More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 26 - May 12, 2025
Once you see it’s just unavoidably the case that you’ll only ever get to do a fraction of the things that in an ideal world you might like to do, anxiety subsides, and a new willingness arises to get stuck in to what you actually can do.
The main point – though it took me years to realize it – is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it’s part of any system or habit or routine.
Systems and schemes for self-improvement, and ‘long-term projects,’ all feed this fantasy: you get to spend your time daydreaming that you’re on the superyacht, master of all you survey, and imagining how great it’ll feel to reach your destination.
you’re pretty much free to do whatever you like. You need only face the consequences.
The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.
research suggests that many ‘insecure overachievers’ start off as children raised to feel noticed and valued only when they’re excelling at things.
My favorite way of combating the feeling of productivity debt in everyday life is to keep a ‘done list,’ which you use to create a record not of the tasks you plan to carry out, but of the ones you’ve completed so far today – which makes it the rare kind of list that’s actually supposed to get longer as the day goes on.
actions don’t have to be things that we grind out, day after day, in order to inch ever closer to some elusive state of finally getting to qualify as adequate humans. Instead, they can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are.
Moving more quickly through an infinite incoming supply of something never gets you to the end of it.
any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now.
What is worry, at its core, but the activity of a mind attempting to picture every single bridge that might possibly have to be crossed in future, then trying to figure out how to cross it?
(What the novelist E. L. Doctorow said about novel-writing applies to everything else, too: it’s ‘like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’)
It’s that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you’ll never know in hindsight, either – because no matter how great or appalling the consequences of heading down any given path, you’ll never learn whether heading down a different one might have brought something better or worse.
Perfectionists love to begin new endeavors, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven’t done any work on a project, it’s still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal in your mind.
The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’ as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security.
you flatter yourself that you’re going to be able to follow it impeccably, day after day – even though, were you to reflect on it, you’d probably agree that your life is too unpredictable for that, and your moods too much of a rollercoaster. ‘Dailyish’ is a much more resilient rule: it’s less of a high-wire act, where one mistake could end everything.
‘Dailyish’ is one that does. In not insisting on your doing something absolutely every day, it shifts the focus away from the ultimately meaningless question of whether or not you have an unbroken chain of red Xs, and back to the life it’s supposed to be serving – to the thing you’re seeking to bring into existence, whether that’s a piece of writing, a work of art, a happy family, a healthier body, or anything else.
you’ll make the most progress, and cover the most ground, if you limit yourself to about three or four hours of intense mental focus each day.
The first is to try – to whatever degree your situation permits – to ringfence a three- or four-hour period each day, free from appointments or interruptions. The equally important second part is not to worry about imposing much order on the rest of the day:
First, there’s the problem itself. But then there’s the way in which the very existence of any such problems undermines our yearning to feel perfectly secure and in control. So we spend our lives leaning into the future, unconsciously deeming whatever’s happening now to be fundamentally flawed, because it’s marred by too many problems. And quite possibly deeming ourselves to be fundamentally flawed, too – or else wouldn’t we have figured out some way to eliminate all these problems by now? Yet the reality, as Harris goes on, is that ‘… life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t
...more
‘I choose to live in Easy World, where everything is easy.’ When some daunting challenge barrels into view, just decide that you’re going to experience it as easy instead.
when you do what you feel like doing, you get to use your desires as fuel for action, rather than constantly diverting energy and attention to overcoming them.
‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else.
act on a generous impulse the moment it arises. The point isn’t to try to render yourself more generous than you already are, but just to notice the moments when you naturally and effortlessly feel that way anyway, then not to screw it up with overthinking.
other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems. This is one more area in which the best thing to do, as a finite human with limited control, is usually not to meddle, but to let things be.
it’s a fool’s errand – and a flagrant denial of your finite power over reality – to make your sense of feeling OK dependent on knowing that everyone around you is feeling OK, too.
‘if you can’t do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone.’
Going through life with a rigid commitment to the elimination of interruption and distraction might seem like a way to stay more absorbed in what’s happening. Yet in fact it pulls you out of it, by undermining your capacity to respond to reality as it actually unfolds – to seize unexpected opportunities and to be seized by an awe-inspiring landscape or fascinating conversation; to let your mind take an unplanned journey into fertile creative territory, or to find enjoyment, as opposed to annoyance, in a small child bursting into your study, while fulfilling your obligations as a parent.
As a concept, scruffy hospitality would be valuable enough if all it conveyed was permission to put a little less effort into keeping a pristine home. But King was pointing to something deeper: being willing to let others see your life as it really is can be a positive act of generosity towards them, too.
we’re all in the same predicament leaves me feeling supported by others in what I do, rather than engaged in stress-inducing, zero-sum competition against them.
It’s nice to collect memories, of course, but the way to do that isn’t to go about trying to collect them. It’s living them as fully as possible, so as to remember them vividly later.
You won’t feel like you know what you’re doing. But nobody ever does; that’s just how it is for finite humans, attempting new things. The main difference between those who accomplish great things anyway and those who don’t is that the former don’t mind not knowing. They were not less flawed or finite than you. Everything they ever did was done by people.
