You see, I have to write to know what I think. All my ideas sound brilliant in the echo chamber of my own mind. It is only when I put down my thoughts, letting them stand on their own strength, that I start to see the cracks and imperfections. (Location 58)
Note: Ahh so not only me who needs to write stuff down to understand it
10 Days of Vipassana: Meditation and the Nature of Attention (Location 209)
I had discovered first-hand a truth that seems both obvious and far too good to be true: that the default state of the human mind is happiness. This is why happiness is not an achievement to be attained — every single thing you add merely obscures what is already there. (Location 283)
Do you know what they found to be the #1 predictor of unhappiness across the entire study? Not paying attention to what you were doing. And it didn’t matter if the thing you were thinking about was more positive or negative than what you were doing. (Location 301)
Ask yourself this: when you have an idea, any idea, what do you do with it? Do you obsessively write every single one down, but never look at them again? Or do you let it pass, thinking “Well it probably wasn’t that good of an idea anyway”? Both these extremes represent people with low creative self-esteem — they don’t put much stock in their own ideas. The real potential of a digital organizational system is to be a tool for capturing and systematically reminding you of past ideas, inspirations, insights, and connections. The heart of creativity and innovation is making spontaneous connections between seemingly unrelated things, and note-taking programs can, when used correctly, serve as a cognitive exoskeleton, both protecting us from the ravages of forgetfulness and amplifying our blows as we take on creative challenges. (Location 796)
When I look at successful people, I notice again and again that it is this — the ability to systematically capture and review and deploy their ideas, further strengthening their creative self-esteem, leading them to value and generate more ideas, and so on in a virtuous loop — that really sets them apart. Not the original quantity or quality of ideas, not their brilliance from birth, not luck. (Location 809)
Network theory has been used to study a dizzying array of fields: from the spread of rumors and diseases; to the movement of fluid through pipes and electrical currents through circuits; (Location 844)
As long as we continue to think about habits in terms of simple, linear relationships instead of networks, we will continue to underestimate the difficulty of behavior change, be blindsided by complexity, and miss out on the powerful tools network theory puts at our disposal. (Location 894)
It’s ok not to know. It’s ok to feel confused and lost sometimes. Every single thing that happens, every thought and emotion, is designed to teach me something, if I’m willing to receive it. Every moment contains something worth being grateful for. The moment you (Location 1104)
How to Use Evernote for Your Creative Workflow (Location 1120)
To answer it, we have to drill down into Evernote’s original mission: “To give you a second brain” What does that mean exactly? What, in fact, would we use a second brain for? I want to dispel a myth: It’s not just “remembering things.” (Location 1132)
Evernote is most valuable not as a remembering tool, but as a thinking tool. (Location 1142)
Promoting unusual associations It’s been said in many different ways: creativity is connecting things, especially things that don’t seem to be connected. (Location 1167)
If you’re optimizing for security, you’d better not use cloud services at all, and store your data in encrypted files backed up to RAID 10s. (Location 1310)
The way to balance these competing priorities is to: Progressively summarize the most important points of a source in small stages (compression), and… Preserve each of these stages in layers that can be peeled back on demand (comprehensiveness). (Location 1427)
1 layer of compression (saving any notes on the source): 50% 2 layers (bolding the best parts): 25% 3 layers (highlighting the very best parts): 20% 4 layers or more (restating the ideas in my own words, applying them to my own context, creating summary outlines, etc.): 5% or less (Location 1456)
Read It. Later. (Location 1598)
The most popular options are: Instapaper Pocket (Location 1604)
There is something deeply, deeply unsatisfying about repeatedly starting something and not finishing it. This is what we experience all day at work, being continuously interrupted by a stream of “emergencies.” The last thing we want after a stressful day starved of wins is to fail even at reading an article. (Location 1683)
I have a different approach: waiting periods. Every time I come across something I may want to read/watch, I’m totally allowed to. No limits! The only requirement is I have to save it to Pocket, and then choose to consume it at a later time. (Location 1721)
As the inimitable Venkatesh Rao has written, (Location 1777)
I can’t do justice to Rao’s blog series linked above (it’s in 20 parts — you may want to save it for later reading), (Location 1786)
We’ve heard a lot in recent years about the importance of hands-on learning and practical experimentation. We get it. Burying your head in a book by itself gets you nowhere. (Location 1792)
send “liked” articles in Instapaper (Location 1823)
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” — William Blake (Location 1847)
Every conceivable email you receive can be handled by just 4 downstream systems: a digital calendar, a task manager, a reference app, and a read later app. (Location 1945)
You start thinking of your inbox as a to do list — that anyone anywhere can add items to at will. This habit becomes an addiction that grows to dominate your working life. (Location 2033)
You are essentially developing a rapid placeholding ability, delegating each task you identify — do this, store this, read this, delete this — to (Location 2051)
This method makes checking your email about as difficult as checking for new postal mail — you’re only deciding (Location 2055)
what work needs to be done, not doing it. (Location 2056)
Turn on keyboard shortcuts and you’ll be able to process a dozen emails at a time without touching your mouse, using only: compose: c reply: r reply-all: a forward: f archive: e send: cmd-enter (Location 2068)
That is our real goal — lowering our reactivity is an end in itself, because anything that forces you to react controls you. (Location 2131)
I will argue that the fundamental driver of creative work today is not values, goals, or processes, but unique states of mind. (Location 2153)
of high-performance — flowing with whatever comes. If you’ve learned how to find boredom useful by, say, keeping a stash of reading material handy at all times, you can find that 2-hour delay to be an opportunity. This is the second level — using whatever comes to your advantage. (Location 2356)
Brené Brown explains on a popular podcast aimed at young male urbanites how vulnerability — “the willingness to show up and be seen when you have zero control over the outcome “ — underlies all acts of real courage. Courage, of course, being more necessary than ever, and vulnerability as difficult as it’s always been. (Location 2385)
Emergent Productivity: A People-Centered Equation for Modern Work (Location 2401)
Immersion. Experimentation. Leverage. (Location 2515)
In the slow-moving, traditional business environment, problem solving was a straightforward 3-step process: (Location 2540)
Problem selection: (Location 2541)
Resourcing: (Location 2543)
Solution: (Location 2544)
Now that we’ve torn down the “old way,” what would it look like to solve problems in such a way that it gets better the faster we go? In three words: (Location 2556)
Immersion means intentionally exposing yourself to streams of ideas, people, and new capabilities, not with the goal of knowing everything, but to stay sensitized to developing opportunities and threats. (Location 2560)
Experimentation recognizes that our technological, networked world presents us with quickly falling downsides (Location 2563)
More experimentation leads to more failure, but that’s actually a good thing: the faster you fail, the faster you learn, because it is usually faster and cheaper to learn from failure than to attempt to anticipate and plan for every single thing that could go wrong. (Location 2567)
Leverage is the ability to rapidly shift resources to new, more fruitful directions. (Location 2569)
The Holy Grail of Self-Improvement (Location 2706)
it calls attention to the fact that the most difficult step is 0 to 1, not 1 to n. Doing something, anything, instead of nothing. The rest is just optimization. (Location 2791)
In other words, the voice of dopamine is not “That felt good!” It is “If you do this, then you’ll feel good.” Which explains that “one more…” feeling you get when eating dopamine-triggering foods like chips and fries, (Location 2855)
By the time you sit down to enjoy that hamburger and soda, the brain has already received enough of a reward in the form of anticipation to reinforce the craving for next time, even if you don’t actually enjoy more than the first few bites. (Location 2860)
I’d like to propose a framework for this type of learning that is both feasible and focused on the individual: experimental habit formation. (Location 3005)
study was mind-wandering. The more someone had their mind on something other than what they were doing, regardless of whether they were thinking about something more pleasant or less pleasant than what they were doing, the more unhappy they were likely to be both while mind-wandering and in general. (Location 3089)
Even in a robot servant utopia, with all our practical needs taken care of, human work will still have a purpose. To find or make meaning, to know thyself, to create beauty or value in the world. (Location 3234)
If “meta-learning” is learning how to learn, then meta-skills in this context involve “learning how to work.” Meta-skills are the skills you need to leverage other skills. (Location 3261)
Meta-skill (n): a skill that allows one to leverage other skills, made up of practical knowledge tied to an internal sense of self-efficacy (Location 3282)
Macro-laws (Location 3309)
Sometimes these macro-laws take the form of simple rules of thumb: “I’m more productive in the morning” or “I prefer a distraction-free environment.” (Location 3315)