Books
- Mastering three types of notes: fleeting notes, project notes and slip-box notes.
- When taking project/literature notes, try to be clear of the purpose – how would it fit into the big picture but be open to changes.
- Rephrasing an argument helps you to understand it better, like putting it in a different frame, different context.
- While writing things down might seem like a detour, not writing things down is a real waste of time.
- Measure daily productivity by the number of notes written (~6 notes per day). This would give us some level of certainty about what we can achieve in a day. Try to block time off for writing and break down the writing task into small pieces that can be finished in one go.
- Structure your writing but keep it flexible
- Read with a pen
- Take smart notes
- Connect them
- People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. So it follows that if you don’t know why you do what you do, how will anyone else?
- A big part of self-love is being protective of your time and energy: a heaven YES or a heaven NO. If I don’t feel completely aligned with something, I don’t do it because I don’t have the energy to spare. It is my job to like, love and respect me.
- People tell themselves that they are not genius or talented to avoid the responsibility of taking control of their lives.
- If I don’t do it, I will have to settle for a job I hate, make very little money, have 0 freetime for myself or anyone else & I will have to put up with it for the rest of my life, bored & frustrated.
- It’s better well done than well said. Knowledge is important but you have to do something with it to make it powerful.
- $$S^3$$ - Small Simple Steps
- Motivation = Purpose \times Energy \times Small Simple Steps
- The thinking hats
- The life you live are the lessons you teach.
- I can control the amount of care I put in.
- Ideas need to flow on smoothly from the previous paragraph, or it provides an easy link to the next.
- How the opening paragraph can lead me to the main points I want to make.
- How not to be wrong
- The missing bullet holes (survivorship bias): always ask what assumptions am I making? Are they justified?
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So good they can’t ignore you
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Upheaval
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Raising Girls Who Like Themselves
- Show your daughter that she can achieve what she wants through her efforts, and she can influence what happens in her life. Focus on what she can learn from a mistake so that she will become stronger and more determined. Break down and challenge catastrophic language and wishful thinking. Incorporate the “What Went Well” exercise into your daily conversations.
- Body confidence: Don’t talk about the appearance of your daughter’s body, your body or anyone else’s body. Value bodies for what they do rather than how they appear.
- Owns her body: Only you have the right to decide what happens to your body. Support her right not to give affection to adults. Allow her to make her own decisions about what she wears, how she cuts her hair and how she looks. The guiding principle: if it’s not harmful and it’s not permanent, then your daughter gets to decide. Refer to body parts with their correct names. Reinforce the rule that “no” always means “no” by complying with her wishes and not allowing any tickling or chasing games where girls say “no”.
- Calm: Play and sleep should be a priority. The enhancement activities can be slotted in only if and when there is free time.
- Independent and masterful: Her actions will make her feel independent and masterful, not your words. The road to mastery is paved with frustration, mistakes and discomfort. Rather than trying to protect your daughter from failure, help her to learn to fail well. Praise her effort, her persistence and her courage to do things that she finds hard. “Only do for her what she cannot do for herself”?
- Has strong relationships: Choose a select number of trusted adults who share the same values as you and ask them to be your daughter’s trusted adults now and into the future. Nurture these relationships now so that when your daughter is older, she will hopefully turn to one of her trusted adults for advice, rather than a peer or a celebrity or social media. Show your daughter that she’s a priority.
- Is herself: Let your daughter decide for herself who she wants to be and when she becomes it. Let her experience and express the full range of emotions, being able to speak up and stand up for herself, and not believing that she must please everyone all the time in order to be loved. You might not have the daughter you were expecting. Being disappointed that she does not always meet your hopes, dreams and expectations is natural and normal. It does not make you a bad person or a bad parent to feel this way. But for the sake of your daughter, you need to work through your grief so you are better able to love and nurture the beautiful, wonderful, unique daughter you do have.
Behaviour
- An ideal time to consider pursuing change is after a fresh start.
- Fight impulsivity (present bias) by making the activity fun: temptation bundling or gamification.
- Fight procrastination by creating constraints: hard commitments that involve tangible penalties or soft commitments that involve pyschological cost.
- Fight laziness by setting timely reminders and creating cue-based plans/checklists.
- A habit developed in an ideal environment won’t be as useful or robust as one honed more flexibly.
- Saying-is-believing: be a person who gives advice. Expectations shape outcomes.
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The design of everyday things by Don Norman (The piano staircase: Make it attractive but also get people to act)
- A set of tools to make time for what matters to you, divided into four steps: choosing a highlight each day, beating distractions, energizing your body to recharge your brain, and reflecting at the end of the day to make improvement.
Psychology
- Courage to be Disliked A provocative look at the problem of happiness:
- Your life is something you choose yourself and you are the one who decides how you live. The important thing is not what one is born with, but what use one makes of that equipment. You’ve got to focus on what you can make of your equipment. You are lacking in the courage to be happy.
- Why are you rushing for answers? You should arrive at answers on your own, and not rely upon what you get from someone else.
- Excuse for not changing: want to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open. Having simple tasks - things that should be done - while continually coming up with various reasons why one can’t do them sounds like a hard way to live, doesn’t it?
- No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on. That you, living in the here and now, are the one who determines your own life.
Fictions
- Came back to tell you I could fly
Papers
- The sheer willingness to put arguments down on paper & send it away to a journal distinguishes one from the mass of one’s colleages in the discipline.
- Everytime a decision comes up, the “qualitatively correct” choice will be made. The action in itself is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.