Shane Parrish

your territory is sort of mental.

It's your perception of yourself.

And then your ego kicks in and your emotion kicks in.

And then you respond.

And when you respond in that moment, you're responding without reasoning.

And the minute you respond without reasoning, you're no better than an animal.

Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.

I love that parable.

I had never actually heard it before until I listened to a couple episodes of this.

I think there's a tension between these two competing factors in us and we choose which one we feed.

But really what we're doing is we're telling ourselves a story.

That story, I believe that the most powerful story in the world is the one that we tell ourselves.

Yeah.

And that story is also a choice.

If we tell ourselves that we are a good person and we do good things and we're open to love and we're vulnerable and we have very little fear about, I think that we're choosing to live a very different life than if we give up and we get up and we tell ourselves another story.

And those stories just have the power to come true, right?

Not the positive ones, but definitely the negative ones.

Like telling yourself a good story doesn't mean you're going to get a good result or good outcome, but telling yourself a negative story

almost virtually ensures that you're going to get a bad outcome.

And so often when I meet people, I find that they're just stuck in the story.