Summary

Don’t Take Anything Personally

The first agreement spawns the other three agreements. With your new-found power of impeccability the poisonous words of others can roll off your back. Once you agree to the negative words of others, then it is part of you. When a person takes another’s words personally, he has agreement with those words. “Personal importance” is a trap – a false trap that says that everything in the world is about “me.” When we take the words of others personally, we are making a concession that others know our world better than we do.

An unhappy person who tries to insult you is just trying to make his own misery seem more bearable. Taking things personally makes a person easy prey to the poison of others. The gift of this agreement is that you are immune...