Deliberate Practice

Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.

I’m summarizing this research here because I want to make a provocative claim: understanding this “right type of work” is perhaps the most important (and most under-appreciated) step toward building a remarkable life…

Morgan Housel

I've learned that short-term thinking is at the root of most of our problems, whether it's in business, politics, investing, or work.

I've learned that debt can cause more social problems than some drugs, yet drugs are illegal and debt is tax deductible.

I've learned that finance is actually very simple, but it's made to look complicated to justify fees.

Coder's High

These days I write more than I code, but one of the things I miss about programming is the coder's high: those times when, for hours on end, I would lock my vision straight at the computer screen, trance out, and become a human-machine hybrid zipping through the virtual architecture that my co-workers and I were building. Hunger, thirst, sleepiness, and even pain all faded away while I was staring at the screen, thinking and typing, until I'd reach the point of exhaustion and it would come crashing down on me.

It was good for me, too. Coding had a smoothing, calming effect on my psyche, what I imagine meditation does to you if you master it.

Timing of things

It did not take long for Dandolo to hear of the cardinal’s plan. In a testy exchange, the doge told Peter that if he was going to forbid the conquest of Zara he should do so immediately, while they were still in Venice. Peter politely declined. The two men understood each other perfectly. Both had the same secret, and both planned to use it for their own very different ends.

Charles James

Charles James, on the Economist,

[Fashion] is what is rare, correctly proportioned, and though utterly discrete, libidinous.

Self-competency

There are countless experiences in life that create fear for doing things, and we are much better at picking up more fears on the way than we at addressing and confronting them.

The self-help books try to boost the “confidence” part of self-confidence, but the real problem is the “self” part. The self, as writers have noticed for centuries, is an unstable, fickle, vain and variable thing. Hundreds of years ago, David Hume noticed that when he tried to enter into what he called his most intimate self, he always stumbled on some particular perception or another. He never could catch himself without a perception of something else, and he never could see himself, only the perception.

So instead of talking about self-confidence, the author suggests that we look to our competence in a situation:

The person with the self-confidence mind-set starts thinking about his own intrinsic state. The person who sees herself as the instrument for performing a task thinks about some external thing that needs doing. The person with the confidence mind-set is like the painfully self-conscious person at a dinner party who asks, “How am I coming across?” The person with an instrumentalist mind-set is serving a craft and asks “What does this specific job require?” The person with a confidence mind-set is told “Believe in yourself.” This arouses all sorts of historical prejudices and social stereotypes. The person with an instrumentalist mind-set is told “Look accurately at what you have done.”