Maria Popova

10 learnings from 10 years of Brain Pickings →

Published November 9, 2016  ·  All posts on Nov 9

And now, somehow, a decade has elapsed.

Because I believe that our becoming, like the synthesis of meaning itself, is an ongoing and dynamic process, I’ve been reluctant to stultify it and flatten its ongoing expansiveness in static opinions and fixed personal tenets of living. But I do find myself continually discovering, then returning to, certain core values. While they may be refined and enriched in the act of living, their elemental substance remains a center of gravity for what I experience as myself.

~ Maria Popova from, 10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings – The Marginalian

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Maria Popova’s site “Brain Pickings” is one of the true delights of the Internet. Take a few minutes to click over and see.

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Genius versus talent →

Published May 8, 2015  ·  All posts on May 8

…a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby-Dick, not even Whitman or Shakespeare. Nobody but Whitman could have written Leaves of Grass; Whitman was born to write Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write Moby-Dick.

~ Jack Kerouac from, Are Writers Born or Made? Jack Kerouac on the Crucial Difference Between Talent and Genius

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The other is a disease →

Published April 2, 2015  ·  All posts on Apr 2  ·  

This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes—things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.

~ C.S. Lewis from, C.S. Lewis on the Three Ways of Writing for Children and the Key to Authenticity in All Writing

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OK plateau →

Published January 15, 2014  ·  All posts on Jan 15  ·  

And so we get to the so-called “OK Plateau” — the point at which our autopilot of expertise confines us to a sort of comfort zone, where we perform the task in question in efficient enough a way that we cease caring for improvement. We reach this OK Plateau in pursuing just about every goal, from learning to drive to mastering a foreign language to dieting, where after an initial stage of rapid improvement, we find ourselves in that place at once comforting in its good-enoughness and demotivating in its sudden dip in positive reinforcement via palpable betterment.

~ Maria Popova, from The Psychology of Getting Unstuck

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Mastering the skill of observation →

Published September 21, 2013  ·  All posts on Sep 21

“In the field of observation,” legendary disease prevention pioneer Louis Pasteur famously proclaimed in 1854, “chance favors only the prepared mind.” “Knowledge comes form noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us,” neuroscience godfather Wilfred Trotter asserted. That keen observation is what transmutes information into knowledge is indisputable — look no further than Sherlock Holmes and his exquisite mindfulness for a proof — but how, exactly, does one cultivate that critical faculty?

~ Maria Papova from, The Art of Observation and Why Genius Lies in the Selection of What Is Worth Observing – The Marginalian

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What it means to be mortal →

Published August 5, 2013  ·  All posts on Aug 5

We, like all living things, want to live on — we want to project ourselves into the future, we have this will to live. And yet, unlike other living things, we have to live in a knowledge that this will is going to be thwarted, that we’re going to die. And so we might have to live with this sense of personal apocalypse — the worst thing that could possibly happen, will. This is what it means to be mortal.

~ Maria Popova from, The Philosophy of Immortality – The Marginalian

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