus on freedom and I fight the urge to be greedy.
A well lived life is a principled life in line with your ethics
One of the surest ways to unhappiness is working a job and living a life that is not in line with your ethics. For example I’m Catholic so I try to make sure my life is aligned with Catholic values and ethics.
The problem is with many people turning their back on religion they create a vacuum in their lives and they struggle to hone their own value and belief system.
The reason I love the Catholic Church is because I don’t need to reinvent the wheel, I simply need to go to church, pray and follow the guidance of the Catholic Church. Before I was Catholic there was a big gap in my life, you could say it was a god sized gap.
Hello friend, I recently wrote an answer to a Quora question.
And the answer did well, so I thought I would share it here.
Here is the exact breakdown of my Quora answer to the question:
What are your top 10 travel tips?
1. Just book the trip
The best travel hack is to book the damn trip. So many people talk about going places, but never actually do. Don’t talk about booking the trip, just bloody book it. Because if you don’t book it now, when will you? I used to be someone who said I would travel to Rome, as I always wanted to go. It took me years to muster up the courage to actually book the trip. Because I had two wrist surgeries, which meant I couldn’t travel anywhere for over a year, this experience really forced me to book a trip to Rome when my wrist healed. And going to Rome was one of my favourite trips I’ve ever been on.
2. Write a list of what you need (the non-negotiables)
If you’re like me, then you have the memory of a goldfish. So I try to make a list of all the non-negotiable items I’ll need and try not to take unnecessary items because they just take up space.
3. Get travel insurance
If bad things can happen, they can happen when you’re away on holiday abroad, so don’t skimp on travel insurance because if you get into a pickle abroad and get sick/injured and need treatment, you can sometimes have to pay thousands for treatment. Getting travel insurance completely dissolves this risk. On my last holiday, my travel insurance cost me £50, which is pennies compared to the price I’d have to pay if I were critically unwell abroad.
4. Go to places you’re generally interested in (don’t feel like you should go to places just because other people go to them)
With Instagram and social media as a whole, we see people going to all sorts of bucket list destinations, but in reality, it doesn’t matter if they’re bucket list destinations or not; all that matters is that you genuinely want to go to those destinations.
5. Wear comfortable shoes
Last year, when I travelled to Rome, I bought and wore new shoes on holiday. Unfortunately, these shoes gave me awful blisters on my feet, which I needed to get seen by a podiatrist. Luckily, my feet are fine now, but make sure that you’ve tested your new shoes before you go on a trip where you will walk a lot (when I was in Rome, some days I walked over 30k steps).
6. Try to get an early flight there and a late one back to maximise time away
This one is self-explanatory; if you’re travelling somewhere you want to make the most of your time, so try and book the early flight on the way there and the late flight on the way back, especially if you’re only going for a few days.
7. Book the sights that you want to see
When I travelled to Rome, I booked to see the Colosseum beforehand, but I didn’t book to see the Vatican, so I had to pay over the odds for a tour around the Vatican while in Rome. Next time I go somewhere, I will book all the main trips beforehand.
8. Leave some room for adventure and spontaneity
Don’t forget that when you travel, it should be an adventure. Go on a trip down an interesting neighbourhood, live like the locals, and try to learn some of the language. Learning about other cultures helps us learn about ourselves because we can always take things away from how other people live.
9. Don’t live like you normally would
You’re away from home. If you wanted to live as you did at home, why didn’t you just stay there?
10. Get up early
Again, this is self-explanatory. What’s the point of travelling to foreign lands if you’re going to sleep in and waste most of your day?
Here is a picture I took while I was in Rome from the Castel Sant’Angelo.
One final point on how travelling boosts confidence
I found that after my first solo holiday, I grew in confidence massively. I think it was because I very much relied on other people to plan the logistics of holidays and trips, but on this occasion, I had to do it myself, and it was actually really easy. It made me realise I’m capable of a lot more than I think if I’m just willing to try.
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Hello friend, I recently wrote an answer to a Quora question.
And the answer did well, so I thought I would share it here.
Here is the exact breakdown of my Quora answer to the question:
What is the best piece of advice you could give someone about life?
“Life is about execution rather than purpose.” – Nassim Taleb. (The picture is of Nassim).
I know I’m writing this post, and you’re reading it, but this isn’t how you truly learn. You learn by doing, by trial and error. But we live in a world where we read and watch videos far more than we do.
Doing shouldn’t supplement reading; reading should supplement doing.
So go out in the world, try different jobs, try different experiences and even write about them to learn more about how they made you feel and how they did or didn’t help you. I use writing as a tool for self-exploration.
If I didn’t try writing, I would have never found my passion
I love writing, and it’s something I will do for the rest of my life, no matter what occupation I’m in. I just love the flow state writing puts me in, and I love how I can help an unlimited number of people from a single post I write.
I was also curious about religion, so I spoke to a priest and started practising Catholicism, and now I’m fully Catholic. And it’s had an amazing impact on my life; it now feels full of meaning and has structure and order to it, but if I had never gone and spoken to the priest, I would have never experienced the benefits like I am now.
I’ve followed this advice with the jobs I’ve had
I’ve been a pot washer at KFC, a volunteer policeman, a pizza delivery man and even worked in financial services. Each experience has taught me about what I do and don’t like in the world of work.
We don’t gain wisdom by doing nothing; we gain it from making mistakes and learning from them. Sometimes I look back at myself from 10 years ago, and I think to myself, “wow, I was such an idiot”, and you might think it’s bad and negative that I talk to myself like that, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as a clear sign I’ve grown.
My worst fear
I don’t want to be the guy who never does or experiences anything new in life and is still stuck in the dead-end job that he was in in his early 20s. We can learn just as much from people we don’t want to be like as from the people we do want to be like.
Another quote from Nassim Taleb that I love
“It is not possible to have fun when you try.”
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No.1 – Go for a 30-minute stroll outside to blow the cobwebs away.
No.2 – Read books that you’re curious about, you won’t feel depressed when you follow your curiosities, trust me.
No.3 – Workout, there’s no better feeling than getting those endorphins flowing.
No.4 – Journal, write down how you feel so you can get to the root of your problems and solve them.
No.5 – Go to talking therapy; a good therapist can help you untangle your mental knots and help you solve deep-seated issues.
No.6 – Go to church, I always feel like a new person after I’ve been to church MASS. It helps keep me grounded as well as following Catholicism as a whole.
No.7 – Spend time with family and friends. There’s no better feeling than having a belly laugh with family and friends.
No.8 – Start a creative project. I’m a believer that expression is the opposite of depression, and spending time on a creative pursuit can help you get out of your head and become present.
No.9 – Pray, I personally pray 3 times per day, and it helps me get out of my mind and focus on something outside myself, and that something is God.
No.10 – Stop doing things that make you feel like crap, like doom-scrolling social media, watching adult content, and losing your temper. Feel better by subtracting your bad habits from your life (you don’t always need to add habits to your life).
No.11 – Take a holiday because you might be burnt out. Just like the body gets physically tired and run down, so can the mind, so be sure to rest it and give it some downtime to recover.
No.12 – Start being grateful for all the good things in your life. For example, I’m grateful for a roof over my head, money in the bank, supportive friends and family, and the ability to help people all over the world by writing on Quora. When you stop and pay attention, life is pretty wonderful.
No.13 – Get a hold on your addictions. Being addicted to anything can cause us to be left in heavy chains. For example, the person who is morbidly obese is addicted to food and is destroying their health. They can’t switch the addiction button off; they’re trapped. I’m a firm believer that we can all beat our addictions. Reach out to a therapist if you need to, just make sure you break away from the heavy chains of addiction before the addictions break you.
No.14 – Don’t spend time with people who drag you down. I remember reading Montaigne, and he talks about a time when a Doctor got him to spend time with a sick old man when Montaigne was in his youth. Doing so made the sick old man feel better (being surrounded by youth), but it didn’t make Montaigne feel better. The point is: yes, help people if you can; love thy neighbour as thyself; but it’s good to be aware of when people drain the life out of you.
No.15 – Stop focusing on things outside your control. You can’t do anything about them, so stop focusing on them; you’ll only suffer.
I hope these tips help. Life is not good when you’re depressed. I’ve been there, and I guarantee everyone has felt melancholy at times its part of the human experience. Just get better at dealing with it. I feel I certainly have got better at dealing with it over time.
My friend, all of this anxiety and lack of confidence is arising because you’re trying too hard.
What helps me especially when I speak to a crowd or read something out loud to a group of people is to focus on everyone else and on the words I’m saying, but I try not to focus on myself.
Try to become as present in the moment as possible and focus on one word at a time.
A similar thing happened to me with my writing
I used to suffer from writer’s block, and I found it extremely hard to write words on the page. It wasn’t until I stopped trying to write the perfect sentence that the words started flowing from my fingertips.
One of my favourite quotes
“It is not possible to have fun when you try.” – Nassim Taleb
I love this quote because when we try hard to do things, we become just that, a try-hard, and our output seems forced and overcooked.
I know it might seem like very basic advice to not try, but life becomes much more fun when you stop trying, trust me, and follow my lead on this. I guarantee you’ll come to the same conclusions as I.
Think about all the best times you’ve had in your life
I bet these times have occurred when you’re not trying, and you’re completely immersed in the moment, not thinking about yourself.
I’ve experienced some of the best feelings when I’ve been in a flow state while writing, skiing, and having good conversations with friends or reading a good book.
The goal you need to aspire to is to be humble
Many people misinterpret what it means to be humble. A common misconception is that being humble means to think less of yourself, which it doesn’t mean at all; instead, being humble means:
Thinking of yourself less.
The ultimate reason we get anxiety, depression, and become chronic overthinkers is that we focus too much on ourselves, and we become too prideful.
When people suffer from depression or negative thought patterns, their self-dialogue is very much self-focused. It’s common for people to say things like the following to themselves:
“I hate my life.”
“I wish I didn’t do that.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“No one likes me.”
“What if I look like a fool?”
The ultimate remedy is to forget about yourself. Forget about your ego; it doesn’t matter.
I always try to imagine the worst situation, and I always realise that it isn’t that bad
When I was in college, around 10 years ago, I was quaking in my boots at the thought of giving a presentation.
But then I thought, “What’s the worst that can happen? People might laugh at me, I might make a few blunders, but whatever happens, I will learn and grow from it and at the end of the day, even if I completely mess it up, I’ll still be alive and breathing, so however the presentation goes, it doesn’t really matter. Do your best.”
So I did the presentation, and I was congratulated by my teachers regarding the fact that it came out really well.
I’ll finish this post with some wisdom from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus that I try to live by:
“If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters.”
They listen twice as much as they speak. They know when to speak and when to listen, and they try not to interrupt.
They smell good. If you smell like a bin, put on some deodorant. It will instantly make you more charming.
They have topics to discuss, a wide array of interests, and can have conversations with anyone. This is why it’s good to read books and have genuine interests. Speaking to someone who is passionate about something is much better than speaking to someone who fails to find joy in anything.
Be precise with your speech. If it takes you 10 minutes to say something that someone else could say in 1 minute, then you need to work on your reading, writing and speaking skills. If you can be precise with your speech, you save time, can have better conversations, and can easily get your point across.
Don’t insult people. If the only thing you say to others is badmouthing people in general, you’ll not charm them; you’ll repel them. Benjamin Franklin said, “Speak ill of no man,” partly because it’s useless to talk bad about someone. It’s different if someone breaks the law or something of that nature because you wouldn’t necessarily badmouth them; you’d just see that justice is served.
Work on your looks and style. More aesthetic and appealing people are generally nicer to look at than ugly people. Sorry to say it, but it is the truth. Research shows that more attractive people get better jobs with higher salaries. Working on your looks and style will inevitably add to your charm.
Be as successful as you can be. Generally, people would rather spend time with successful, responsible people than with people who blame the world for their lack of results in life.
Be as authentic as possible. People would rather spend time with someone who is genuine and themselves than someone who tries to be someone else. Ultimately, the latter isn’t sustainable, and the real person will emerge in the end. If you show your real side, then people can either like you for who you are or they can’t. Never try to make someone like you. It always backfires. Never try to curry favour.
Not exercising: if you don’t move it, you lose it.
Not eating healthily. Your body is built for eating whole foods.
Being alone. Loneliness kills. Spend time with friends and family.
Being in a job you hate. This will destroy your soul.
Having friends who aren’t good for you. It’s better to have no friends than the wrong ones. But no one’s perfect.
Drugs. Be drug-free and stay in control of your life. If you can stay in control of your life, you can make it a good one.
Having the same old boring routine will make your life feel like Groundhog Day. Get out of your routine and mix it up. It’s the moments that we least expect that turn out to be the greatest. Be spontaneous.
Chronically being dehydrated. This will leave you with no energy, and you’ll feel awful. Drink at least 2–3 litres of water per day.
Consuming too much sugar. I used to get chronic migraines from this. I stopped eating lots of sugar, and they went away.
Drinking too much alcohol. Don’t become an alcoholic; life never turns out well for alchoholics.
Before I started writing online, one of the main things holding me back was the question, “What will people think of me?” This left me paralysed for so long that I didn’t start writing until way later in my life than I should have.
Now that I write consistently, I’ve learnt that some people like my writing, some people don’t, and some people are indifferent to it, a bit like how people are to me in real life.
And even when people don’t like my writing and comment negative things on my posts it really isn’t that bad in fact if you’re not p*issing a few people off with your writing your not doing it properly.
When I annoy people, I know I stand for something that is normally the opposite of what they value.
But these people who comment negative things on my posts don’t realise they’re helping me. Because the maxim “any publicity is good publicity” is true up to a certain extent.
Because at least if you’re getting negative comments on your posts, your writing isn’t boring and getting ignored. And there’s nothing worse than boring writing.
But the fact is, as a writer (and anyone posting content online), you’ll probably have to write a lot of boring stuff to write something good. It’s the natural progression you sign up for as a writer; you don’t become Montaigne overnight.
Anyway, that brings me back to the point of making decisions for you because in reality no one really cares, everyone is all in there little worlds and focused on themselves I mean I am 99% of the time and honestly I can’t remember a time when I was so offended by someone that I tried to stop them doing what they wanted to do.
The benefit of living in a Western country (I live in the UK) is that you can do what you want for the most part. But the fear of people’s opinions can stop us from exercising this freedom (as it has for me in the past).
This reminds me of two quotes by Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius:
“We should listen only to those whose lives conform to nature. And the others? He bears in mind what sort of people they are—both at home and abroad, by night as well as day—and who they spend their time with. And he cares nothing for their praise—men who can’t even meet their own standards.”
I love this quote and come back to it time and time again because it’s so true. The fact is, we love ourselves more than others, but why do we care more about other people’s opinions than our own?
As a personal heuristic, I try to only listen to people whom I respect and who are virtuous, the type of people who can meet their own high standards.
“Then what is to be prized? An audience clapping? No. No more than the clacking of their tongues. Which is all that public praise amounts to—a clacking of tongues.”
I also come back to this piece of wisdom time and time again because we shouldn’t do things solely to get external praise; we should do things that we’re proud of for their own sake.
For example, when I write, I always try to post things I’m happy with. Of course, external praise is nice in the sense that it’s good to help people and have a positive impact on their lives.
But we shouldn’t crave other people’s praise so much that we lose a sense of why we’re really pursuing something. For example, I write because I’m learning as I go through life (I don’t claim to have everything figured out), and every post I write is a way for me to learn more about myself and the world, and as a side effect, I help others, and I also enjoy the flow state writing gets me into.
So I’ll drive the point home:
I promise no one cares what you’re doing. So start making decisions for you before your life is all used up. Start today because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.
Hi, I’ve just published my new book, The Manual for Mental Strength: Ancient Heuristics For The Modern Crisis.
In this book, I talk about my struggle with mental health and how I built resilience. And my goal is for this book to help other people improve their mental health as well.
This book started as a Quora answer that went viral with several hundred upvotes, so I decided to expand it into a book.
I hope you enjoy it, and please leave a review because reviews help push my book out to more people. As an independent author, reviews help me grow and improve massively.
henrypaget.com 