Join 📚 Roger's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .
When you tilt toward the good, you’re not denying or resisting the bad. You’re simply acknowledging, enjoying, and using the good. You’re aware of the whole truth, all the tiles of the mosaic of life, not only the negative ones. You recognize the good in yourself, in others, in the world,
Hardwiring Happiness
Rick Hanson
There’s a gravity and sense of importance inherent in deep work—whether you’re Ric Furrer smithing a sword or a computer programmer optimizing an algorithm. Gallagher’s theory, therefore, predicts that if you spend enough time in this state, your mind will understand your world as rich in meaning and importance. There is, however, a hidden but equally important benefit to cultivating rapt attention in your workday: Such concentration hijacks your attention apparatus, preventing you from noticing the many smaller and less pleasant things that unavoidably and persistently populate our lives. (The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom we’ll learn more about in the next section, explicitly identifies this advantage when he emphasizes the advantage of cultivating “concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.”) This danger is especially pronounced in knowledge work, which due to its dependence on ubiquitous connectivity generates a devastatingly appealing buffet of distraction—most of which will, if given enough attention, leach meaning and importance from the world constructed by your mind.
As Princeton Newport Partners closed I reflected on the proposition that what matters in life is how you spend your time. When J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world and manifestly not fulfilled, he said the happiest time of his life was when he was sixteen, riding waves off the beach in Malibu, California. In 2000, Los Angeles Times Magazine, speaking of new multibillionaire Henry T. Nicholas III of Broadcom Corporation, said, “It’s 1:30 a.m. He’s just turned 40—at his desk, in a dimly lit office. He hasn’t seen his wife and children, ‘my reason for living,’ for several days. ‘The last time we talked, [Stacey] told me she missed the old days, when I was at TRW and we lived in a condo. She told me she wants to go back to that life.’ But they can’t go back because he can’t let up.”
A Man for All Markets
Edward O. Thorp
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise