And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling "This is important! And this is important! And this is important! You need to worry about this! And this! And this!"&nbsp;And each day it's up to you to yank your hand back, put it to your heart and say "No, this is what's important."

"You don't learn to sail in stormy seas," Ricard says "You go to a secluded place, not to avoid the world, but to build avoid distractions until you build your strength and you can deal with anything. You don't box Muhammad Ali on day one."

The old adage that we should live every day as if it were our last usually means that we shouldn't wait until death is imminent to begin prioritizing the things that really matter. Anyone with a smartphone and a full email inbox knows that it's easy to be busy while not being aware that we're actually living.

On when to start prioritizing

How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

In Thrive, Arianna Huffington makes an impassioned and compelling case for the need to redefine what it means to be successful in today's world. Arianna Huffington's personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye--the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group--one of the fastest growing media companies in the world--celebrated as one of the world's most influential women, and gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she wondered is this really what success feels like? As more and more people are coming to realize, there is far more to living a truly successful life than just earning a bigger salary and capturing a corner office. Our relentless pursuit of the two traditional metrics of success--money and power--has led to an epidemic of burnout and stress-related illnesses, and an erosion in the quality of our relationships, family life, and, ironically, our careers. In being connected to the world 24/7, we're losing our connection to what truly matters. Our current definition of success is, as Thrive shows, literally killing us. We need a new way forward. In a commencement address Arianna gave at Smith College in the spring of 2013, she likened our drive for money and power to two legs of a three-legged stool. They may hold us up temporarily, but sooner or later we're going to topple over. We need a third leg--a third metric for defining success--to truly thrive. That third metric, she writes in Thrive, includes our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for compassion and giving. As Arianna points out, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success. They don't commemorate our long hours in the office, our promotions, or our sterling PowerPoint presentations as we relentlessly raced to climb up the career ladder. They are not about our resumes--they are about cherished memories, shared adventures, small kindnesses and acts of generosity, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. In this deeply personal book, Arianna talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritizing the demands of a career and raising two daughters--of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her "aha moment." Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and scientific findings in the fields of psychology, sports, sleep, and physiology that show the profound and transformative effects of meditation, mindfulness, unplugging, and giving, Arianna shows us the way to a revolution in our culture, our thinking, our workplace, and our lives.

books

Books

In Thrive, Arianna Huffington makes an impassioned and compelling case for the need to redefine what it means to be successful in today's world.   Arianna Huffington's personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye--the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group--one of the fastest growing media companies in the world--celebrated as one of the world's most influential women, and gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she wondered is this really what success feels like?   As more and more people are coming to realize, there is far more to living a truly successful life than just earning a bigger salary and capturing a corner office. Our relentless pursuit of the two traditional metrics of success--money and power--has led to an epidemic of burnout and stress-related illnesses, and an erosion in the quality of our relationships, family life, and, ironically, our careers. In being connected to the world 24/7, we're losing our connection to what truly matters. Our current definition of success is, as Thrive shows, literally killing us. We need a new way forward.   In a commencement address Arianna gave at Smith College in the spring of 2013, she likened our drive for money and power to two legs of a three-legged stool. They may hold us up temporarily, but sooner or later we're going to topple over. We need a third leg--a third metric for defining success--to truly thrive. That third metric, she writes in Thrive, includes our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for compassion and giving. As Arianna points out, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success. They don't commemorate our long hours in the office, our promotions, or our sterling PowerPoint presentations as we relentlessly raced to climb up the career ladder. They are not about our resumes--they are about cherished memories, shared adventures, small kindnesses and acts of generosity, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.   In this deeply personal book, Arianna talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritizing the demands of a career and raising two daughters--of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her "aha moment." Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and scientific findings in the fields of psychology, sports, sleep, and physiology that show the profound and transformative effects of meditation, mindfulness, unplugging, and giving, Arianna shows us the way to a revolution in our culture, our thinking, our workplace, and our lives.

Arianna Huffington

Thrive

I played with LEGO a lot as a kid, and I think that still is a big factor in how I build solutions to problems today. I build things with simple, modular blocks (which Google Sheets, Airtable and Notion are very good for), and as I’m building, or as I’m using the Thing I Built, I make lots of small tweaks and changes. I like to throw thigns at the wall, and see what sticks. A more-polished term for this style might be Emergent Design.

I still play w/ LEGO at age 34 (sorta)

When working on processes &amp; systems, I have a strong affinity for Punk Rock Process or Cockroach Process. Stuff that’s very simple, made with rudimentary or easily-accessible building blocks (like Sheets or Excel), and which can survive and stay functional during the chaos of a fast-moving startup that’s full of busy people with fragmented attention spans.

I like to set up ‘Punk Rock processes‘

Hacking on stuff — especially stuff that I might use while travelling, at a PAX or FIRST event — is a rabbithole where I can sink hours on tinkering and trying new ideas. I’m a sucker for trying to come up with a 'solution' to these kinds of situations that I think I’ll encounter in the future. It’s definitely a personality quirk that can frustrate me. Seeing this as a labour of love, and a way to broaden my skills and familiar with more building blocks, may help lessen that self-judgement.

I still fall into hacking rabbitholes

I have a lot of what I'll call labours of learning - they're fun as long as you feel like you're learning new things and increasing your mastery.

Labours of Love & Labours of Learning 

2021-04-02 - My main priority right now is to be a great husband and dad, and to get better at both of those, and this has been a really rewarding and satisfying experience for me. It helps to see and know that I'm getting better at these things.

2021-04-02 - When I look back at my time in high school, and to some extent during university and past that, I often put mental energy into trying to fit in with people who, even 5 years later, I've never thought about. I think this constrained me, and prevented me from feeling comfortable in my own skin. It's probably worth asking: Am I doing something similar today?

The more time we spend around someone, the more we tend to take for granted the nice things they do for us, and conversely we get exponentially more annoyed by the frustrating things they do.

2021-04-11

There are a lot of books that I've read, which I can't recite or clearly remember much of, but which have still shaped who I am and how I operate now. Having those memories isn't a really indicator of whether they will stick in ﻿some part of my brain.

The biggest killer of buying cheap, potentially low-quality parts or using cheaper vendors isn't that you have to buy the more expensive thing eventually. It's the hit you take to your schedule, both to replace the part in your design, and often to find out about the failure in the first place. There can also be timeline challenges with integrating the cheaper parts, due to poor documentation or reference designs.

2021-04-12

For anyone who has stumbled onto this article, I’m am writing it for myself. Specifically, I recently discovered deepstash.com, and I’m using this article as a workaround to put my own ideas into…

remotework

Remote Work

writing

Reading & Writing

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

education

Learning & Education

creativity

Creativity

Random Insights, Ah-has & Re-has

Key, overarching idea of the book:Our brain is 'driven' by 2 different parts: System 1 & System 2. System 1 can assess a situation and choose a response very quickly. It controls most of what we do, and is like the line-workers and middle management of our body & brain.System 2 is slower, more deliberate, and -- most crucially -- it's very lazy. It rarely engages unless it has to.

My analogy for System 1 & System 2: a functional team (whether a sports team or a startup) where all members are equally young & inexperienced, but 1 has been nominated the leader. This person has to sometimes step out of their default, reactive behaviours and act like the grown-up in the room, but it takes conscious effort to do that. Those are the situations when System 2 gets involved.

System 1 = your Automatic brain, and it's often ruled by emotions and feelings way more than we'd like.System 2 is your Deliberate brain.

Major New York Times bestseller Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011 A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Major New York Times bestseller Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011 A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.

Daniel Kahneman (born 5 March 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, notable for his work on behavioral finance and hedonic psychology.With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982), and developed Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in Prospect theory. Currently, he is professor emeritus of psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology.

Daniel Kahneman

Thinking, Fast and Slow

It occurred to me that there is a qualitative difference between cleaning the tiles and cleaning the floor. Cleaning the tiles is much easier, even though it looks the same from the outside, and the outcome is the same.

On taking on small tasks vs. 1 big task

One advantage to having stark checkerboard floor tiles in your bathroom is that it makes the floor much easier to clean. I pondered this midway though a home-based silent retreat, as I attempted to clean my bathroom like a monk […]

Thrive

Random Insights, Ah-has & Re-has

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Clean the Tiles, Not the Floor

Pat Martinson