Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Two things happen when you stop holding back and start pursuing goals you actually want to achieve: PEOPLE WANT TO HELP YOU. When other people start to see how much you care, they want to join in. You find your tribe this way. We need other people, a community, to help us create the work and life we want for ourselves. THE PATH WILL PULL YOU. When you’re on your chosen path, you’ll find that you rarely need to push yourself to work. Instead, you begin to experience the joy and excitement of being pulled toward your objectives. If you’ve never felt the pull before, this may sound too good to be true. But it’s legit. Going after your authentic dream is a massive accelerant. There’s nothing more invigorating than pursuing your true calling instead of settling for adjacency: writing instead of editing, acting instead of agenting, being your own boss instead of working for someone else. You may truly want to be an editor or a talent agent or a manager—and that’s great. You simply have to figure that out for yourself. Just don’t tell yourself that settling for less than what you really want is the smart choice. It’s a fool’s bargain. That’s because you don’t even know what’s possible. Listening to what’s calling you and deciding to follow the path makes anything feel possible. Once you’ve felt that pull, you’ll never want to push again.
Creative Calling
Chase Jarvis
Second, refining encourages overconsumption. For example, making a glass of orange juice may require four or five oranges. It is very easy to drink a glass of juice, but eating five oranges is not so easy. By removing everything other than the carbohydrate, we tend to overconsume what is left. If we had to eat all the fiber and bulk associated with five oranges, we might think twice about it. The same applies to grains and vegetables. The problem is one of balance. Our bodies have adapted to the balance of nutrients in natural food. By refining foods and only consuming a certain component, the balance is entirely destroyed. People have been eating unrefined carbohydrates for thousands of years without obesity or diabetes. What’s changed, and recently too, is that we now predominantly eat refined grains as our carbohydrate of choice.
The Obesity Code
Jason Fung and Timothy Noakes
At the leading edges of science, at the threshold of the truly new, the threat has often nearly overwhelmed. Thus Rutherford’s shock at rebounding alpha particles, “quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life.” Thus Heisenberg’s “deep alarm” when he came upon his quantum mechanics, his hallucination of looking through “the surface of atomic phenomena” into “a strangely beautiful interior” that left him giddy. Thus also, in November 1915, Einstein’s extreme reaction when he realized that the general theory of relativity he was painfully developing in the isolation of his study explained anomalies in the orbit of Mercury that had been a mystery to astronomers for more than fifty years. The theoretical physicist Abraham Pais, his biographer, concludes: “This discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein’s scientific life, perhaps in all his life. Nature had spoken to him. He had to be right. ‘For a few days, I was beside myself with joyous excitement.’ Later, he told [a friend] that his discovery had given him palpitations of the heart. What he told [another friend] is even more profoundly significant: when he saw that his calculations agreed with the unexplained astronomical observations, he had the feeling that something actually snapped in him.”555 The compensation for such emotional risk can be enormous. For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real. Bohr especially understood this mechanism and had the courage to turn it around and use it as an instrument of assay. Otto Frisch remembers a discussion someone attempted to deflect by telling Bohr it made him giddy, to which Bohr responded: “But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.”556 Much later, Oppenheimer once told an audience, Bohr was listening to Pauli talking about a new theory on which he had recently been attacked. “And Bohr asked, at the end, ‘Is this really crazy enough? The quantum mechanics was really crazy.’ And Pauli said, ‘I hope so, but maybe not quite.’ ”557 Bohr’s understanding of how crazy discovery must be clarifies why Oppenheimer sometimes found himself unable to push alone into the raw original. To do so requires a sturdiness at the core of identity—even a brutality—that men as different as Niels Bohr and Ernest Lawrence had earned or been granted that he was unlucky enough to lack. It seems he was cut out for other work: for now, building that school of theoretical physics he had dreamed of.
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise