Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
Your goals are mile markers along your path. Therefore, it is essential that they align with what you truly want in life. No “shoulds.” Goals with a meaningful why behind them energize us. Whether your goal is building an app, becoming a surgeon, learning to dance, or earning all your income from your freelance passion—it’s creativity at work. In small, daily actions, you’re creating outcomes for yourself and, by extension, creating your life. So you must be clear about what you want those outcomes to be. Entire books have been written about goal setting, but to get you started, here are a few key principles. Write your goals down and refer to them regularly. Every day. Keep your goals few in number—three or four at most—so that you can focus on them. Assign each goal an appropriate window of time. The clearer the goal, the more likely you are to achieve it. So instead of “Learn to dance,” try “Dance the Macarena at my wedding.” Or, if you want to up the stakes, try “Land a spot on So You Think You Can Dance by next year.” To quote a fortune cookie I once ate, “If you don’t know where you want to go, how will you ever get there?” Habits Habits are nothing more than behaviors that have become automatic through repetition and reward. The strength of a habit has nothing to do with your inherent worth as a human being or any sort of natural talent. Habits get stronger when they’re reinforced—it’s that simple. The important part to remember is that you must approach all habits in a healthy way, from a place of self-care and love, not self-negation or masochism. Any habit can become unhealthy when the effort is coming from a place of “have to” or “should.” With small but consistent effort, anyone can build a new habit. Then the behavior simply happens when it’s supposed to, without much conscious thought. You find yourself automatically writing in your journal first thing each morning, reaching for water instead of soda, and so on. Creativity itself is a habit. It’s a behavior like any other, and it can be strengthened, even made automatic. If your creative work were an effortless, joyful experience of perfect flow every day, I don’t think you’d be reading this book right now. Either you’d be off creating something magical, or you’d be out there enjoying the rest of your life—radiating that special glow of creative fulfillment. But you’re not. And that’s okay. We’re all in this together.
Creative Calling
Chase Jarvis
Paine offered “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense” of the American condition—that it would only deteriorate should some temporary reconciliation be achieved. To back this contention Paine cited several conventional arguments, all demonstrating the divergence of British and American interests. But perhaps his most compelling point—not much noticed since—reminded Americans that blood had recently been spilled, and with its loss American affection for the “mother country” had drained away. American passions had been engaged in the struggle, and the passion that was directed toward Britain was hatred. The conclusion to this analysis seemed obvious: “Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream.”19 Much of what Paine wrote had already been said in the nine months following Lexington. The events of those months, giving evidence of the stubbornness and hostility of king and Parliament, made belief in reconciliation difficult to sustain. Common Sense helped Americans see just how far they had come in the struggle to protect their rights, made them see that they could not go back to the old relationship of 1763. If Paine was right not the king, nor the Parliament, nor the English people had any desire for the old arrangements. A part of what Paine was saying had been said by pamphleteers for a dozen years—there was a conspiracy afoot to enslave the colonies. But Paine went farther: he showed that the conspiracy inhered in the very structure of the Anglo-American arrangements. Because the conspiracy could not be separated from the monarchy or from the British constitution, the Americans, it seemed, had no choice. They must declare their independence. A declaration of independence might be only common sense, but Paine clearly believed that it would be more—it would indeed be a break in history. He told Americans of the importance of what they were doing in only a few sentences: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”
The Glorious Cause
Robert Middlekauff
When my eldest daughter, Elena, was about six years old, she and I decided that we were going to write a work we’d call The Rules of Life. The first rule we came up with was: Be here now. It’s a good survival rule. It means to pay attention and keep an up-to-date mental model. The second rule was: Everything takes eight times as long as it’s supposed to. That was the friction rule, which wilderness travelers will do well to heed.
Deep Survival
Laurence Gonzales
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise