Dr. Mort Orman here, and this week I’ve been focusing on 27 important truths about life I abstracted from a group of 88 truths published in a blog post by a young man named David Cain, who lives in Winnipeg, Canada and writes a blog about being human at www.rapititude.com .
If you want to read his entire article, “88 Important Truths I’ve Learned About Life,” just click here.
I went through David’s list and picked out 27 truths which I thought were the best.
Then, I divided them into three groups of nine, based on how I perceived them to be related.
In my first post this week (Part 1) I listed nine truths about what it generally means to be human.
Then, in my second post (Part 2) I shared nine more truths about the nature of human relationships.
Today, in my final post in this series (Part 3) I want to share nine more of David’s truths with you about our emotions and how we feel about things in our lives.
Remember, there are many more truths about life which are important but which aren’t mentioned in David’s article or in this series.
I just went with David’s list and focused on points he mentioned that I agreed with the most.
So here are the final 9 selections in my list of 27 (note again that I included the numerical order each appeared in David’s original list at the end of each entry):
- Emotions exist to make us strongly biased towards or against something. This hinders as often as it helps. (49)
- Managing one’s wants is the most powerful skill a person can learn. (14)
- Wishing things were different is a great way to torture yourself. (86)
- The ability to be happy is nothing other than the ability to come to terms with how things change. (87)
- Blame is the favorite pastime of those who dislike responsibility. (33)
- Putting something off makes it instantly harder and scarier. (25)
- Credit card debt devours souls. (26)
- When you break promises to yourself, you feel terrible. When you make a habit of it, you begin to hate yourself. (73)
- A good nine out of ten bad things I’ve worried about never happened. A good nine out of ten bad things that did happen never occurred to me to worry about. (74)
Your Top Three Choices?
Look these over again and identify the top three truths from this list you believe are most important.
Then, pick your favorite one, and also notice if you disagreed with any of them.
My top three choices are 49, 86 and 73.
I’ve got particular reasons for choosing these as my top three, which is why they probably won’t be the exact same three you might choose.
Of these three, I think 49 is by far the most important.
Many of us automatically assume that we can (and should) trust and depend upon our emotions.
Some even go so far as to rarely question the validity of their emotional reactions.
But emotions can be very tricky—they can deceive just as often as they inform.
There are very deep biases built into all of our emotions, especially our more negative and stressful ones, and mostly we don’t recognize these biases until their damage has been done.
Truth 86 is important because it speaks to how much we suffer (and experience stress) because we want and expect life to be different than it actually is.
Life doesn’t really care about what we think.
But we should care—not just about what we think, but how we think—and more importantly how our thinking and our habits of behaving get us into trouble much more frequently than we like to admit.
Want To Know Why People Don’t Lose Weight
I put truth #73 in my top three, because I really believe it explains—in ways most people don’t fully appreciate—one of the biggest reasons why overweight people fail to lose weight.
Most overweight people have made countless promises to themselves about what they will and won’t eat, and how much they will exercise on a daily basis.
They might keep some of these promises for a brief period of time, but eventually they stop keeping them, and here’s where the “game” is lost.
Not only do they begin to hate themselves every time they make a promise and fail to keep it, but they begin to believe, deep down inside, that they lack the ability to make good on their daily promises.
And when you believe this in your heart, there is no way you are going to succeed with a diet or exercise plan.
I don’t care what diet you try to follow or what exercise plan you create, it’s all going to come crashing down.
And your “appetite” for going through this excruciating process the next time, or the time after that, will turn into disenchantment and eventually into fear of failing (along with the certainty that this will surely happen) once again.
So kudos to you David. Wherever you found or discovered these key truths, I thank you for sharing them.
Not only did you hit upon one of the key causes of our obesity epidemic, but you also shared many important truths that others should find enlightening.
I know I did, and I hope others did as well.
To your health, happiness and success,
Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com
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