What I’m Reading

* 13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings: “You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.”

* Quitting While You’re Ahead: “The right goals are obviously important … because some goals are more motivating than others.”

* Why I Write: “Writing is the ultimate test of whether your thoughts make sense or are merely gut feelings. Feelings about why something is the way it is don’t need to be questioned or analyzed in your head because they feel good and you don’t want to rock the boat.”

* 8 Rules to Do Everything Better: “The most important rules to grow your body and mind.”

* How To Develop Mental Toughness: “An expert’s guide to sticking it out through pain and suffering.”

* What Does It Mean To Be Tough?: “Toughness is experiencing something that is subjectively distressing, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take a thoughtful action that aligns with your core values.”

* A Sacred Space: “Leave your ego, leave your greed, leave your competitiveness with your rivals, leave your fear and your self-doubt and your lack of belief in yourself. In here, in this space where we work, there is no room for such stuff.”

* Personal Development Goals Worth Pursuing: “Until motivation is sold by the bottle, you can work on building it little by little.”

* Becoming a Morning Person: “You will likely start your day with more energy than before, improve your overall mood in the morning, and create some quality time for getting more accomplished in the day.”

* On Comparing Yourself to Others: “If you can’t compare yourself to others and you can’t compare yourself to your former self, what should you do? You should compare yourself to where you would expect to be in the ‘average’ state of the world.”

* Cross The Gap Before It Grows: “When you avoid something, it doesn’t merely remain unfamiliar. It becomes stigmatized in your mind. With each instance of avoidance, your inclination to avoid it grows.”

* Get Up! Begin Your Day: “I am rehearsing doing something I don’t want to do. I’m rehearsing doing something I’m afraid of. I’m rehearsing doing something that hurts.”

* Letter To My Younger Self: “You’re going to be part of something else. You’re going to be part of changing the women’s game. Of showing other girls who felt they didn’t belong that they do belong.”

* Why We Can Never Do Just One Thing: “We can’t expect to interact with any system without repercussions. Over time, even minor externalities can cause significant strain in our lives and relationships.”

* The Fast Track To A Life Well Lived Is Feeling Grateful: “At base, emotions are about the future, not the past. From an evolutionary standpoint, feeling pain or pleasure that can’t change anything would be a useless waste of the brain’s efforts. The true benefit of emotions comes from their power to guide decisions about what comes next.”

* The Surfer’s Secret to Happiness: “If you added up the seconds that a good surfer actually spent riding the waves, it would amount to only the smallest fraction of an entire life. Yet surfers are surfers all the time.”

* What’s A Mental Model?: “Mental models allow you to view the world through more tried, tested, and unbiased lenses, and help find solutions to problems that might be out of your personal sphere of experience.”

* In Defense of Nostalgia: “I humbly submit that when you’re seeking a revival, a renewal, a real renaissance, looking back is the best way to move forward.”

* No Moment Can Be Saved For Later: “In an era where we’re never without a camera, we may be losing the ability to simply appreciate, in real-time, remarkable experiences in an uncomplicated way.”

* The Surprising Benefits of Journaling One Sentence Every Day: “Most people know that journaling is helpful, but they never get around to making it a priority.”

* Resistance and Self Loathing: “Though it seems ultra-personal, the voice of self-loathing is in fact universal. It is impersonal. Now to the good news about self-loathing…”

* Why We Can’t Sit Quietly In A Room Alone: “Eventually, by cultivating receptivity rather than defensiveness, a kind of tranquility can emerge.”

* The Power of Questions: “The quality of the answers we get are directly correlated with the quality of the questions we ask. Here’s how to improve your questions.”

* Why Complexity Sells: “Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do.”

* Care Deeply, Not Passionately: “Inevitably, caring deeply requires you to consider what your role is actually going to be.”

* On Blame: “Blame eases the psychological panic the brain experiences when these giant holes get blown in our storylines. But what’s the cost?”

* What’s Your THING?: Incredible Tweet thread by Carl Richards

* The Best Way To Consume Information: “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”

* The Only Dependable Source of Happiness: “Invest all your efforts in cultivating the best and most durable source of happiness—a strong, unshakable character—given that it naturally aligns with the best of your goals and intentions.”

* What I Learned From Losing $200 Million: “Success in “normal”circumstances says little about your chances in crisis, since in crisis the rules change.”

* You Better Love This: “Something stupid you can stick with will probably outperform something smart that you’ll burn out on.”

* The Four Tools of Discipline: “There are four tools of discipline: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.”

* Cutting Through Indecision & Overthinking: “Taking any action is likely to be better than inaction and indecision, but we can get so caught up in trying to find the perfect decision that we make no decision.”

* How To Know If You’re A Morning Person: “The life of a person who wakes up really, really early.”

* Creating the Best Version of You: “People struggle to define their real selves, but they don’t have to.”

* Why Everyone Should Write: “Turning gut feelings into tools means understanding their origin, limits, and how they interact with other ideas. Which requires turning them into words.”

* Learning How to Think: “Poor initial decisions are one of the reasons we’re so busy. With poor thinking, a large chunk of your time is spent correcting mistakes. Good thinking, on the other hand, produces better initial decisions and frees up time and energy.”

* Solitude and Leadership (post includes audio version): “‘Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.’ Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality.”

* Transformative Experience: A Primer: “A transformative experience changes who you are – it alters your values and preferences, creating a fundamental disconnect between your pre-transformation and post-transformation selves.”

* Grief and Loss: “It’s hard to acknowledge that something that felt like a curse could also be a blessing. It took me a while to make peace with this.”