Hard and not so hard truths. Kick ass life hacks. Points 11 to 20

11. You underestimate how influenced you are by the people you spend time with. Nothing determines how you will behave more than the people you regularly hang out with. It’s been repeated almost ad nauseam, but here it is again: you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Extreme, but clear enough example:  if you have four roommates who smoke, don’t work out, order loads of junk food every single day, float around in seas of alcohol and play video games all day long it’s going to be so much harder for you to build healthy habits and to stick to them.

12. What your parents desired but never got will always have a strong influence in your life. ‘The biggest influence in the life of a child is the unlived life of the parent’ said Jung. We also marry the unfinished business of our parents. What went wrong in our parents relationship and unresolved issues our parents struggled with play a much bigger role in whom we chose as a partner than we realize or want to see.

13. Women care more about looks than they find acceptable to admit. They are likely also not communicating their sexual dissatisfaction. Women most of all want security, safety and want to be seen as ‚good‘, women care much more about their reputation than men do. They are not going to admit to something that could make them a target for criticism or judgement. This is slowly changing, but it’s a slow process and as with all qualities that have long been repressed the intitial change can be that it’s overdone. That’s why here and there you see very provocative women popping up as a reaction to this long tradition of ‘the good girl’.

14. Whatever talent you see a guy display, his initial motivation to get good at it was probably to attract a romantic partner, to impress a parent or to fight his sense of mediocrity.

15. Oft repeated, but so true: there is not a woman so hot that there is not some guy tired of having sex with her. Men lose their sexual attraction to a woman after having had lots of sex with her. Since women tend to need intimacy in order to have sex this is less true for them. If women could read the thoughts of their boyfriend or husband all couples would break up right this instant.

16. Addiction is a disease of your social relationships. Quitting an addiction without building more meaningful connections is not possible. All addictions are a result of lacking the means, the tools and the healthy foundation to establish true intimacy.

17. The benefits of cold showers are real. Immerse yourself in very cold water for about 5 to 10 minutes per day and you will burn fat, feel energized, feel a sense of well-being afterwards, you have will primed your mind to tackle hard things, it will boost your self-discipline, it will contribute to your overall health and it will fill you with a sense of pride, cause you did something hard. Even if you just do it to burn fat, it’s totally worth it.

18. The less you have lived your life as you wanted to the more you fear dying. This seems to imply that we are all on some sort of mission in this life and when we don’t fulfill it we are not ready to die and vice versa.

19. The biggest cage of mankind is avoiding feelings of shame. When you really look into what stops people from doing what they say they want to do you will notice that it’s feelings of shame holding them back. Feelings of shame are also why people covet things like expensive cars or fame. They think having those things will take away the shame. This is the tragedy of many famous and rich people. Once they get those things they notice nothing was fixed and those same feelings persist. That’s when it gets dangerous for them, because they got the thing that they felt was going to cure them and it didn’t.  Shame is also the driving force behind ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ 20. Your five favorite stories all have a main character that is very similar to the way you are or desire to be. We’re all a little bit narcissistic. If we love a story then somehow it must be about us or about who we want to be.

Find the next ten life lessons in the next blog post.