What’s behind Anger

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According to Albert Ellis, the most common irrational ideas behind anger are the following:

1. I must do well and win the approval of others for my performances, or else I will rate as a rotten person.

2. Others must treat me considerately and kindly and in precisely the way I want them to treat me.

3. The world (and the people in it) must arrange conditions under which I live, so that I get everything that I want when I want it.

Mark Cosgrove, Counseling for Anger

The persecuted victim

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Conspiracy theorists perceive and present themselves as the victim of organized persecution. At the same time, they see themselves as brave antagonists taking on the villainous conspirators. Conspiratorial thinking involves a self-perception of simultaneously being a victim and a hero.

Stephan Lewandowsky & John Cook, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook

Here's what I'm thinking

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"If you walk into a room as a senior person and innocently say, 'Here's what I'm thinking about this,' you've already skewed people's thinking," says Marine Gen. Peter Pace. His approach: "Start out with a question and don't voice an opinion."

Why? Because people can't line up behind you if they don't know where you stand. And if you present subordinates with an intellectual challenge, they feel freer to offer their opinions without fear of giving offense. "If you are looking for answers, ask the question," advises Pace, and "if you are looking for an honest critique, you ought to be the first person to self-critique." 

Michael Useem writing in Fortune Magazine

The Creative Process

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The creative process is often not responsive to conscious efforts to initiate or control it. It does not proceed methodically or in programmatic fashion. It meanders. It is unpredictable, digressive, capricious. As one scientist put it, “I can schedule my lab hours, but I can’t schedule my best ideas.”

Creative individuals have the capacity to free themselves from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. They don’t spend much time asking “What will people say?” The fact that “everybody’s doing it” doesn’t mean they’re doing it. They question assumptions that the rest of us accept. As J. P. Guilford has pointed out, they are particularly gifted in seeing the gap between what is and what could be (which means, of course, that they have achieved a certain measure of detachment from what is.

It is easy to fall into the romantic exaggeration in speaking of the capacity of people of originality to stand apart. Those who are responsible for the great innovative performances have always built on the work of others, and have enjoyed many kinds of social support, stimulation and communication. They are independent but they are not adrift.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

Healing in Freedom

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Being loving is far more therapeutic that being correct. People need first to believe that you are willing to let them be who they are. If you attempt to direct another person’s every move, you eventually lose your effectiveness, no matter how correct you may be. Freedom for each of us is to be who and what we are, that’s the cornerstone of an influential life.

When you give freedom to others, it doesn’t mean you are lowering your standards or that you don’t care about them. It means you are providing an atmosphere to let others think and feel and act without excessive pressure to fit your mold. The paradox is that when others sense the freedom you offer, they are more attracted to you. They key is to learn how to use this freedom.

Les Carter, Imperative People: Those Who Must Be in Control

Staying Power

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Life is tumultuous – an endless losing and regaining of balance, a continuous struggle, never an assured victory. We need a hardbitten morale that enables us to face these truths and still strive with every ounce of our energy to prevail.

But there is no possibility of sustaining ourselves in that effort if our values and beliefs are so weakened that nothing seems worth the struggle. First and last, humans live by ideas that validate their striving, ideas that say it’s worth living and trying.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

It’s all about the long term

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If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few (people) are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details. In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder (born Jan 12, 1964)

(The title of this post comes from the title of the first shareholders letter Bezos' sent in 1997)