Basically, you can live your life in one of two ways. You can let your brain run you the way it has in the past. You can let it flash any picture or sound or feeling, and you can respond automatically on cue, like a Pavlovian dog resp‎onding to a bell. Or you can choose to consciously run your brain yourself. You can implant the cues you want. You can take bad experiences and sap them of their strength and power. You can represent them to yourself in a way that no longer overpowers you, a way that "cuts them down" to a size where you know you can effectively handle things.

Time and again, researchers have shown that students' capabilities are powerfully impacted by the identities they develop for themselves as the result of teachers' belief in their level of intelligence.

Unless you feed your mind, those suffering states will take over.

Your capability is constant, but how much of it you use depends upon the identity you have for yourself.

The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

What people CAN do is very different from what they WILL do.