Watching
/My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.
Clarence Buddinton Kelland
saying nothing
/Most people know how to say nothing but few know when.
other people
/Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Oscar Wilde
character
/The measure of a person’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
You Complete Me
/One of the most memorable scenes in the movie Jerry Maguire climaxes with the main character telling his estranged wife, “You complete me.” Many people understand the line to mean "I'm not a whole person without you." As if a person is like a machine missing a critical part until the "right one' comes along.
But you could also hear it as a statement of realization that "I finally see how we fit together." Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Or better yet, like two great works of art. The paintings or sculptures or rugs are beautiful on their own, yet together they create a new, compelling and intricate tapestry of vibrant colors.
Stephen Goforth
why we do it
/Nikki was driving through the Rocky Mountains with her daughter when their truck hit black ice and flipped over the guardrail. Nikki was knocked unconscious as the vehicle rolled over four times and landed on a barbwire fence. When five-year-old Mary couldn’t wake her bleeding mother, she didn’t sit and cry. Mary crawled out of one of the broken windows and climbed 150 feet to the road where she waved down at a passing truck. As emergency workers cut the roof off the truck to get Nikki out, Mary waited in one of the rescue vehicles. She asked a paramedic if her mother was dead. It would be three days before Nikki would wake up.
When Mary was later asked why she went for help on her own, the kindergartener said, “I needed to save my mom because I love my mom.”
Nikki and Mary recovered from their injuries at home. Mary was given an award for bravery.
Stephen Goforth
Recovery
/Outcomes by themselves don't really have an unambiguously positive or negative effect on your happiness. Yes, there are some outcomes—you get a terminal disease, or your child dies—that are pretty extreme, but let's leave those out. But if you think about it, the breakup that you had with your childhood girlfriend, or you broke an arm and were in a hospital bed for two months, when they occurred, you might have felt, “Oh my goodness, this is the end of the world! I'm never going to recover from it.” But it turns out we're very good at recovering from those, and not just that, but those very events that we thought were really extremely negative were in fact pivotal in making us grow and learn.
Raj Raghunathan quoted in the Atlantic
becoming
/It’s not what you are doing but what you are becoming.
the unfinished self
/The human self (is) not simply a finished product, a kind of entity, but a developing process. A self is not simply something I am but something I must become. To be sure, there is also a sense in which the self must have a kind of substantial reality, for there must be something that is undergoing the process of becoming. But the substantial reality of the self includes potentialities, and thus selfhood is a process in which a person must try to “become what one already is.” This unfinished self gives shape to itself through its choices; every decision I make is also a decision about what kind of person I want to be.
C. Stephen Evans, Introduction: Kierkegaard’s life and works
giving, pardoning, dying
/It is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life. – St Francis of Assisi
Listen Slowly
/Some years back, I was snapping at my wife and children, choking down my food at mealtimes, and feeling irritated at those unexpected interruptions through the day. Before long, things around our house reflected the pattern of my hurry-up style.
After supper one evening, the words of one of our daughters gave me a wake-up call. She wanted to tell me something important that had happened to her at school that day. She hurriedly began, “Daddy-I-wanna-tell-you-somethin’-and-I’ll-tell-you-really-fast.”
Realizing her frustration, I answered, “Honey, you can tell me... and you don’t have to tell me really fast. Say it slowly.”
I’ll never forget her answer: “Then listen slowly.”
Charles Swidoll
Top performers secret: They chunk it
/The idea that skill-which is graceful, fluid, and seemingly effortless--should be created by the nested accumulation of small, discrete circuits seems counterintuitive. But a massive body of scientific research shows that this is precisely the way skills are built--and not just for cognitive pursuits like chess.
Physical acts are also built of chunks. When a gymnast learns a floor routine, he assemblies via a series of chunks, which in turn are made up of other chunks. He’s grouped a series of muscle movements together in exactly the same way you grouped a series of letters together to form a Everest. The fluency happens when the gymnast repeats the movements often enough that he knows how to process those chunks as one big chunk, the same way that you process the above sentence.
From below, top performers look incomprehensibly superior, and see if they’ve leaped in a single bound across a huge chasm. They aren't nearly as different from ordinary performers as they seem. What separates these two levels is not innate superpower but a slowly accrued act of construction and organization: the building of a scaffolding, bolt by bolt and circuit by circuit.
Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code