What I’m Reading

* How to Gradually Become a More Relaxed Person: “Our cultural ideas of relaxation tend to involve some sort of external intervention — drinks, vacations, entertainment, or some other kind of stimulation, more to distract us from tension than actually relieve 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.”

*Learning Through Play: “Doing things we enjoy without a goal in mind leads us to find new information, better understand our own capabilities, and find unexpected beauty around us.”

* The Big Lessons From History: “An important lesson from history is that the risks we talk about in the news are rarely the most important risks in hindsight. The same story, again and again.”

* Never Stop Learner: “These life lessons taught me that we need very little in life to make us happy, provided we have that frame of mind to enjoy whatever we have.”

* Painfully Tiny Goals: “If you’re expecting your willpower to do the work towards a task that hasn’t drawn you in naturally already, then acknowledge the reality of the situation by biting off something it can actually chew.”

*I Have A Few Questions: “Ponderings and life lessons.”

* Descriptions Aren’t Prescriptions: “When you encounter a representation of something, it’s useful to consider which parts are descriptive and which parts are prescriptive. 

* Be a Schedule Builder Not a To-Do List Maker: “To-do list devotees keep a running register of all the things they promise to get done, but at the end of the day, they’re surprised to find the list of uncompleted tasks has gotten longer, not shorter.”

* The Meaning of Life is Subjective: Lessons From Intellectuals: “Loving your life no matter what it has in it can help you find meaning. If life matters, what we do with it whilst we are still alive is probably something important to ponder about.”

* Inversion As A Critical Thinking Skill: “The thinking in which you want opposite — not only thinking forward but also thinking backward. This trick is a powerful idea because it de-biases us from having blinders.”

* On Ideas And Identity: “Ideas become part of who we are. People get invested in their ideas, especially if they get invested publicly and identify with their ideas.”

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

* A Basic Skill We Should Have Learned as Kids: “Emotions really do work like sets of spectacles. It is a huge help to know which lens you’re seeing the world through, at any given moment.”

* What Sharks Can Teach Us About Survivorship Bias: “If we focus only on the survivor stories, we might think that being a real estate agent or an architect is safer than starting a technology company.”

* On Resilience: What My Sled Dogs Taught Me About Planning for the Unknown: “Planning for forever is essentially impossible, which can actually be freeing: It brings you back into the present.”

* Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions: “Being influenced by the actions of people who are playing a different game than you are.”

* How To Practice Long-Term Thinking When You Can Barely See Past Tomorrow: “While the future is certain, you can still create it by what you choose to do or fail to do.”

* Survivorship Bias: “While optimism can actually be helpful, inflating our likelihood of success because we forget to include failures in our dataset will add unnecessary risk to an already complex decision-making process.”

* David Foster Wallace On The Meaning Of Life (Audio): “2005 commencement speech which was the basis for his book on the same subject.”

* The Healthy Emotion We Don’t Get Enough Of: “Awe is partly about focusing on the world outside of your head and rediscovering that it is filled with marvelous things that are not you.”

* Optimize Your Life (And Decisions) For Fewer Regrets: “Making a decision can be painful — not because you might get it wrong, but because it forces you to sacrifice all but one of your possible futures. A future that’s unpredictable but in your control.”

* How to Change Your Perspective according to Shane Parrish (short video)

* The Power Of Flexible Consistency: “Instead of having an ‘all-or-nothing’ approach to life, where each failure or unexpected event can derail a routine, flexible consistency offers a set of principles to bounce back and keep on making progress.”

* If You Must Worry, Do It On Paper: “Writing down your worries forces you to slow down — which can make think a bit clearer and often opens up a bit of space for reflection, meditation and positive thinking.”

* Killer Instinct: “One of the laws of Resistance is that Resistance is always strongest at the finish.”

* Friendships In The Time Of COVID: “One of the main reasons many friendships eventually fall apart is because other people take our time. We find lovers or have children, and they are our priority. It’s difficult for someone to feel as if they’re no longer a priority.”

* Make The Power Move: “The Power Move is always a simple bodily movement that punches through any psychological resistance.”

* The Spiral of Silence: “Our desire to fit in with others means we don’t always say what we think. We only express opinions that seem safe.”

* Negativity Bias: “While the negativity bias used to be a useful survival mechanism, it has a powerful—and often unconscious—impact on the way we behave, think, and build relationships.”

* A Few Rules To Live By: “The only thing worse than thinking everyone who disagrees with you is wrong is the opposite.”

* Understanding Others’ Emotions (short video): “Do you want empathy or do you want a solution?”

* Nothing is “Beyond” Self-Improvement: ” Choices about what to do are really choices about who to be. Navigating this never-ending parade of options is part and parcel of the self-improvement enterprise, and the self-improvement enterprise never meaningfully ends.”

* The Inner Superpower That Makes Us Human: “We can learn what our impulses are, reflect on whether they’re helpful, and practice not always acting on them.”

* The Observer Effect: Seeing Is Changing: “In general, we change our behavior when we expect to be seen. We never know when we’re being watched, so we act as if it’s all the time.”

The Never-Ending Now: “All media works us over completely… and leaves no part of us untouched, unaffected, and unaltered. The medium is the message.”

*Dan Gilbert Interview (Video): “Great short video on business, life, revitalizing your community, entrepreneurship and leadership.”