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.”

What I’m Reading – Week of January 23

* The Wrong Side of Right: “Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.”

* Sometimes Winning Means Knowing When to Quit: “Succeeding or failing in goals doesn’t have to be a black-and-white proposition; goals can come in shades.”

* Does Not Compute: “A lot of things don’t make any sense. The numbers don’t add up, the explanations are full of holes. And yet they keep happening – people making crazy decisions, reacting in bizarre ways. Over and over.”

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.”

That Time of Year

It’s that time of the year to review your wins and losses, review your goals and assess your progress, have a really honest conversation with yourself and do some actionable planning for the new year, intending to do shit that matters and actually get it done.

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.”