Once you can improvise well, responding effectively without the need for conscious thought and deliberation, you know you’re getting close to mastery.
Author: Roger L Kneebone | Source: Psyche | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement
It is a strange and uncanny result of urban civilization and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. It has gradually become an industry, a profession and an imperative social need of the individuals in modern societies. Everyone strives for more and more leisure and knows less and less what to do with it. … [ Read more ]
Author: Masud Khan | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman called it “loafing.” The Buddhist tradition describes it simply as presence. Whatever we may call it, amid a culture of filling the existential void with cultish productivity and an endless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to enact such states of … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.
Author: Nisargadatta Maharaj | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Love, Wisdom
What is ordinary is that people look for something special. But what is special is when people settle down in the ordinary.
Author: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
Author: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Experience, Learning, Life & Society
We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.
Author: Émile Zola | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in … [ Read more ]
Author: Lewis Thomas | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Experience, Learning, Life & Society
This to me is the most consistent marker of real intelligence. The more acute someone’s ability to perceive and assess, the more likely that person is to recognize his or her limits. These include the unevenness of any one person’s talents; the specific areas of weakness—social awkwardness, musical tin ear, being stronger with numbers than with words, or vice versa; and the incomparable vastness of … [ Read more ]
Author: James Fallows | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.
Author: Anne Lamott | Subject: Personal Improvement
Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Author: David Foster Wallace | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry
You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
We are meaning-making creatures. We are quick to tell ourselves stories. And in those stories, we often cast ourselves as the hero and the other person as the villain because it’s an easy shortcut. It’s an easy trope, but it’s often not the full story.
Author: Amy Gallo | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Our brain perceives conflict as a threat, and our brain doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing between a small threat, like someone rolling their eyes at us, and a big threat, like being chased down by a bear. We often don’t make good choices in those moments because, in fight or flight mode, there’s really two options: I can shut down, or I can … [ Read more ]
Author: Amy Gallo | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
In a society characterized by freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, individuals bear “burdens of judgment,” as the American philosopher John Rawls wrote. Without the government or an official church telling people what to think, we all have to decide for ourselves – and that inevitably leads to a diversity of moral viewpoints.
Author: James Steiner-Dillon | Source: The Conversation | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society
One way to force yourself to think is to write. Good writing requires good thinking. Forcing yourself to make your thinking visible gives poor thinking nowhere to hide. You can’t simply take a few minutes here and there, get the gist of the problem, and expect to have clear writing. It doesn’t work that way.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress. When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human … [ Read more ]
Author: Tim Urban | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
In trying to impose its experience as a law to youth [Old Age] sins not only through ignorance, but from sheer selfishness. Parents try to impose their view of life on their children not merely or mostly to save those children from disaster — that to a certain extent and up to a certain age we must all do — but from possessiveness, from a … [ Read more ]
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Relationships
Acting is sinking your own personality in order that you may mimic another’s. Masquerading is borrowing another’s personality, putting on the mask of another’s features, dress, experiences, emotions, and thereby enhancing your own… Youth, and especially shy Youth, is strongly possessed by the instinctive desire to masquerade.
[…]
Masquerading bores Crabbed Age. Why?
Simply because the impulse to imaginative self-enhancement dies down as soon as liberty to … [ Read more ]
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior