Day Seventeen. Take Control of Your Desires

If you want to be in command of your life, you have to get command of the desires that direct your behavior. Otherwise, it is all too easy to pursue irrational desires—desires that are self-destructive or harmful to others, such as the desire to dominate. When you don’t actively assess and critique what you want, you often end up pursuing senseless desires without knowing why.

“No man is free who cannot control himself.”

—Pythagoras

When you develop as a self-reflective thinker, you can differentiate between desires that make sense and those that don’t, between those that can be justified and those that can’t. You work to reject desires that lead to suffering. You break down habits that feed self-destructive ...

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