The Art Of Self-Mastery

If you feel like something is missing from life, where should people begin?

• If your life is fine, then it's possible that you don't have questions. However, either the longer you live or the more you start observing the patterns of this life, at some point a question would appear. And if a person doesn't ask the question, he also can't find the answer.
• Even if you keep achieving, you could still have the sense that it wasn't enough. What's the sense of my life? Feeling not enough or missing something.

How do you come to think about interrupting that permanent loop of want, pursue, achieve, and want again?

• Observe yourself, imagine it's just a movie, and your body is a movie character; let your perspective out of your body. From this perspective you could see differently, in a wider perspective, since you're not caught inside your own patterns anymore, so you could see the pattern of this character (YOU).
• Step 1: Be aware of your patterns and recognize them — awareness, mindfulness, and being conscious of yourself.
• Become more conscious of really deciding what I want to invest my lifetime in. Is it worth it to attain what I'm working for right now? If it's true, then go for it.

How do you advise people to deal with regret?

• At some point, the sorrow or even the regrets have been so painful in a way that I was left only with two choices.
  • Learn from what went wrong.
  • Learn to let go by forgiving — forgiving the people who were involved, and forgiving yourself.
• You can't move on to the future if you still carry old baggage inside of you.

Where does discipline and focus come from?

• The quickest way is when you really set up a schedule and just do the work, free from how you feel.
• It's not helpful to base your structure or your goal on how you feel.
• Discipline is doing what you have committed yourself to, also meaning you don't do the things you already know aren't good for you.
• Discipline is not just about the active part of doing something; it also relates to the passive part of leaving out of your life the things you already know aren't going to help you.
• Focus is the ability to mobilize your energy. To mobilize the energy means to know exactly where I am focusing my attention, and where the attention goes, where the energy flows.