Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
THE COMMUNIST SUCCESSES in the central sector were mounting. Three days into what had started as an American offensive, the Chinese were now moving in on two of the prizes they had sought from the start, Wonju and Chipyongni. As the Chinese seemed ready to take Wonju, fears for Chipyongni grew. So far almost everything the Americans had done in Wonju had gone wrong, and the Communist victories had seemed like a continuation of what had happened around the Chongchon. Then, with both Wonju and Chipyongni at stake, the Americans caught a major break, the kind that can turn defeat into victory. On the morning of February 14, a small artillery spotter plane was flying over the Som River, which cut its way through the mountains northwest of Wonju. One of the observers, Lieutenant Lee Hartell of the Fifteenth Field Artillery Battalion, happened to look out. There, along the sandy beach of the river, was an unusually heavy tree line, or so he thought at first, a lot more trees than one usually saw in that area. He decided to look again. This time he noticed that the tree line was moving. It was not a tree line, he suddenly understood, but a vast Chinese force, seemingly well camouflaged, and so confident that they were moving en masse in daylight as they almost never did, and did not even freeze as they were supposed to when a plane came over. With victory so close and time so precious, they now had too little respect for their enemies and had simply ignored the spotter plane. Hartell and his stunned pilot placed the force at as many as two divisions, perhaps fourteen thousand men moving four abreast, almost surely on their way to the final battle for Wonju. Hartell radioed in his find and called for artillery fire. The battle was soon to be memorialized by the Americans as the Wonju Shoot.
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
That’s why a survivor must compartmentalize and set small goals. It would kill him not to. Simpson “felt crushed” as he realized that the movie had to start over—the friggin’ movie!—right from the first stupid clichéd reel. It was enough to make you do what all good survivors do: He laughed at himself. “This is getting ridiculous,” he said out loud. You become like a slapstick version of yourself, taking pratfalls and suffering impossible abuses, like Laurel and Hardy getting run over by a steamroller and getting back up again.
Deep Survival
Laurence Gonzales
Speaker 0: and there's a lot of ramifications of that is a swell. So, Brando, um, if your leisure pursuits are triggering neither of these issues, you're probably not gonna burn out, right. So if you're not overtaxing yourself, you'll stay up real late, working on programming. And if it's something you want to do, it's fun. I'm programming a computer game in my spare time, even though I program information systems for my job because I don't know. I like learning about programming computer games. I like this type of math. You're not really at risk of burnout. That's not how it works. Burn out is not caused by lack of diversity of activity. So a za long as you're doing these things because they're interesting to you and they're exciting and you are motivated, the work on them that's great. You have found something to do with your time outside of work that is exciting. You're motivated, the work on, and it's deep and interesting and so good. And if it begins to feel like a burden, if you're giving yourself really rigorous goals for your math, learning after work or something and you're staying up late to hit these goals and begins to feel like a burden, then that's a problem, and you might want to change course. But for the most part, I'm not worried. I'm not worried, right? So as long as you're not running down your body or forcing yourself to do things with your free time that you don't want to do, you have a lot more give and flexibility there than you might assume. Kurt asks, What's the ultimate? Why
Ep. 59: Why Be Productive?
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise