Ample and quality sleep is one of the most important, and sadly neglected, elements of a sound mind and body.
~ Jarlo Ilano from, 5 Quality Sleep Strategies to Feel Well-Rested and More Productive
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(Emphasis mine.)
No.
Sleep is the most important part of my life. No exceptions. No equivication. No weasel words.
Sleep. Sleep? SLEEP!
Despite my issue with his characterization of the degree of importance, Ilano’s article is a good overview of some basic sleep ideas.
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So it stands to reason that if you want a clean house (or anything else) you have to a) put in the effort to get it there — completely there — and then b) police it for little broken windows. Things sitting out. Tasks that have been ignored once. Duties that have been ducked once. Promises that have been broken once. Twice is too late; you have to start again.
~ David Cain from, How to Fight Crime by Making Your Bed
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The broken window theory is, in fact, very much open to debate. But setting that aside for a moment.
I definitely have a habit of chasing things down to their root cause on the first instance of trouble. I’m not anywhere close to perfect! But my first instinct is to stop what I’m doing and figure out what that thing just happened. I’m an imaginer of processes. I go around trying to find one solution which fixes two things, or better yet, fixes two things by fixing one and eliminating a second.
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But what if we blocked all of our exits, and stopped ourselves from numbing out or escaping being present to our feelings and the moment in front of us?
~ Leo Babauta from, Refraining From Letting Ourselves Numb Out
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What if indeed!
Much of my personal changes arise from observing my habitual behavior and then putting up some sort of road block (or at least adding some friction) to derail me when I head for the habitual behavior.
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Now I realize I was not giving up anything of any use to anyone. The news never really added to my knowledge in any meaningful way. It just added a steady stream of limited and unsubstantiated viewpoints on select issues to my head, which is already full of limited and unsubstantiated viewpoints. The news doesn’t inform you about what’s happening in the world. The news only informs you of what’s on the news.
~ David Cain from, There’s Nothing Small About the World
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One of the first steps I ever took in turning my life around was to get a handle on my information “diet.” In the beginning, there was TV. I was horribly mistaken in thinking that it was possible to obtain any useful news from TV. (There’s plenty of entertainment on TV if you’re willing to guzzle advertising with it.) Early on, perhaps around ~1993, I realized you could use RSS (and it’s many descendent flavors) to watch [as in, “notice when things are published”, not “mindlessly stare at”] information sources of my choosing.
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This is an instance of what philosophers call testimony. It’s similar to the sort of testimony given in a courtroom, but it’s less formal and much more frequent. Testimony happens any time you believe something because someone else vouched for the information. Most of our knowledge about the world is secondhand knowledge that comes to us through testimony. After all, we can’t each do all of our own scientific research, or make our own maps of distant cities.
~ Regina Rini from, How to Fix Fake News
This is a nice introduction to the idea of “testimony.” By saying or writing whatever-it-is-I’m-considering, would I be building up, or tearing down my reliability as a source of testimony?
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Luckily, this problem has a solution: I call it Getting Your Brain Back, but it is a time-honored problem that has been solved by many people in the past. Originally limited only to company CEOs and world leaders, the excess of information has trickled down to the rest of us. To survive in this flood, we need to learn how to swim, in much the same way as busy and important people have always done.
~ Peter Adeney from, New Year’s Resolution: Getting Your Brain Back
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…and just how bad have things become? Try this short TED talk:
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When someone is that afraid of being contradicted, they are no longer concerned with the truth, only with protecting their priceless investment in what they have said. To honor a statement you made yesterday as a binding declaration of who you are is a tragic, yet extremely common mistake. This is the fundamental error that plagues humanity: to mistake one’s ego for oneself. Enforcing an impossible, lifelong consistency in what you say and believe can only lead to dishonesty and despair.
~ David Cain from, 4 Brilliant Remarks From History’s Wisest American
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When I thought I was basically “done” becoming who I would become, I got bent out of shape over all the problems I saw in the world.
Now that I realize that the only meaningful life is one where I continuously tinker with self-improvement, I see that–just like me–everyone else is on a journey of transformation… wether or not they realize it.
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You will get hurt. You will embarrass yourself. You will wish you did things differently. You will forget things that are too important to forget. You will lose things you can’t afford to lose.
~ David Cain from, Secret Lessons From Sesame Street
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Once more. Louder, for those in the back.
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Things that are every bit as great happen every day in scientific labs, and no one cares. Maybe as a society we’ve become anesthetized to science — when really, it’s so exciting. We have so much to gain as a country if we invest in science and knowledge and understanding. I don’t blame the public for not understanding, though, or even legislators for sometimes not wanting to invest. They all look so much like my family.
~ Renee Reijo Pera from, In the Ticking of the Embryonic Clock, She Finds Answers | Quanta Magazine
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There are several science-y details in this interview that really startled me; Our knowledge of embryo development is vastly improved since last I looked.
…but mostly I just like the sentiment of wonder she expresses. “When is the last time I learned something new?” is a question I try to update the answer to every day.
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Let the other person have the privilege of being the first one to be understood. The biggest distraction to understanding someone else is self-importance. Needing to say something means you have to be thinking about it, and thinking about it means you have very little mental capacity left for empathy. Free up yours, and it will free up theirs.
~ David Cain from, The Secret to Connecting With People
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Empathy is the most useful ability I have ever developed. Sure, I first had to develop my abilities of self-awareness and self-assessment. But at that point, the need for empathy and compassion became plain as day.
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