Finding Your Own North Star

I found as many addicts among hyper-responsible, perfectionistic folks as among rebellious, irresponsible criminals.

Whenever you’re headed away from your North Star, your essential self feels a constant sense of yearning emptiness.

Life is short, and far too many people in it would like a chunk of your time.

The abundant medical evidence on the relationship between stress and immune response includes plenty of studies showing this “exam effect” on college students. Bottom line: Stress decreases your immune response, leaving you vulnerable to all sorts of interesting diseases.

Teaching your social self to pay attention when your essential self says “no” is the most basic way to reconnect the two sides of your personality. By doing this, you begin to rewire the navigational devices that lead you toward your right life.

The more conformist the culture, the more taboo “no” becomes.

You may be blithely oblivious to your own discontent until the very moment you find yourself weeping at a business luncheon, or punching your son’s first-grade teacher. Fortunately, you can avoid such unpleasant situations if you learn just one “word” in your essential self’s nonverbal lexicon: NO.

The fascinating thing about these incidents is that although the conscious, verbal self is completely blindsided, the words that come out of nowhere are true in the deepest sense.

are usually surprised by what it says

This wasn’t always true. The generations that preceded us learned that the most dependable path to financial security was to do what Melvin did: earn a business degree, put on a gray wool suit, get a job with a big firm, and march in step all the way to the corner office. The better you followed the social rules, the greater your success. Listening to the beat of a different drummer was career suicide. Thoreau was thinking of the modern workplace when he wrote, “The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”