The Secret Playbook: 32 Paradoxes and 6 Antipodes

Paradoxes

1. To require that others respond to you exactly as you want gives them control over you.
2. To influence others to respond in the specific way that you want renders them inauthentic in your mind.
3. Acceptance is not acquiescence.
4. It is rare to see fully all that there is, yet nothing else.
5. Activity is not necessarily the same as productivity; work ethic is not the same as success ethic.
6. Assumptions and beliefs, like traumas, are ways of stopping time.
7. “More” is not a goal, yet its elusiveness serves as a container of hope and happiness.
8. Suffering and desire are the two secrets we cannot keep.
9. See it big; keep it simple.
10. The only thing constant is change; often the hardest work is accepting the changes.
11. The loss of the illusion is more difficult than the loss of the real thing.
12. We most engage what we run away from.
13. The more we deny or disavow something, the more apparent it becomes.
14. We criticize, perhaps to prove that we do not posses the fault.
15. Both opposition and conformity occupy the same prison.
16. Only when you feel fully secure can you be aware of how afraid you were.
17. Fighting engages; accepting lets go.
18. Only the impossible is addictive—a fantasy that has been lost but given temporary hope by proxy.
19. The answer gives birth to and shapes the question; by listening to the answers you may give voice to the question.
20. Adolescents can teach us the depth of superficial things.
21. If you don’t change your direction, you are likely to end up where you are headed.
22. Judgment resides in the potential space between urge and action.
23. It is a moment of liberation to know that no one is binding you.
24. The most common thing that gets in the way of seeing something as it truly is, is our preconception of it.
25. The most common thing that gets in the way of listening and understanding is trying to fix.
26. Fear, change and adventure are synonyms.
27. Mistakes and successes both teach.
28. The past is a lesson; to let go and learn from it is a process.
29. All you ever have to do is the next right thing.
30. Sometimes it isn’t clear what the next right thing is, but you can almost always determine what it isn’t.
31. Whatever we experience, we either create or accept. Wisdom is to relinquish all hope of a better past.
32. Wisdom is to relinquish all hope of a better past.

Antipodes—The opposite of…

1. perfect is real.
2. fear is freedom.
3. control is mastery.
4. doing is being.
5. repetition is creativity.
6. working harder is working smarter.