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The surprisingly difficult art of doing less
Chasing after the next goal
In our consumer culture, we end up buying more and doing more. To be satisfied is almost considered an offense because it means you're not chasing after the next thing.
Part of the same vicious cycle of wanting more is the desire for continual self-improvement and the development of other competencies.
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8
Key Ideas
Increase Your Powers of Observation
Learn how to notice small details.
It's not a superhuman ability. It's important to note when talking about Holmes that he has spent a lifetime cultivating the habits of mindfulness. So it's not like he was just born with this ability to be in touch with the world. What we choose to notice or not notice is a way of framing it in our own mind. We have a lot of bad habits in our mind, and we have to retrain ourselves to really notice the world. Everything we do rewires the brain, but we can rewire it in a way that mindfulness eventually becomes less of an effort. -- Konnikova
Force Yourself to Slow Down
Give yourself monthly or daily challenges to form a new habit of observation.
Ideas could include trying new foods weekly and writing about them, noticing the color of a co-worker's shirt every day, or even just looking at a new piece of art closely once a day.
The idea is to gradually teach yourself to notice small details in your environment and daily life.
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Key Ideas
Loneliness is a perception issue
Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have: it is just as possible to feel very lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact.
Dealing with loneliness through creativity
One way people have always dealt with loneliness is through creativity. By metamorphosing their reality into art, lonely people throughout history have managed to interchange the sense of community relationships could foster with their creative outputs.
The artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is known for his paintings of American cityscapes inhabited by closed-off figures who seem to embody a vision of modern loneliness.
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Key Ideas
Never stop learning
Research shows that people with more education have a greater cognitive reserve and this works as a protection in the face of mental decline.
But there's a twist to it: educated people t...
Crosswords
Cognitive activities like crossword puzzles, reading or playing music may delay memory decline among people who eventually developed dementia.
Stereotype threat
It happens when a person is in a situation where they are anxious that they may conform to a negative stereotype aimed at his or her social group.
Positive stereotypes, or success on previous memory tasks, can help combat this negativity.