Big Blue Whale Read shared | "The Courage to Be Hated": Your "misfortune" is your own choice

Speaker Meiwen

Host of Jiangsu News Broadcasting "News Evening Peak"

Senior news anchor, has won the "Golden Microphone Award" broadcast work award of China Broadcasting Host, the first prize of the 25th China News Awards live broadcast category, and has won the title of Top Ten Hosts of Jiangsu Radio and Television Station and Excellent Host of Jiangsu Radio and Television News for many times.

This book is guided

Are you afraid of being perceived as incompetent at work?

Are you afraid of being left out in the cold with your friends?

Do you feel anxious in unfamiliar places?

In fact, all these troubles are because we care too much about other people's opinions and opinions.

In order to achieve true freedom and happiness, sometimes you need to show the courage to be "hated", appropriately ignore the opinions of others, uphold your own opinions, and live out your own character.

With the main ideas of Adler's psychology as the core, this book explains the various problems we face in life, how they are going, and how to solve them through the dialogue between a philosopher and a young person.

This book won the 2014 annual sales champion of Amazon japan, ranking first in sales for 300 consecutive days!

You will reap the rewards

■ Life is always your own, only you can decide your own life. The pain of the past, it can be a stepping stone on your way forward, it can also be a stumbling block, it only depends on your attitude.

■ All troubles come from interpersonal relationships, and if you want to be truly free, you need to respect your inner thoughts and not worry about being hated by others.

■ The moment we come into this world, the journey of life begins. Seriously living every moment and enjoying the process of life is the subject we should pursue.

About the author

Ichiro Kishimi

philosopher

He is the author of Alfred Adler's Lecture Notes on Personal Psychology and Why People Suffer from Neuropathy, and he has written many works such as "Introduction to Adler Psychology".

Koga Shiken

Freelance writer

He has published many bestsellers in business or documentary literature. Author of "Lecture Notes on Articles That I Want to Make My 20-Year-Old Self Accept.".

Audio transcript

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The book I'm sharing with you today is The Courage to Be Hated. First of all, I would like to ask you a few questions. Are you bored with a tedious life? Are you tired of complex relationships? Do you feel like you're getting farther and farther away from happiness? Do you feel that the meaning of life is becoming more and more blurred? How do we achieve true happiness with our own hands in the midst of complicated daily lives and complex relationships? This book will tell you the answer.

The authors of the book are the Japanese philosopher Ichiro Kishimi and the freelance writer Shiken Koga, who subtitled the book "Adler's Philosophical Lessons of the Father of Self-Enlightenment", so Adler's philosophical ideas run through the book. Who is Adler? Adler, along with Freud and Jung, was called the "Big Three of Psychology." He was an Austrian psychiatrist, but also a thinker and philosopher. As the founder of individual psychology and the forerunner of humanistic psychology, Adler is known as the "father of modern self psychology". Adler began to follow Freud on the issue of neuroses, but later established himself as the first god to oppose psychoanalytic theory.

The book is in the form of a dialogue and is easy to understand. The dialogue body is not unfamiliar to everyone, the Confucian classic "Analects" is the dialogue body, and the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates were also recorded by the disciple Plato in the form of dialogue. In The Courage to Be Hated, there is a philosopher and a young man, the philosopher symbolizes Adler, and the youth is like a stunned boy, constantly questioning and doubting the philosopher's claims.

Is the starting point for young people and philosophers to argue about the simplicity of life? In the eyes of some people, life is not simple, life is not satisfactory nine times out of ten, and there are difficult scriptures in the family. But Adler disagrees, saying that the world is extremely simple and that people can be happy at any time. Man is unfortunate because he sees the world as complicated. This sentence has two meanings: first, the nature of the world is simple, and second, your concept makes the world more complicated. The author cites an example of well water to illustrate this point. As you may know, the temperature of well water is constant, about 18 degrees for many years. This is an objective number, no matter who measures it. However, drinking well water in the summer feels cool, while drinking well water in the winter feels warm. The temperature of the well water hasn't changed, but your feelings are very different. By extension, the world has not changed, it has become our own. So when you want to be happy, you have to try to see that simple world, and in order to see the simple world, all we can do is change ourselves.

So the second question comes, is it difficult to change yourself? Adler's view is that it is not difficult that we are able to change ourselves. Many people may object, because one of the more popular views at present is determinism. At the heart of determinism is that our present and future are determined by the past. For example, genes say that part of our personality is genetically determined, and there is also the original family theory, which emphasizes that you are now shaped by your original family and your growth environment and experience. These belong to your past, and we can't change them. But Adler does not support determinism, and when you look at the immutable past, there is no room for action and it loses the meaning of exploration. So he came up with teleology. What is teleology? Our present is our creation. Happiness or unhappiness are your own choices. Adler psychology believes that it doesn't matter what a person's past experiences are, what matters is how you look at your past experiences, which determines our current lives. This discipline considers not the "causes" of the past, but the "purposes" of the present.

In the movie "Wind and Rain Harvard Road", the Harvard girl Liz's past is very bad. She was born in the slums of New York to parents who used drugs, and she spent her childhood in drugs, AIDS, and hunger. At the age of 15, her family was finally broken, and she began living on the streets, picking up trash and stealing things. However, even living in such an unbearable environment, Liz did not complain about fate, did not sink into the past, she knew clearly that her purpose was to go to a bright and bright world. She plucked up the courage to apply to re-enter high school and set herself goals for each homework A. In order to achieve this goal, she often carries all her belongings with her, and the heavy books often make her back ache unbearably. In order to ensure the quality of learning, she sets an alarm clock for herself at any time and uses all bits and pieces to study. The subway, the corridors, and the friends' houses became the places where she often spent the night studying. Through her own efforts, Liz finally completed the four-year course in two years, graduated with an all-A score of 95 points, ranked first among 150 classmates, and won the "New York Times First Class Scholarship" to enter Harvard University with honors.

Things of the past have been stereotyped, just as we cannot decide what kind of family we were born into, when in fact there is no problem with not having a family. Of course, everything in the past will have a certain impact on us, but what kind of life we will live in the future and what kind of people we marry depends on our choices and efforts in the present. So how do we choose our own life or what kind of life do we choose? To put it bluntly, it is to choose a life with fewer troubles. Before we explore how to reduce our troubles, we must first know where our troubles come from. In Adler's theory, all our troubles come from relationships. If there are no human relationships in this world, if there is no one else in the universe but only oneself, then all troubles will disappear. Any annoyance will have an element of others. What factors in relationships bother us?

First, Adler says, feelings of inferiority can annoy us. For example, some people feel that they are ugly or not good enough, resulting in a sense of inferiority. Second, the sense of competition can also annoy us. If a person always wants to prove himself, always wants to perform better than others, and always wants to win, then this sense of competition will lead to misfortune. Because even if you're a winner, you can't rest assured, and you'll be extra careful not to be a loser. Once you develop a sense of competition, you will involuntarily treat the people around you as enemies, thus creating a power struggle with others.

If we weaken the impact of our inferiority complex and sense of competition on us, our troubles will be reduced accordingly. Adler was the first to come up with the term inferiority complex. In his philosophy, inferiority represents a sense of inferiority, that is, less value. So when a person has low self-esteem, he must feel that his value is inferior to others. But when we judge the value of an object, it must be based on social significance. Paper money for a dollar and a hundred dollars are essentially pieces of paper, and there is not much difference in cost, but in social life, a hundred dollars is worth a lot more than a dollar. So feelings of inferiority are not "objective facts" but "subjective explanations." When you want to get rid of your inferiority complex, remember not to blindly evaluate yourself, and at the same time, do not blindly seek the approval of others. The recognition and expectations of others can never be satisfied.

I don't know if you have found that in our work and life, people with a "flattering" personality, in order to create good interpersonal relationships, desperately try to please others, but they are not happy.

In the hit idol drama "Post-it Note Girl", the heroine played by Chen Qiaoen deliberately pleases the colleagues around her in order to create good interpersonal relationships in the company, and the trivial chores in the company and the unfinished work of colleagues after work are all done by her. So she is jokingly called a post-it note girl by everyone, and where there is a demand, it appears wherever there is a need. But since it was deliberate, it was not a heartfelt thought and act, so she was miserable.

Adler believes that there is no need to worry about being hated by others, and there is no need to worry about others not liking. Of course, this is not to say that we can have no scruples and not consider other people's ideas at all. It is just to say that we should not care too much about the views and opinions of others, but need to have our own opinions and live out our own personality. In fact, to put it bluntly, that is, we must have the courage to be hated by others, so that you can truly gain freedom. This is also the source of the book's title.

Some people may raise objections, we are social people, we need to constantly interact with people, there is no way not to care about other people's ideas, so Adler proposed a concept, called "subject separation". In Adler's eyes, the ideal interpersonal relationship is probably, I love you, but it has nothing to do with you, you hate me, and it has nothing to do with me. He even said that the vast majority of people are using love to control others, especially parents' treatment of their children's education.

Why are many people in modern society unhappy and troubled every day? In fact, we have not achieved a real separation of subjects. What do you mean? For example, you pursue someone, but the other person doesn't like you, so you're miserable. The separation of topics is that you like others and whether others like you or not, which is completely two topics. Whether you like someone else is your subject, and whether she is willing to accept you as her subject.

Let us not interfere with other people's problems, and we should not let others interfere with your problems. Many people are annoyed because they have blurred their respective subjects. For example, parents often do some moral kidnapping in the name of love: I do all this for you, you don't appreciate it, it really makes me sad. This sentence is familiar to everyone, but parents forget that they do not love their children in the way that their children like, so of course children are not willing to accept it. Through the separation of topics, people can maintain an appropriate distance from each other, and this distance can lead to healthier interpersonal relationships.

Next, let's talk about how to mitigate the negative impact of competitive awareness on us. Vicious competition is the source of all evil, and if the sense of competition is too strong, it is unconsciously hostile to the world. If we don't compete, how do we get along with others? Adler proposed that the ultimate goal of interpersonal relationships is to gain a "sense of community," to treat others as their partners, and to find their own value, the so-called sense of belonging, by contributing to others. If you always think of others contributing to you, you will be disappointed, because others are not born to meet your expectations. If you only think about how others should be all day long, you must be unhappy, but you can choose to contribute to others, and this is something that you can control yourself. When contributing to others, it is important that you can experience your own sense of worth, which will inspire a sense of happiness. In Adler's theory, contribution is happiness. From the people around us, we can see that selfish people are often not very happy, but people with large patterns and people who think about others are easy to get more happiness.

So how to get a sense of community, Adler gave us three solutions: the first is self-recognition, also called self-acceptance, which is a prerequisite. Only by accepting yourself will you accept others and contribute to others. When we evaluate ourselves, what matters is not who you are, but what value you can play. The point of self-acceptance is to accept the part of yourself that you can't change, while trying to do what you can do. The second is the trust of others, which teaches us how to accept others, to put it bluntly, to believe in others unconditionally. If you want to associate with a person, you must believe unconditionally, even if you think he will lie to you and hurt you. Because if you are defensive when you interact with others, there is no way to establish social relations with others. Trust in the other will allow you to form your own community, and when you have your own community and have a small team, you have to take the third step, called the contribution of the other. When you have your own circle, you have to contribute to your peers and make others better. What needs to be emphasized here is that contribution is not self-sacrifice, but to make others better. When you see that the other person has truly improved, you will experience a real sense of value, just like we said that a sense of value can bring happiness.

According to what has just been said, we know that life is particularly simple, and it is particularly simple to live a good life, but we often make the world complicated. If we want to be happy, we must try to reduce the troubles of interpersonal relationships and extract happiness from interpersonal relationships. So what is the meaning of life if you explore it further?

Adler believes that there is no universal meaning of life, the meaning of life is given to yourself, and you must have the courage to accept the ordinary.

People are constantly pursuing, or pursuing fame and fortune, or pursuing the approval of others throughout their lives. I always feel that I must be famous in order not to spend my life in vain. Because in the eyes of many people, only the special is different, too ordinary will not have any achievements, so it will continue to toss. Some people eventually have what they want to pursue, while some people are still the same as they are and even getting worse and worse. Why do we suffer? Because we always do not have the energy to do, do not give ourselves the real meaning of life, do not know how to accept ourselves. We can't accept our own ordinary, and we feel that if we are too ordinary, we will lose a lot of things. In fact, there is nothing to lose, mainly depends on how you look at your life and how you plan your life.

The road has to be walked by yourself, and you have to give meaning to your life according to your own ability. Only by accepting your ordinary self will you see the truest version of yourself. Adler believes: "The reason why people pursue the special is because they cannot accept their ordinary selves. "A lot of people think they're too ordinary and inferior. I have low self-esteem and can't communicate normally with people who are stronger than myself.

In fact, life is very simple: as long as it is serious and does not need to be profound. Like mountaineering, we don't just have to climb to the top to be successful. If you are physically weak, it is good that you climb to the middle of the mountain, because the purpose of climbing is the process, not the final result, and most of our time in life is on the road, not only climbing to the top of the mountain. Because there are always accidents in life, you may not be able to reach the top of the mountain because of illness or other reasons, so is this life in vain? To put it more bluntly, if you don't achieve your life goals in this life, is it a failure? In Adler's view, this is not the case, if life is regarded as a line, it is certainly not a straight line, but a curve of points. That is to say, life is a continuous moment, and at each stage, it has its own goals or purposes. We can only live in the here and now, the present moment. Life is like a whirling dance, in the dance, dancing itself is the purpose, and no one knows where it will eventually dance. Planning and planning should be there, but it shouldn't be the center of gravity, and all we can do is embrace the dancing "here and now." If your every movement is attentive and wonderful, then your dance will make sense.

So, life is about the process, not the end. Even if we try our best, we may still be ordinary people, and that is nothing, because we are ordinary, but we are not ordinary. Adler's psychology liberates the ego from the past, relationships, and the future. In the past, we were stuck in the past, and we may blame our parents for complaining about society, but Adler completely handed over the responsibility of life and the right to choose to ourselves. Grasping this moment is a meaningful life. In fact, we have always been very free, and modern people who are often troubled by everything do not lack the ability to achieve happiness, but lack the courage to achieve happiness. We must have the courage to try new things, dare to break through our own bottlenecks, not afraid of the eyes of the people around us, and live a flesh and blood self.

(Editor of this issue, Wang Xiandi)