3-2-1: How to time travel, the power of reading, and being grateful when you don’t have what you want
Length: • 2 mins
Annotated by Tahsin Khan
3 IDEAS FROM ME
I.
“To experience time travel, read.
To achieve immortality, write.”
II.
“Do bold things with a pleasant and friendly demeanor.”
III.
“When you drink water from a cup, it becomes part of you. When water falls on you like rain, it evaporates a few minutes later.
Similarly, thoughts can be consumed or dismissed. Is this thought nourishing? Is this feeling something you should drink? Or is it more like getting caught in the rain?
You’ll always feel the rain, but you don’t have to drink the rain. You can let the thought pass and in a few moments the sun will return. You don’t have to claim everything you feel.”
2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS
I.
Singer and songwriter Bob Dylan on the advice his father gave him:
“Even if you don’t have all the things you want, be grateful for the things you don’t have that you don’t want.”
Source: Chronicles, Volume One
II.
Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”
Source: LIFE Magazine (May 24, 1963)
1 QUESTION FOR YOU
Which activities are the best expression of you? Can you spend five minutes doing one of them today?
Until next week,
James Clear
Atomic Habits, the #1 best-selling book
Atoms, the official Atomic Habits app
3-2-1 newsletter with 3 million subscribers
p.s. Who wants ice cream?
