What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included. And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.
~ Michel de Montaigne
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The History of Philosophy is an interactive tool enabling users to dig into a visual timeline of 2,500 years of philosophical thought and discover lines of agreement and divergence.
~ Ahmed Kabil from, The History of (Western) Philosophy
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I glanced at this when it appeared in my RSS feed and I had two simultaneous thoughts: “Wow, I should really dig into—” And, “RUN AWAY!” Because, this is exactly the sort of maximally complicated data visualization that I would create.
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One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
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Here is what we seem to have forgotten: America is not some finished work or failed project but an ongoing experiment. And it is an experiment that, by design, will never end. If parts of the machine are broken, then the responsibility of citizens is to fix the machine—not throw it away.
~ James Mattis from, The Enemy Within
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I’ll just drop that there.
…and I’ll go on to add that it’s interesting how, through loops and curly-Q’s, I often find myself at the same place. There’s a copy of The American Idea: The Best of The Atlantic Monthly in my currently-reading stack.
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To act on whatever our intentions might be to make the world better requires something more than individual action It requires, in almost every case, people who may have little connection with each other, or who may even be on opposite sides of a question, to decide to come together for some common good.
~ Peter Block
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Embracing a growth mindset means to get pleasure out of changing for the better (inward rewarding) instead of getting pleasure in being praised (outward rewarding.) […] to seek as many opportunities to learn as possible is the most reliable long-term growth strategy.
~ Sönke Ahrens from, How to Take Smart Notes
Ahrens of course discusses, and gives credit where credit is due, to Carol Dweck’s ideas. (See Dweck’s, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.) Her comment about “reliable long-term growth strategy” struck me as insightful. Her use of, “most reliable,” is an understatement. What other strategy would even be reliable?
If I want to grow, I need to learn. If I want to learn, I need to maximize those opportunities.
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When you start to see your world as something more in line as a tool and an obstacle to interact with, play with, you’re going to take that lesson and look at other obstacles in your life. Your relationships, your job, your work, your health even. All these things are going to be so strongly ultimately affected by this tiny little change of yourself and your city.
~ Caitlin Pontrella
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By definition LC is about dietary carbohydrate restriction. If you are reducing carbohydrates, your proportional intake of protein or fat, or both, will go up. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with a high fat diet, it seems to me that the true advantage of LC may be in how protein is allocated, which appears to contribute to a better body composition.
~ Ned Kock from, Dietary protein does not become body fat if you are on a low carbohydrate diet
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Zoinks! This short article is dense. I read each paragraph. Then slowly reread the paragraph, squinting slightly and turning each sentence over in my mind. It feels like there’s at least one actionable-item, (something to start doing, or something to stop doing,) in every paragraph. I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years trying to learn what I can about all the things in this article. It’s a beautiful assembly that backs up the thesis in the first paragraph, (which is quoted entirely above.)
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Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.
~ Michel de Montaigne
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This is where the spacing effect comes in. It’s a wildly useful phenomenon: we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions. We can leverage this effect by using spaced repetition to slowly learn almost anything.
~ Shane Parrish from, The Spacing Effect
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It’s funny how ideas percolate in the brain. This article and another one, (back on the 29th, which is further down in this weekly email,) passed through my radar within a couple of weeks. (I can tell because my general digital reading pile is a FIFO queue.) They were read a few times, but again in relative closeness in time. And they both ended up making the cut to be blog posts.
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