Timeless Ideas | December 27, 2020
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
Progress comes from caring more about what needs to be done than about who gets the credit.
― Dorothy Height
II.
A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.
― Kahlil Gibran
III.
I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
― C. S. Lewis
Ideas
I.
Can anything be more idiotic than certain people who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves officiously preoccupied in order to improve their lives; they spend their lives in organizing their lives. They direct their purposes with an eye to a distant future. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining?
Seneca in On the Shortness of Life
II.
Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.
Ryan Holiday in Ego Is the Enemy
III.
I have come to realize that bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships. One has many more supposed friends when one is up than when one is down, because most people like to be with winners and shun losers. True friends are the opposite.
Ray Dalio in Principles: Life and Work
Articles Worth Reading
I.
To be creative, Chinese philosophy teaches us to abandon ‘originality’
Julianne Chung | Psyche
Even if creativity were taken to aim at originality, de-emphasising originality might ironically result in greater creativity. This is because striving for originality can actually be counterproductive when it comes to achieving genuinely fresh results: if we focus on the task of achieving something original, we’ll explore only the range of possibilities deemed sufficiently likely to yield that result, leaving out a lot that could have contributed to achieving something original.
II.
Fear, Bravery, and How to Break the Loop of Our Destructive Patterns
Maria Popova | BrainPickings
To keep repeating a baleful pattern without recognizing that we are caught in its loop is one of life’s greatest tragedies; to recognize it but feel helpless in breaking it is one of our greatest trials; to transcend the fear of uncertainty, which undergirds all such patterns of belief and behavior, is a supreme triumph. That triumphant transcendence of the pattern is what novelist Nicole Krauss explores in an exquisite response to Vincent van Gogh’s 1884 letter to his brother about fear and risk-taking.
III.
George Ellis | Aeon
The French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) believed that the Universe was a piece of machinery, and that physics determines everything. Physics has made huge strides since the days of Laplace; indeed, it would be completely unrecognizable to him. Yet there are still physicists today who confidently proclaim that we can’t have free will because physics determines everything, including brain functioning – entirely ignoring the complex context and the power of constraints.
Want to read more? You can read the full archives here and other posts on our website as they are published. Was this email forwarded to you? Join the club by signing up below: