Seeing Victory

A plank 12” wide laying on the floor would be easy to walk. Place the same plank between two ten story buildings and “walk the plank” is a different matter. You “see” yourself easily and safely walking the plank on the floor. You “see” yourself falling from the plank stretched between the buildings. Since the mind completes the picture you paint in it, your fears are quite real. Many times a golfer will knock a ball in the lake or hit it out of bounds and then stop back with the comment, “I know I was going to do that.” His mind painted a picture and his body completed the action. On the positive, side, the successful gofer knows that he must ‘see’ the ball going into the cup before he strokes it. A hitter in baseball sees the ball dropping in for a base hit before he swings at the ball, and the successful salesman sees the customer buying before he makes the calls. Michelangelo clearly saw the Mighty Moses in that block of marble before he struck the first blow.

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Allowing grief

When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them. -Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger

First times

When is the last time you did something for the first time?  -John Maxwell

Worshiping the pursuit of extreme success

Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.  One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

Romantic interests

When it comes to men that are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do. -Randy Pausch

The uses and limits of numbers

The statistics can’t capture the true toll of the COVID virus. They can’t tell us what it’s like to work in an intensive-care unit, or how it feels to lose a loved one to the disease. They can’t even tell us the total number of lives that have been lost (as opposed to the number of deaths that fit into a neat category, such as those occurring within twenty eight days of a positive test). They can’t tell us with certainty when normality will return. But they are, nonetheless, the only means we have to understand just how deadly the virus is, figure out what works, and explore, however tentatively, the possible futures that lie ahead.

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

Brick walls

Brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.  -Randy Pausch

Living my thoughts

I had to surrender my clothes (when I entered the Nazi concentration camp) and in turn inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript (which I had hidden in my own coat), I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the main Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. How should I have interpreted such a “coincidence” other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?

Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

When I have learnt

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now .... When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. –C.S. Lewis

Chances and opportunities

When pessimists think they're taking a chance, optimists feel they're grasping a great opportunity.

Talking with Strangers

 A hefty body of research has found that an overwhelmingly strong predictor of happiness and well-being is the quality of a person’s social relationships. But most of those studies have looked at only close ties: family, friends, co-workers. In the past decade and a half, professors have begun to wonder if interacting with strangers could be good for us too: not as a replacement for close relationships, but as a complement to them. The results of that research have been striking. Again and again, studies have shown that talking with strangers can make us happier, more connected to our communities, mentally sharper, healthier, less lonely, and more trustful and optimistic. 

Joe Keohane writing in The Atlantic

'Life is hard'

When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard.'  I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?' -Sydney J. Harris

Meaning in Suffering

Having negative events happen to you decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life, according to a study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering." 

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

A difficult question

When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. -Daniel Kahneman

The Suburb within

You might live in the middle of a big city, but there could still be a white picket fence around your imagination. You can take the subway to work but still park your identity in a two-car garage. This is the inner suburbia, and you probably moved her long ago. You’ve learned to contain your longings and sympathies within a comfortable zone, measures and mediocre. To grow, you must move toward otherness. You must quit the ranch house of your soul and head for the forbidden place—your inner wilderness, inner bohemia, or even your inner inner city. The answer you need lie there, where you are least at home.

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

Problems

When I can’t help myself, maybe someone else’s problems can help me. –Andrew Boyd

Feedback

Some professors argue that they don’t want to hear their students talk about a subject because they don’t know enough… But I always think of piano teachers; they would never keep their students away from the keyboard simply because those pupils couldn’t yet play Mozart. Sure they have to endure a lot of bad notes, but they would never push someone off the bench and refuse to let them play until they somehow became better.

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do

Burning

What is to give light must endure burning. -Viktor Frankl

Two Things

My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour.  -John Newton, author of “Amazing Grace” born August 4, 1725

People are susceptible to being deceived by the trappings of science

"Although trust in science has important societal benefits, it is not a panacea that will protect people against misinformation. Spreaders of misinformation commonly reference science. Science communication cannot simply urge people to trust anything that references science, and instead should encourage people to learn about scientific methods and ways to critically engage with issues that involve scientific content." - study lead author Thomas O'Brien

From the abstract:

We identify two critical determinants of vulnerability to pseudoscience. First, participants who trust science are more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. Second, reminding participants of the value of critical evaluation reduces belief in false claims, whereas reminders of the value of trusting science do not. We conclude that trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience. 

Press Release 

Read the study is here