Personal

Shane Parrish’s highlights from this gem of a Ted Talk by Kahthryn Schulz. … The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is that we just assume they are ignorant. You know, they don’t have access to the same information we do and when we generously share that information with them, they are going to see the light and come on over to our team. When that doesn’t work. When it turns out those people have all the same information and they still don’t agree with us we move onto a second assumption. They’re idiots. They have all the right pieces of the puzzle and they are too moronic to put them together. ...

From a Ryan Holiday post on journalling, “I don’t journal to “be productive.” I don’t do it to find great ideas, or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me. Morning pages are, as author Julia Cameron puts it, “spiritual windshield wipers.” It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found. To quote her further…: ‘Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.’” ...

From What Does Immersing Yourself in a Book Do to Your Brain? … Reading allows us to try on, for a few moments, what it truly means to be another person, with all the similar and sometimes vastly different emotions and struggles that govern others’ lives. The reading circuitry is elaborated by such simulations; so also our daily lives, and so also the lives of those who would lead others. The novelist Jane Smiley worries that it is just this dimension in fiction that is most threatened by our culture: “My guess is that mere technology will not kill the novel. . . . But novels can be sidelined. . . . When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people . . . who have no way of understanding us or each other.” It is a chilling reminder of how important the life of reading is for human beings if we are to form an ever more realized democratic society for everyone. ...

Riffing off last weeks mail on reading, Scott H Young has a really thorough, helpful post on how to take notes, while reading. Starting with the why, and then onto various strategies on how to take notes, the post is well worth your time. P.S. If you like my emails, forward it to your friends and ask them to subscribe too!

Abby lost her grandmother this week. This is her eulogy to her. She was Aunty Matty to other people, mummy to her children and countless other fond names to who knew her. But she was my Nana. I have memories of her cradling me, and taking care of me as a baby. Vacations at Nana’s were the highlight of my childhood years. She was a tireless, hard working woman who raised her large family to the best of her abilities. And not just her family, but also (to me it seemed) the whole neighbourhood. She was loved and appreciated, just by about everyone whose life she touched. ...

You will always be my sweet sixteen, Nana! I love you.