Newsletter

Reasons to Write #339 From Eric Barker’s, “The 3-Step Evening Ritual That Will Make You Happy” Writing helped people suffering from depression, anxiety or PTSD. It helped their relationships too. But that wasn’t all … Their physical health improved as well. Women with breast cancer reported fewer symptoms and required fewer cancer-related doctor visits. People with asthma and arthritis “reported meaningful improvements in quality of life similar to benefits that would be expected by a successful new drug treatment.” ...

Learning a new skill this year? Putting your mind to learn programming? Looking to wow folks with your newly acquired French? A professional exam, you want to ace? And yet, as you look back over years of broken resolutions, you think it might not be worth it? That you aren’t cut out for learning physics on your own if you wanted to? That you are “slow”? Maybe that’s just because you haven’t realised that learning itself is a skill? That you need to learn, how to learn? ...

As the year draws to an end, here’s what the folks I follow read this year. Vishal Khandelwal, has a couple of short, sweet posts on “The Books That Made Me.” Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2. If you’ve already read (and reread) Taleb’s books, here’s a list of books he loves (and hates). Here is Ryan Holiday’s evergreen list and here’s what he was unto in 2018. Patrick Collison has a whole antilbrary. (via this ttfs episode). ...

Scott H Young on writing as a tool to sharpen your thinking. From the article … First, by jotting down your thoughts on paper, you can hold more ideas than you could in your limited working memory. This means you can more easily work through thoughts that have several parts which are difficult to keep in mind simultaneously. Second, writing allows editing. If I write down an idea, then later notice a contradiction further down the page, I can go back and edit it. Editing mentally quickly becomes exhausting as, like in the n-back task, the old information interferes with the new. ...