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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
hobby that requires a lot of time.
“In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.”
“Waste, carelessness, mistakes, loafing,” one poster read. “Help us stop them before they stop us.”
“When the Call Comes, Answer Present,” it urges. “When you are ‘Off’
One time-use expert told Juliet Schor, “We have become walking résumés. If you’re not doing something, you’re not creating and defining who you are.”
Social media has fed this obsession with performative busyness.
Pavlus asks if life hacking is, in truth, a way to focus on small, measurable tasks instead of asking ourselves big, hard questions about what we do with our time and what our larger priorities are.
when a culture is focused on individuals and not on communities, people tend to emphasize achievement over affiliation.
For centuries now, the Protestant faith has been among the most vigorous in declaring the virtue of work and the shamefulness of even short periods of idleness.
Community is an important word in this context, and it’s the reason I’m focusing first on language, because our work habits have severely interfered with our ability to create communities. Language is essential and important because humans survive not alone but in groups.
When we hear someone explain the same opinion in their own voice, we’re more likely to think they disagree because they have different perspectives and experiences. On a subconscious level, we make assumptions about the other person’s humanity based on the method they are using to communicate.
Empathy in service of belonging may be the underpinning of our basic moral code.
These are the essential qualities of a human being: social skills and language, a need to belong that fosters empathy, rule-making, music, and play. We excel at these things, and we need them in order to be healthy.
Those who’d been allowed to look online for information about zippers were more likely to think they knew more about everything they were asked, even weather, history, and food. Studies show that online research doesn’t make us much more knowledgeable, but it significantly increases our confidence in our knowledge.
“Our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a limited number of people in our social world.
Consider the difference between the goal of efficiency—adaptation to an existing environment—and the goal of resilience—the ability to adapt to changes in one’s environment. “Resilient systems,” writes Roger Martin in the Harvard Business Review, “are typically characterized by the very features—diversity and redundancy, or slack—that efficiency seeks to destroy.”
Because of that, feeling pressed for time can lead you to make bad choices about how to use your time.
you might discover that increasing your time perception (becoming aware of how you spend your time) will bring greater happiness than a higher salary.
I asked myself, What’s the ideal use of my time on a daily basis? I created a list of the things I wanted to do every day, plus the things I had to do, then spread them over my sixteen waking hours.
There are two kinds of rest: leisure and time off, or spare time.
You may dread small talk, but study after study shows that those conversations make you healthier, happier, and more relaxed. The benefits of authentic social interaction are immediate and primal. Set aside some time to talk with friends or make sure that you make contact with strangers when you’re out and about.
If you take away nothing else from this book, I hope you understand that human beings are at their best when they are social, and human minds work best in connection with other human minds. It may not be the most efficient way to live, but it’s the most likely to foster well-being.
socializing regularly can add as many years to your life as quitting smoking.
Brainstorm alone and evaluate or analyze as a group.
We rarely go anywhere now without finding the fastest, most efficient way to reach our destination.
Many of us become obsessed with means goals and completely lose sight of the more important end goal that should motivate all our efforts: living a good life.
You can use a version of Sakichi Toyota’s “Five Whys.” Keep asking yourself why until you ultimately arrive at your fundamental objective.
