Silence
/A man is known by the silence he keeps. - Oliver Herford
Baby Steps
/Many of us.. have great dreams and ambitions. Caught up in the emotions of our dreams and the vastness of our desires, we find it very difficult to focus on the small, tedious steps usually necessary to attain them. We tend to think in terms of giant leaps toward our goals. But in the social world as in nature, anything of size and stability grows slowly. The piecemeal strategy is the perfect antidote to our natural impatience: it forces us to think in terms of a process, a sequence of connected steps and actions, no matter how small, which has immeasurable psychological benefits as well. Too often the magnitude of our desires overwhelms us; taking that small firs step makes them seem realizable. There is nothing more therapeutic than action.
In plotting this strategy, be attentive to sudden opportunities and to your enemies momentary crises and weaknesses Do not be tempted however, to try to take anything large; bite off more than you can chew and you will be consumed with problems and disproportionately discouraged if you fail to cope with them.
Robert Greene
The 33 Strategies of War
A man is his own easiest dupe
/A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true. - Demosthenes
Humility
/Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people CALL ‘humble’ nowadays: he will not be a greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a bit envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
Your job
/Make good more attractive than evil.
Delighting in Life
/You can't outwit death anyway by "progress" or accumulating wealth; so why not accept your fate, choose values which are authentic, and let yourself delight and believe in the being you are and the Being you are part of?
Rollo May, Love & Will
Saving millions of pounds of unsold produce from being destroyed
/#GOODNEWS
When George Ahearn heard that farmers were destroying unsold produce, he arranged for trucks to deliver 3 million pounds of it to food banks across the state of Washington. Read more here.
Simple & hard things
/Make simple things easy, and hard things possible.
How Birth Order affects you
/Everyone takes it personally when it comes to birth order.
Children and parents alike are profoundly affected by the constellations of siblings.. But that doesn’t mean the effects of birth order are as clear or straightforward as we sometimes make them sound. Indeed, birth order can be used to explain every trait and its precise opposite. I’m competitive, driven — typical oldest child! My brother, two years younger, is even more competitive, more driven — typical second child, always trying to catch up!
“Too many parents are haunted by experiences both good and bad that they identify with their birth order,” said Dr. Peter A. Gorski, a professor of pediatrics, public health and psychiatry at the University of South Florida. And that might lead them to classify their own children according to birth order, he went on, which in turn can lead to a sense of identification or even rejection and to “self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“Birth order doesn’t cause anything,” (says) Frank J. Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley Dr. Sulloway said. “It’s simply a proxy for the actual mechanisms that go on in family dynamics that shape character and personality.”
Now, of course birth order played into my patients’ patterns, but so did gender and birth spacing and, above all, temperament.
"I wouldn’t discount the impact of birth order,” Dr. Gorski told me. “It sets up the structure of one’s place in relation to others from the beginning, as we learn how to react to people of different ages and different relationships.”
Perri Klass writing in the New York Times
the hardest teacher
/Experience is the hardest teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. -Vernon Law
Sunk Cost Fallacy
/We all have seen the sunk cost fallacy in action at some point, whether it be sitting through that bad movie because we have already paid for it or finishing that awful book because we were already halfway through. Everyone has been in a situation where they ended up wasting more time because they were trying to salvage the time they had already invested. A sunk cost, also known as a retrospective cost, is one that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered by any additional action. The sunk cost fallacy refers to the tendency of human beings to make decisions based on how much of an investment they have already made, which leads to even more investment but no returns whatsoever. Sometimes, hard as it is, the best thing to do is to let go.
A way to save yourself from this cognitive bias is by focusing on future benefits and costs rather than the already lost past costs. You have to develop the habit, hard as it is, of ignoring the previous cost information.
Rahul Agarwal writing in Built in
The main thing
/The main thing in life is not to be afraid to be human. –Pablo Casals
Success is..
/Knowing my purpose in life.
Growing to my maximum potential.
Adding value to others’ lives.
John Maxwell
A lot of happiness
/A lot of happiness is overlooked because it doesn’t cost anything
Alone
/What can you ever really know of other people's souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.
CS Lewis, Mere Christianity