...It’s a sign of maturity to be able to hold on to two conflicting desires or two opposing ideas at the same time without immediately rejecting one or the other, before there has been time for a careful discernment. To live with desire is to live with tension...
...As we’ve seen, the passing of time is judged in two ways – prospectively, as it happens, and afterwards, retrospectively. When you judge time prospectively it is easy to see that, as I’ve been discussing, attention and emotion both play a part; but when you look retrospectively and try to guess how long an event took, it is a third factor that shapes your answer – memory...
...Everyone asks how you got together; nobody asks how you stayed together. And it’s the latter that is often the real achievement to be proud of....
...In a climate of constant uncertainty, it’s tempting to be cautious with our joy; to hold our breath, wait for the other shoe to drop. Anticipating disaster can give us an illusion of control. But it doesn’t make us free...
...When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities)...
...All of this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes...
...doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people...
...The same activities that take us from failure to survival would also take us from survival to success—if we would just keep doing them...
...The key to deep practice is to reach. This means to stretch yourself slightly beyond your current ability, spending time in the zone of difficulty called the sweet spot. It means embracing the power of repetition, so the action becomes fast and automatic. It means creating a practice space that enables you to reach and repeat, stay engaged, and improve your skills over time...
...Essentialism was about doing the right things; Effortless is about doing them in the right way...
...we can develop competence just as well by subtracting. The problem is that it can be harder to show competence by subtracting. No matter how beneficial an act of subtraction is, it’s not likely to leave as much evidence of what we’ve done...
...Our yearning for certainty leads us to pursue seemingly safe solutions But it’s only when we sacrifice the certainty of answers, when we take our training wheels off, and when we dare to wander away from the street lamps that breakthroughs happen. If you stick to the familiar, you won’t find the unexpected. Those who get ahead in this century will dance with the great unknown and find danger, rather than comfort, in the status quo...
...Having a purpose simply means knowing why you’re gathering and doing your participants the honor of being convened for a reason...
...Don't be afraid to be pushy and loud when you are championing he idea of someone less powerful than you, or someone with less of a voice. You should not speak up for someone more powerful as you will appear as a suck up...
...“I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen,” he said. “If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.”...
