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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Keep things for which you have a plan, limit the number of active plans, and limit the storage you allocate to inactive ones. Allocate your resources primarily to your current goals.
Folks who are overly hard on themselves will often discount their efforts in achieving a particular situation, saying, “I just got lucky.” instead of “That worked out great! I should approach similar problems that way again and see if it helps.” Listen to the language you use with yourself and keep it in line with what achieves positive change in your world.
Beware of spending so much time trying to come up with the perfect tool or method to do something that you never actually start. Nerds are particularly prone to this pattern of avoidance, sometimes spending hours trying to find the best software for a task that’s easier to do physically than digitally, or wasting days fiddling with the configuration of their tools. Ironically, a cheap and rudimentary tool can sometimes encourage use more than a highly polished one because it sets the best balance between “good enough” and “not too good to tinker with.”
Enjoy your finite attention. You are going to receive more demands upon your attention than you have time for. You will get too much email and, by all kinds of methods online and off, you'll find out about too many cool links and shows and books and hobbies and ideas for anyone to explore in one lifetime. Embrace this. If you're walking on the beach and pick up every shell you see, it will impair—not increase—your enjoyment. Pass things by without anxiety. In other words, delete, archive, recycle, and unsubscribe. Don't let things pile up in the hope that you can get to them someday. Let the
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Your brain produces thoughts in a stream of narrative just like—and I’m going to use an awful simile here, but it’s apt—just like your intestines produce excrement. You’ve got a lot of crap in your head and most of it isn’t true. —Martha Beck, sociologist and therapist
Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”
Talk about what you want, what you really really want. There are levels of intimacy you can't fall up into; you have to climb.
for choosing whether to keep or buy clothes: “Don’t ask, ‘Can I imagine wearing this?’ Instead, ask ‘Can I imagine this ever being the best possible thing in my closet to wear?’”
The truly free person is one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse. Learn to say no simply: “Sorry. I won't be able to join you.” Period.
If you’re not careful time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. —Charles Yu, author
The ups and downs of life, both the big and the small, are easier to ride out when you acknowledge that you're made up of many selves with different moods. Accept that you are who you are, in the mood you're in today. Recalibrate to that current baseline and try to do the things that today's me does best.
What do I love? With whom do I want to share my time? When do I feel most myself? How can I pare what surrounds me down to that which is right in this moment? What matters to me now? Why am I doing anything that doesn't bring me closer to this?
