Improvement at anything is based on a thousand of tiny failures, ...and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you've failed at something.

Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make... once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero.

Happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production.

Is everything okay? How are you feeling?' I pause for a moment, still smiling. 'Alive. Very alive.

The problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health

The point isn't to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.

That means the more something threatens to change how you view yourself, how successful/unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, how well you see yourself living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it.

There's a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the world. Anything that shakes up that comfort- even if it could potentially make your life better- is inherently scary.

If it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself.