These are my notes from Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book, Committed. Gilbert is the gal that wrote Eat, Pray, Love.
Click here to watch her 2009 TED talk – It’s a very cool talk – and here are my notes on Committed
Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert, 2010 (author of Eat, Pray, Love)
Highlights from my personal notes:
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• We cannot choose everything simultaneously
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• More than one of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty and confusion
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• Choice –» personal freedom –» emotional uncertainty, second guessing and regrets … use the Process and Appreciation tools
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• Give yourself some time off to deal with your perplexities
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• I will write this, do this, for a finite and limited number of receivers: my tribe
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• If a fish and a bird fall in love, where will they sleep?
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• Failing, becoming an expert in failure, can be a very good thing if:
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• It does not stop you, and
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• If you find or take something of value from it, e.g., what caused the failure, what were the factors
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• “Failure” is an interesting opportunity for personal or professional growth
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• There are any number of other players with whom you can do whatever you wish in joy, adventure and fun
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• All men and all women are mostly the same, most of the time
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• “Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.” In other words, THIS IS IT! Stop lying about it … to yourself or others.
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• Anything becomes “hard work” and, ultimately, unrewarding, when the expectation that only an achieved result will bring any kind of enduring satisfaction or fulfillment or enlightenment.
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• Family grows into clan grows into tribe (150±) grows into kingdom grows into dynasty grows into nation-state
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• By unnerving definition, anything the heart (Expanded Self) has chosen for its own mysterious reason(s) it can always un-choose later – again, for its own mysterious reason(s)
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• Have, engender, embody a humility, a respect for forces that are bigger than me/you/us – something even approaching awe (p.85) (Expanded Self?)
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• It is supportive to learn and to know where you end and someone else begins
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• Of “simpler times” and nostalgia: what time has ever been a “simple time” for those who were living it?
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• Insight and reminder of how goofy my mind chatter can be … no … usually is; how it freezes, paralyzes me in story and analysis; how it resists, how unwilling it it is to give up anything in the face of, for the sake of change.