What I’m Reading – Week of February 6th

* Too Busy to Pay Attention: “We’re so focused on what’s next that we rarely take the time to ask ourselves whether we’re living the life we want or if we’re even really present in the one we have.”

* Your Attention Didn’t Collapse. It Was Stolen.: “I believe we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. We own our own minds – and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them.”

* Big Skills: “Most things that look like superpowers are just a bunch of ordinary skills mixed together at the right time.”

What I’m Reading – Week of January 30th

* Everything Must Be Paid for Twice:”
Figuring out how to pay the second price isn’t hard. You just have to notice that moment you usually think about packing it in, and stay with it instead of doing something else.”

* What A World: “Optimism is a helluva drug. People believe things that aren’t true, are only loosely true, true but improbable, or true but lacking important context. To do otherwise hurts too much.”

* I Am a Meme Now — And So Are You: “You can’t write — or live — if you imagine the whole world watching over your shoulder, waiting for you to screw up, ready to mock or vilify you.”

Final Post 2021 – What I’m Reading

* The Lost Art of Reflection: “The idea is at the end of the day to take a few minutes, preferably with pen and paper or laptop, and ask yourself, ‘What did I learn today?’”

* Lessons from the Sea: “I’ve learned, through a lot of fear, shivering, pain, and swimming through it anyway, that “greatness” is not a permanent state, but an action we can all choose to do.”

* Writing is Networking for Introverts: “Writing about your other interests gets other people interested.”

* Defining Success: “Long lasting success resulted from consistently showing up, adjusting to changing circumstances, and sustaining above average performance for long periods of time.”

* Groups Never Admit Failure: “Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don’t like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to.”

What I’m Reading – Week of December 18th

* Assured Misery: “People tend to know what makes them angry with more certainty than what might make them happy. Happiness is complicated because you keep moving the goalposts. Misery is more durable.”

* 9 Things I Learned About Productivity This Year: “In 2021 I began to dissect my lifelong problem of severe procrastination, instead of just wrestling with it.”

* The Art of Slowing Down Time: “The irony of life is that many people are quick to protect their money and property but not their time.”

What I’m Reading – Week of December 4th

* Why You Should Have An Anti-Mentor (video): “Someone who, when they look down on you or disagree with you, you know you’re doing something right. If they are agreeing with you, you might want to reassess your value’s and decisions.”

* Advice Gets Good When It Gets Specific: “Without a specific application point, a piece of classic wisdom is just a platitude.”

* Elements of Effective Thinking: “We’re seduced into believing that brilliant thinkers are born that way. We think they magically produce brilliant ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

*Training = Turning Pro: “Amateurs have amateur habits. Pros have professional habits.”

What I’m Reading – Week of November 21st

* When a Stress Expert Battles Mental Illness: “It’s hard to reconcile being an ‘expert’ on performance and experiencing what I’m experiencing. At times, I feel like a fraud and an impostor, fragile and scared.”

* Why We Often Remember The Bad Better Than The Good: “Memories are fallible. Long-term memories are nearly always wrong.”

* How To Do Things: “People don’t want a ten-hour-long stream of how-to information they then have to organize in their heads. They want a hammer put into their hand.”

* Experts From A World That No Longer Exists: “The more evolution you have, the more you should expect that expertise has a shelf life.”

What I’m Reading – Week of November 14th

* Avoiding Stupidity: “The point is that most of us are amateurs but we refuse to believe it. This is a problem because we’re often playing the game of the professionals.”

* How to Level Up: “New tracks of capability await us everywhere, often just beyond a waist-high hedge of awkwardness. Once you level up, you never go back down, and struggles that seemed eternal can disappear for good.”

* The Pain Zone: “Every one of us hits that wall. Every one feels our lungs burning, our heart about to explode out of our chest. Every one of us wants to quit. Every one wants to back off, just a little, so this damn struggle will stop hurting so much.”

* The Same Stories, Again and Again: “Innovation is hard to predict and easy to underestimate because so much occurs by accident, when several boring discoveries compound into something extraordinary.”

What I’m Reading – Week of October 24th

* On the Illusion of Choice (YouTube video): “Young people have the illusion of choices. But if you want to be good, you have no choices.”

*On Creating Good Stories: “We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even—or perhaps especially—in an emergency.“

* Your Whole Life Is Borrowed Time: “The universe is not at all sentimental—aliveness is always going to be an arbitrary status that can be revoked at any time. No recourse, no due process.”

* It Sounds Crazy: “It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear.”

What I’m Reading – Week of October 10th

* Nature Shows How This All Works: “The only thing that matters is where you are in the long run.”

* How To Take Notes While Reading: “While reading, I take notes. I circle words I need to look up. I star points that I think are critical to the argument. I underline anything that strikes me as interesting. I comment like a madman in the margins. I try to tease out assumptions, etc.”

* Why Your Inner Circle Should Stay Small: “Carefully curate your most trusted, inner circle and you’ll be surprised at how much more valuable you’ll become to the larger community of people in the world who care about the same things you do.”

What I’m Reading – Week of September 25th

* The Last Time Always Happens Now: “The point isn’t to make life into a series of desperate goodbyes. You can go ahead and do the thing more or less normally. You might find, though, that when you frame it as a potential last time, you pay more attention to it, and you appreciate it for what it is in a way you normally don’t.”

* How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Lucky: “Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to make effective decisions. Yet no one really teaches us what it means to make consistently high-quality decisions.”

* Why People Feel Like Victims: “You only need to spend only a few minutes watching or reading the news, in any country, to hear and see victimhood raging.”

* History’s Seductive Beliefs: “The biggest takeaway from history is that the characters change but their behaviors don’t. They’re the same today as they were 100 years ago and will be 100 years from now.”