What I’m Reading

* The Velocity of Skill Development: “Focused repetitions give you feedback. Feedback makes you better. Each repetition builds upon the ones you’ve already done. This is how greatness happens.”

* Good And Bad Procrastination: “I think the way to “solve” the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.”

* Goldilocks of Giving: “I encourage everyone to accept themselves and to accept others as they are. However, true growth comes from having a continuous and honest conversation with yourself. Self-evaluation can guide your path, and help you bloom.”

* The Science Behind Journaling: “By knowing who we were, it’s easier for us to reflect on who we want to become, providing us a clearer picture of the future and allowing us to map out exactly how to get there based on all that we’ve learned from before until now.”

* How to Do the Things You Keep Avoiding: “Tasks you’re avoiding never leave your consciousness for long. They hang there like clouds, some distance away, watching you.”

* Solve Problems Before They Happen: “It’s worth asking why, if we think something is worth saving, we don’t put more effort into protecting it ahead of time.”

* Best Story Wins: “Not who has the best idea, or the right answer. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads.”

* On Regret: “We all have joys, hopes, fears, and longings that never go away no matter how old we get.”

* How To Be Angry: “At its core, your anger is telling you that there’s a problem. One way to productively express it is to use the energy it provides to solve that problem.”

* The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short: “A friend asked me if I’d figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on.”

* The High Price Of Mistrust: “Right now, polarization and social distancing have forced us apart from any sense of community to a degree that can seem irresolvable.”

* Why You Should Practice Failure:

“How many of us make deliberate mistakes? How often do we try to fail in order to learn from it?”

* On Cultivating and Sustaining Love:

“Love is losing yourself in the process of caring about and showing undivided attention to someone or something, through ups and downs. It’s as simple and as hard as that.”

* On Planning For The Ups and Downs of Happiness

“There are time when all the lies you have told yourself about yourself just fall away.”

*Clean the Tiles – Not the Floor:

“The real pain of many tasks is psychological, arising from the way the mind processes them, not so much from the actions that constitute the tasks themselves.”

* We Are What We Remember:

“Which of our memories are true and which are not is something we may never know. It doesn’t change who we are.”

* On Self Doubt:

“Our self-doubt is the inverse manifestation of our artistic dream. The greater the one, the greater the other.”

* How Long To Form A Habit?:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

* Luck Relative To Hard Work:

“Absolute success is luck. Relative success is hard work.”

* How to Make Friends as an Adult:

“Leaping your way to even one new friend kicks off a wonderful compounding effect. Each friend tends to come with more acquaintances, and usually they’re highly qualified friend candidates.”

* Jootsing: The Key to Creativity:

“Creativity can seem like a mysterious process. But many of the most creative people understand that you can actually break it down into a simple formula.”

* The Big Rocks And The Jar:

“A Lesson in Making Priorities”

* It’s You Against You, All Day Long

“Some you’ll win. Most you’ll lose. Sometimes you’ll feel accomplished and warm-fuzzies and the burst of happiness and ownership in doing a great job, being recognized, being loved, winning. Most times you will go to bed knowing you did alright, not your best, but given the chance to wake up tomorrow you’ll get a little closer to your best.”

* Favorite Farnam Street Posts From 2020

“Much of what we do at FS is about reflection. Learning requires reflection; time to sit, think, and process.”

* Own The Tools

“This little insight suggests a principle that we 21st-century wanderers might want to write down: whenever you can, own the tools, or you never stop paying for them.”

* Resistance And Dreams

“I wish I could hear that voice and say, ‘Ah, that’s Resistance! I’ll simply dismiss it.’ But I’m terrified that the voice is true.”

* Don’t Look Back and Don’t Look Down: “We’re talking here about a discipline of the mind. Mental toughness. A choice that you and I make (and hold ourselves to) as professionals … a deliberate act.”

* Highlights From 2020’s Farnam Street “Ask Me Anything” (Video)

* Marc Andreessen On Productivity, Scheduling, Reading Habits, Work, and More: “The sheer load of the number of things coming at me and coming at the senior partners here is just very intense. That has forced a comprehensive shift to a far more structured way of living. It’s actually by far the most structured I’ve ever been.”

* You’re Only As Good As Your Worst Day: “As individuals, we tell people the most about who we are when everything goes wrong.”

* Practice = Professional: “All are here to serve a higher purpose, to seek, in the training and conflict between and among one another, to realize the best of themselves. That’s you and me every day at the easel, at the piano, at the keyboard. That’s a practice.”

* The Comfortable Misery Syndrome: “If everything is too good, you’re probably stuck not being awesome.”

* How To Handle The Beast: “Our species knows the Beast well, but we don’t talk about it much. I suppose that’s because it’s hard to win at the rat race and other public-facing status games when you admit you are suffering. But suffering less is more important.”

* Leading During A Crisis (video): “There are certain kinds of rules in a crisis. Number one, I don’t respond in little pieces and then change my mind. I wait until I get the facts. It’s your response that defines who you really are in other people’s eyes.”

* How Julia Child Used First Principles Thinking: “There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. If you can master the first principles within a domain, you can see much further than those who are just following recipes.”