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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Twyla Tharp
Read between
March 21 - April 19, 2020
The older I get, the more I say no.
Why didn’t I trust the voice that said I’m wasting time? Do this enough times and you learn to walk away instead of diving in.
dopamine-negative. The adrenaline surge around them is competitive and unwelcome.
We don’t get the feel-good chemical blast in their company
On the other hand, we all know people who put a smile on our faces. We look forward to seeing them with the same fizzy excitation...
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dopamine-p...
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good chem...
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We need to practice this state of being with like-minded souls in all aspects of our lives, from...
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this is not a completely outrageous way to segregate your universe of relationships. We already do this intuitively when we gravitate to cliques of like-minded people at work or rope off a few weekends each year just to spend time with our best friend from college.
Divide a page into two columns.
On the right side, list all the people whose appearance you anticipate with pleasure.
On the left side, list those you anticipa...
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Anticipating each person either gives you a positivity...
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You’re not judging people’s social grace or sweet temper or agreeability, only your level...
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dopamine-positive side includes a few...
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Next, calculate how much time you spend with peop...
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Are you surrounding yourself with people who bring the best out of you or wasting time with...
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Now that you know, how do you fe...
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Give yourself permission to say no next time to one of the people on the ...
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Henri Matisse
Fight fight fight—keep chipping at the status quo bias, keep chipping at the funk.
Matisse wrote, “My destination is always the same but I work out different routes to get there.”
Matisse’s work never abandoned his pledge to find joy in the world around him.
Matisse holds a living dove in his left hand and, with his right, sketches this bird as an exuberant celebration of life.
optimism is a discipline and it was this that steeled Matisse to work through his very last days. “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
Agatha Christie novels. There are sixty-six of them,
“closed room” murder mysteries—
The older you get, the more you need motivation to keep going.
Like all motivators, anticipation works on the pleasure principle—the desire to increase pleasure, decrease pain.
“Few enterprises of great labor or hazard would be undertaken if we had not the power of magnifying the advantages we expect from them.”
When we work toward a goal and achieve it—a
a part of our brain (specifically, our frontal cortex) is bathed with dopamine, which stimulates our pleasure centers.
The pleasure produced by dopamine isn’t about reward. It’s about the anticipation of reward.
anticipation. It sags when we have nothing to look forward to.
It fades after we’re rewarded for doing the work. It peaks somewhere in the middle when we are flush with feelings of expectation an...
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I could now understand my lethargy on empty days. I was suffering from dopamine deprivation because I had nothing to anticipate. I missed the blast.
Any time we reach from a beginning to a goal far forward—say, solving a crime or continuing to uphold a pledge for many years—it is anticipation that will keep us on our course.
two primar...
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our anxiety that things wi...
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hopes that they will...
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translate either feeling into action is through plannin...
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Plan plan plan. Get into the smallest details.
you can use visualization as you anticipate and plan for your future.
both the thrill of excitement we feel in anticipating a happy outcome and the anxiety in contemplating how things might go awry are valuable.
The trick is to always prepare for the worst case a...
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Perhaps you’re like me when you start your day. You hope things will go smoothly but anticipate that they might not.
Left unchecked, this can turn into rumination, but if monitored and harnessed, it can be made active.
Used correctly, this is realism, n...
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It means we acknowledge the possibility of obstacles—and ...
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as invited participants, we deserved the courtesy of being presented at our best.
