Timeless Ideas | April 18, 2021
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
― Sigmund Freud
II.
Life is a learning experience, only if you learn.
― Yogi Berra
III.
He who has learned to disagree without being disagreeable has discovered the most valuable secret of negotiation.
― Chris Voss
Ideas
I.
Where we want to be cautious . . . is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with ‘likes’ on a post. You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.
Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology
II.
If one really has confidence in oneself, one doesn’t feel the need to boast. It’s because one’s feeling of inferiority is strong that one boasts. One feels the need to flaunt one’s superiority all the more. There’s the fear that if one doesn’t do that, not a single person will accept one “the way I am.” This is a full-blown superiority complex.
Ichiro Kishimi in The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life, and Achieve Real Happiness
III.
We are restless because deep in our hearts we know now that our happiness is found elsewhere, and our work, no matter how valuable it is to us or to others, cannot take its place. But we hurry on anyway, and attend to our business because we need to matter, and we don’t always realize we already do.
Ryan Holiday in Stillness is the Key
Articles Worth Reading
I.
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings
The vast majority of our mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering comes from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. The remedy, of course, is not to bend the reality of an impartial universe to our will. The remedy is to calibrate our expectations — a remedy that might feel far too pragmatic to be within reach in the heat of the collision-moment, but also one with profound poetic undertones once put into practice.
II.
Sheri Van Dijk | Psyche
At times, we all have strong emotional reactions that we struggle with – that’s just part of being human. But, for some people, the inability to manage emotions in healthy, effective ways can be a pervasive problem, and this can come with a lot of negative consequences.
III.
Jeremy Anderberg | The Art of Manliness
Though certainly not a measurable benefit, there’s a unique, unexplainable power to the idea that words are flowing from your brain, through your arm and hand, and out onto a page. It’s a very physical process that just isn’t the same when it’s words flowing through a keyboard and into the digital ether. The slowness of writing forces deeper contemplation; the way your hand muscles get just a little bit tired (surely because we simply don’t use those muscles much anymore!) is physical evidence that you’re doing work; the visual and tangible proof of ideas come to life is far more inspiring than seeing it on a Word Doc.
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