The Tools summary

John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” has a handy chorus to remember when using this second tool, which is choosing love to cope with difficult people, or rather, difficult behavior by other people. 

Now, let’s define “difficult.” It could be your significant other blatantly flirting with someone else at a party, an obnoxious driver cutting you off in traffic, or a flippant boss who also isn’t noticing how much you deserve a raise. You get the gist: These are the last people you feel like loving in the moment.

Few people lack insecurities, and most of us allow them to plague even our best efforts. The third tool teaches you how to bring your entire self to situations – insecurities and all. Since no one really wants to think about themselves being their biggest obstacle, we’ll start with the authors’ story about someone else who was in that boat. 

A patient was a first-generation high-school graduate and small-town native who left to make her way in a large city. There, she tried to integrate into her idea of big-city sophistication, and worked hard to set her child up for success. She didn't want him to feel like an outsider, like she did. But despite her efforts, other mothers still seemed to shun her, even when her son was accepted to a prestigious soccer program.

Does anything keep you up at night? If you’re losing sleep over it, chances are it fills your waking hours, too. Add it to the list of any potential thing that could go wrong in a day, and you may not want to get out of bed in the morning. That is, if you’re allowing worst-case scenarios to dictate your existence. 

It’s so easy to succumb to negative thoughts, especially if you’re a worrier. You may have good health, a happy family, fulfilling work, and even moments of joy amid it all, and yet you’ll find something to agonize over. 

You’re now fully equipped with four critical tools to tackle every problem in your life, but no one is going to make you use them. That’s why the fifth tool speaks to motivation. Get ready, because it’s going to sound absolutely terrible, especially if you cringed about owning your insecurities to use the third tool of personal agency.  

Here we go.

Hopefully you’ve come away with an ultimate toolkit of five tools to tackle any part of your life that needs building or repair. With the first tool, you learned how to practice welcoming adversity to push through your pain points and achieve major goals. With the second tool, you learned how to harness and channel love to better deal with difficult people and calm your own mind. Third, you learned how to build confidence by bringing your whole self to intimidating situations by visualizing, connecting with, and acting in tune with your “shadow” self that embodies your insecurities. The fourth tool spells out the method of practicing gratitude for all that you have, which shifts your energy from a focus on anything that’s lacking. And with the fifth and final tool, you learned the way to motivate continuous improvement is by continuously reminding yourself how you’d feel if you suddenly ran out of time. No one wants to end life with great regrets, and with these tools, you won’t have to.