Moonwalking With Einstein not only educates you about the history of memory, and how its standing has declined over centuries, but also gives you actionable techniques to extend and improve your own.
When I read How We Learn a little over a week ago, this
popped up at the end of it. The title sounded interesting, so here we are.
It’s safe to say that Joshua Foer has lots of memory
credentials – he won the 2006 USA Memory Championship and set a new record for
memorizing a deck of 52 cards: 1 minute and 40 seconds.
When he’s not memorizing stuff, he works as a freelance
writer, writing for The New York Times or The Washington Post, for example. He
also has a TED talk.
Here’s what I learned from the book summary:
The importance of memory has diminished from century to
century.
Our now horrible memory isn’t fixed.
2 great techniques to instantly improve your memory are
chunking and the memory palace.
Let’s go!
Lesson 1: Memory has become less and less important
throughout history.
We didn’t always have the attention span of a goldfish, but
today it sure seems that way.
Imagine our memory had been so bad, once we finally became
old enough to pass on knowledge from generation to generation.
We wouldn’t be here today, had the elders not remembered a
few important things.
Before the invention of scripture, memory artists were
today’s equivalent of quarterbacks. King Cyrus of Persia was known for knowing
all the names of his soldiers, and Socrates mocked writing for making people
forgetful.
No wonder: Anything that was written before 200 BC had no
punctuation, all texts were basically just word strings. If you didn’t already
know what you were reading, reading was useless.
If there’s one guy to blame then, for the decline of memory,
we’d have to point the finger at Johannes Gutenberg. In 1440 he invented the
printing press, and it was all downhill from there.
Once we could store information externally, physically store
it anywhere in our house and access it at any time, the need to remember things
significantly declined.
This tendency has continued ever since, and taken a major
turn for the worse with the invention of smartphones and globally available
internet.
Lesson 2: However, our bad memory isn’t fixed.
However, just because our memory sucks now doesn’t mean we
can’t improve it. You might know that the average number of list items we can
store in our short-term memory is 7.
This capacity can be extended though, as shown in a study by
K. Anders Ericsson and William Chase from 1980.
Test subject S.F. expanded his ability to memorize digits
from 7 to 79 through over 230 hours of repeating number sequences to himself, a
technique also called the phonological loop.
Similarly, it was found that chess players have a so-called
chess memory. Because they are an expert in their field, they perceive the
board differently and focus on the most important parts of it, based on their
experience.
It’s called chess memory because it is limited to chess and
won’t help them do better on general memory tests.
The lesson? Through repetition, practice and becoming an
expert in certain fields you can increase your capacity to remember things.
Lesson 3: Chunking and the memory palace are 2 great
techniques to instantly improve your memory.
Remembering more is one thing, and you’re bound to hit an
eventual ceiling there, but recalling better and faster is where it really gets
interesting.
2 quick examples from the summary are chunking and the
memory palace. Chunking simply means dividing one string of information into
several.
Can you remember 1117200112241999 just by looking at it
once?
Neither can I, but I can remember 2 dates in a row:
11/17/2001 and 12/24/1999.
Fascinating, right? By creating 2 chunks of differently
formatted information, memorizing a string of seemingly random numbers becomes
easy.
If you now put these dates into context, it’ll be even
easier, for example 11/17/2001 was my friend’s 11th birthday and the second
date was Christmas 1999.
The memory palace is a technique where you walk along a
route you know really well, and put memories in certain locations along the
way.
For example, you could go through your childhood home and
place the items from your shopping list on the kitchen table. Then, when you’re
in the grocery store, all you have to do is to mentally enter the kitchen and
see what’s there.
Once you see tomatoes, onions and potatoes on the table, you
know what to shop for. You can even have multiple routes for different kinds of
memories.
My personal take-aways
How We Learn was more about the “how” of memory formation
and how you can use the way your brain works to your advantage.
Moonwalking with Einstein is all about the “what”, as it
gives you specific techniques to actively improve your memory.
Chunking (as with the date example) was a big “aha” moment
for me. That and the memory palace stood out, so I included them here.
I love how Foer gives a little historic background, knowing
why I should improve my memory (and why it’s so bad in the first place), was a
great angle to get me to want to get better at it, otherwise I would’ve just
used the “we have smartphones now” argument.
That said, this summary is packed with a lot more
techniques, interesting studies and examples from history. It was really hard
to pick 3 things. I also never would’ve bought the book “blindly”, but now it’s
on my list.
Mindsight offers a new way of transforming your life for the better by connecting emotional awareness with the right reactions in your body, based on the work of a renowned pyschologist and his patients.
Here’s a tip: If you really want to make something stick in
other peoples’ minds, come up with your own word. It not only shows creativity
and allows you to claim the phrase, because of its novelty, people will perk
their ears up and curiously ask for more. Once you’ve given them a good
definition, they’re much more likely to remember it than if you just describe
something to them in regular terms.
Dr. Dan Siegel did just that. He coined the term mindsight
to describe the skill of being able to reflect on the connection that exists
between your body and your mind – combining emotional intelligence with
self-awareness and stoicism.
Done right it can help you deal with trauma, uncertainty,
improve your relationships with loved ones and of course, control your
emotions. I think it’s a great concept.
Here are 3 lessons that help you develop mindsight:
Think of yourself as a river to cultivate a balanced,harmonic self.
Practice the three pillars of mindsight: observation,objectivity and openness.
Be receptive, not reactive in your relationships.
Out of all the possible jedi mind tricks you could learn,
mindsight is by far the best one, so let’s get to it!
Lesson 1: Imagine yourself as a river to stay calm and
balanced.
This is it. If I could only ever give you three lessons to
live by, this would be one of them. It’s been one of the core things that’s
allowed me to live a very happy life so far. Ready for it?
Be balanced and harmonic. I believe in the golden mean.
Always have, always will. Staying away from extreme thoughts and ideologies has
helped me get along with most of the people I’ve met in my life, constantly
adapt to my circumstances, yet never completely veer off the path I intended to
pursue.
Whenever I’ve abandoned this and gone too extreme in one
direction or the other, for example by slacking off too much or too little,
I’ve become unhappy.
Finding the right balance means being able to adapt to
changing, external circumstances, while staying stable and true to your own
values. How can you do that?
Think of yourself as a gently flowing river. You won’t clash
with the people in your life and your environment, but just embrace them, make
room for them, flow around them and continue on your original course.
This means accepting that it’s normal for your actions,
emotions and thoughts to fall into different places on a big spectrum and
trying to balance emotional and rational thinking, so that neither completely
takes over.
Lesson 2: Practice the three key aspects of mindsight with
different exercises: observation, objectivity and openness.
The reason the above exercise helps is that it shows you
that your emotions aren’t character traits – they’re fleeting experiences in
your life, nothing more. This is great because it gives you control and makes them
much less frustrating to deal with.
A similar exercise you can do is to imagine your mind is an
ocean. What you think and feel comes in ripples, waves or even storms, but it
always just moves across the surface of the ocean – the bottom deeply beneath
it is always calm. The feelings on top are always temporary, but it’s still up
to you to find the calmness deep within.
With exercises like these, you’ll practice the three key
pillars of mindsight:
Observation – learning to notice when distracting thoughts
pull away your focus.
Objectivity – following the flow of your thoughts without
judging, noticing how you feel and learning from it.
Openness – accepting your emotions at every turn and not
letting them turn into a source of stress.
Keep practicing these and you’ll become the most balanced
human being you know!
Lesson 3: Try to be receptive, not reactive in your
relationships with loved ones.
We all fight with our partners. Whether you’re married, in a
relationship, or even single and still waiting for someone special, you know
that arguing is a natural part of any (not just romantic) human relationship.
One of the main distinguishing factors between letting those
fights pile up, grow and ultimately destroy the relationship and dealing calmly
with new ones to resolve them without hassle is whether you’re receptive or
reactive.
If you’re reactive, every complaint your partner makes feels
like a threat. You instantly go into freeze-fight-or-flight mode, trying to
pretend nothing happened and ignore the problem, run away or attack your better
half – none of which are good responses and ultimately lead to a big
communication problem.
But if you manage to stay receptive to your partner’s
feelings, you’ll always find a way to talk things through. Even if you don’t
agree with them, you’ll always listen first and show them that you value and
acknowledge their perspective and emotions.
And if things get really heated, you can try taking a time
out from the fight, practice some of the other exercises, and return to the
conversation with a fresh attitude.
My personal take-aways
What a beautiful book. I had no idea this’d turn out to be
that important. But I think it outlined some of the most important ways in
which you can develop mindfulness – and stay mindful. Again, lesson 1 has been
one of the best things I’ve learned in my humble, 25-year old life, making this
one a must-read, if you ask me.
Mindset takes a look at the difference between people with a fixed and a growth mindset, how one trumps the other and what you can do to adopt the right one.
Look at your hands. How long have been this way? As long as
you can remember, right?
That’s because we have almost no control over our appearance
and features, such as height, the shape of our nose, or the color of our eyes.
What we do control, however, are our skills and abilities,
at least according to the latest research.
Carol Dweck is one of those researchers and in her book
Mindset she discerns between two attitudes: the fixed mindset and the growth
mindset.
People with a fixed mindset believe talent is everything. If
they’re not gifted with the ability to do something, they think they’re doomed
to be a failure. Their skills seem to be written down in their genes, just like
their looks, which is why they never try to improve in something they suck at.
To contrast that, people with a growth mindset believe that
whatever they want to achieve is theirs for the taking, as long as they work
hard for it, dedicate themselves to their goal and practice as much as they
can.
Since our mindset has a big influence on our performance,
both are worth taking a closer look at.
You might have heard the quote “Hard work beats talent when
talent fails to work hard.” People with a fixed mindset take a different view.
In their world talent is king.
Naturally, they want to look talented all the time. The
hiring practices of big corporations like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs make this
evident. They hire the best graduates in the world and then expect them to
perform perfectly and instantly.
Instead of being trained on the new job, employees are
thrown into cold water and monitored closely for errors. Whoever doesn’t do a
great job right away is instantly fired. This is hurtful for both sides.
Not only do the employers rob themselves of some great
people, their black-and-white thinking also cultivates a fixed mindset in
others. Since the applicants already assume they’re always being judged as good
or bad, the employers behavior turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As a result, most employees spend their time trying not to
look stupid (instead of working productively), in order to not be branded as a
failure forever.
Compare that to the growth mindset, where, if you give kids
hard math problems, they love working on them and want more of the same kind.
Their desire to face more and tougher challenges doesn’t
necessarily come from wanting better grades, but from the satisfaction they get
from pushing themselves as much as they can.
They take any chance they get to learn from the best, always
try and test new strategies and adopt the mantra “Practice makes perfect“.
Two famous examples are Lee Iacocca, who ran Chrysler, and
Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM.
Both came in when the companies were down in the dumps, and
both successfully turned them around. The difference lies in what happened
afterwards.
Iacocca became complacent, he took all the credit,
surrounded himself with worshippers and worried more about his own image than
about the company. Seeking approval from others to compensate his low
self-esteem led him to making bad decisions, like ignoring dwindling sales and
even firing innovative designers, which brought the company right down again.
Gerstner, on the other hand, recognized the internal battles
at IBM were taking away from teamwork and customer service, so he broke up old
hierarchies and even put himself on an employee level to communicate well with
anyone and everyone. By focusing on teamwork and learning from past failures he
showed a true growth mindset and brought sustainable success to IBM.
In a similar manner, a furious, fixed mindset golfer might
fire his caddy or throw his shoes into the crowd. Michael Jordan, on the other
hand, never let a mistake stop him.
He says: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game
winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.”
His Airness has spoken!
Note: Michael Jordan has recently become the first
billionaire basketball player in history.
Trying to avoid difficult situations is characteristic of
the fixed mindset, because the longer you spend time working on something, the
less of an excuse you have to fail.
Had Christopher Reeve (actor of the original Superman
movies) adopted this kind of mindset, he probably would have died soon after
his riding accident, which paralyzed him from the neck down. Instead, he put up
a tremendous fight, became an activist for spinal cord research and was finally
able to move his arms, legs and even upper body.
Eventually, he even walked across the bottom of a swimming
pool.
Surprisingly, we are all born with a growth mindset. Babies
know no limits, they want to learn anything and everything. However, between
the ages of 1 to 3 a mindset can already be determined.
Babies with a growth mindset tend to try and help other
crying babies, while fixed mindset babies are disturbed by it.
Apart from our parents, our teachers also play a major role
in how our mindset turns out. A bad teacher might tell a D student that she’ll
never amount to anything, whereas a good teacher would encourage her to study
more and do better on the next test.
Lastly, anyone can develop a growth mindset.
For starters, try this: The next time you spill your coffee,
don’t say: “I’m clumsy!” and associate the failure with your identity.
Instead, see it as an external, one-time event and resolve
to do better the next time, for example by saying: “What’s done is done, I’ll
just mop it up and pay more attention the next time.”
This way you’ll spend more time working towards your goals
and dreams, and less time worrying about what’s wrong with you. You’ll develop
a growth mindset soon and be well on your way to reaching your full potential.
Final thoughts
This reminded me a lot of the book Learned Optimism, where
the difference between success and failure is mostly determined by the
perspective you choose to take on it.
I love the topic and have written about it before. 3 things
I found valuable in cultivating a growth mindset are reading, learning about
other people’s stories and going on a quest for love.
I wish the summary had quoted the original study Dweck did
to make her discovery, but even without it it did a great job at explaining
where these mindsets come from, what consequences they have and a lot of
real-world examples.
Who would I recommend the Mindset summary to?
The 37 year old who thinks it’s too late to change careers, the 16 year old, cocky high school student, who never studies because good grades fall into his lap and anyone who believes talent is all you need and if you don’t have it, you’re screwed.
The Book in Three Sentences
Skills can be cultivated through effort.
People with a growth mindset thrive on challenges.
The fixed mindset: “I can’t do it”. The growth mindset: “I can’t do it yet”.
The Five Big Ideas
The
view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
“Believing
that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to
prove yourself over and over”.
“People
in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it”.
“The
growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to
love it in the face of difficulties”.
“Those
with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and
improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions”.
Mindset
Summary
“[Children
with a growth mindset] knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills,
could be cultivated through effort”.
“Not
only were [the children with a growth mindset]not discouraged by failure, they
didn’t even think they were failing. They thought they were learning”.
“What
are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is
something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated
trait?”
“Robert
Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor
in whether people achieve expertise ‘is not some fixed prior ability, but
purposeful engagement’.”
“For
twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself
profoundly affects the way you lead your life”.
“Believing
that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to
prove yourself over and over”.
“This
growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you
can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which
way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone
can change and grow through application and experience”.
“Why
waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting
better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them?”
“The
passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when
it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset”.
“The
fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset
makes you concerned with improving”.
“When
you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world—the world of fixed
traits—success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself.
In the other—the world of changing qualities—it’s about stretching yourself to
learn something new. Developing yourself”.
“Benjamin
Barber, an eminent sociologist, once said, ‘I don’t divide the world into the
weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures…. I divide the world
into the learners and non-learners’.”
“People
in a growth mindset don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it”.
“We
gave fifth graders intriguing puzzles, which they all loved. But when we made
them harder, children with the fixed mindset showed a big plunge in enjoyment”.
“For it’s not about immediate perfection. It’s aboutlearning something over time: confronting a challenge and making progress”.
“‘Becoming
is better than being’. The fixed mindset does not allow people the luxury of
becoming. They have to already be”.
“People
with the growth mindset know that it takes time for potential to flower”.
“College
students, after doing poorly on a test, were given a chance to look at tests of
other students. Those in the growth mindset looked at the tests of people who
had done far better than they had. As usual, they wanted to correct their
deficiency. But students in the fixed mindset chose to look at the tests of
people who had done really poorly. That was their way of feeling better about
themselves”.
“John
Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren’t a failure until you
start to blame. What he means is that you can still be in the process of
learning from your mistakes until you deny them”.
“French
executive Pierre Chevalier says, ‘We are not a nation of effort. After all, if
you have savoir-faire [a mixture of know-how and cool], you do things
effortlessly’.”
“People
with the growth mindset, however, believe something very different. For them,
even geniuses have to work hard for their achievements”.
“They
may appreciate endowment, but they admire effort, for no matter what your
ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into
accomplishment”.
“The
growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing—and to continue to
love it in the face of difficulties”.
“Those
with the growth mindset found success in doing their best, in learning and
improving. And this is exactly what we find in the champions”.
“Those
with the growth mindset found setbacks motivating. They’re informative. They’re
a wake-up call”.
“People
with the growth mindset in sports (as in pre-med chemistry) took charge of the
processes that bring success—and that maintain it”.
Recommended Reading
If
you like Mindset, you may also enjoy the following books:
Mind Gym explains why the performance of world-class athletes isn’t only a result of their physical training, but just as much due to their mentally fit minds and shows you how you can cultivate the mindset of a top performer yourself.
“If you do the work you get rewarded. There are no shortcuts
in life.” ―Michael Jordan
It’s simple, to the point, and, as I’ve become more and more
aware over the past two years: plain true. Did you know that he was cut from
his high school basketball team? Yes, someone once thought his Airness sucked
at basketball.
What few people realize is that Jordan did about just as
much work on his mind than he did on his body, over the course of his career.
This is where this book, written by Gary Mack and David Casstevens, comes in.
In Mind Gym, they explain what mental workouts top athletes
subject their minds to, and how you can do the same to help your brain prime
your body for the work needed to succeed.
Here are my 3 favorite lessons:
Cultivate willpower with the seven C’s of mental toughness.
Slowing down can help you move faster.
Make love, learning and labor the three pillars of your lifeto succeed.
Let’s take our brains to the weights section, shall we?
Walking into the mind gym!
Lesson 1: Mental toughness is made up of seven things.
It’s a good thing our short-term memory can hold up to seven
items, because that means if you lock and load this list of what the authors
call the “Seven C’s of Mental Toughness,” you’re good to go:
Competitiveness. If you just want to be nice, not bash into
any walls, please everyone and not rub any elbows, you’ll just be steamrolled
by those who don’t mind.
Courage. The thing that enables you to be competitive in the
first place. It’s not that you can’t be afraid of your competitors. But you
have to consciously decide to challenge them anyway.
Confidence. Helps a great deal with being courageous.
Control. The thing all Stoics focus on. Forget about what
you can’t do. Look at what’s in your power.
Composure. What to keep when you lose control. Dwelling
doesn’t move you forward.
Consistency. The result of not letting motivation or a lack
of it derail you. Show up to practice anyway.
Commitment. In the short and the long term. Forever and
always. Until you win.
A pretty cool stack of good traits, huh? Think 3-2-2 in
bundling them, but add them all together and you have all the attitudes you
could ever need to succeed.
Lesson 2: Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast.
You’ve heard that one before. Take regular breaks, give
yourself down time to recover, muscles only grow when they get rest, etc. But
that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about actually going slower
while you’re moving.
Let’s say you’re running a 10K. In this case, that’d mean
for you to run at maximally 90% of your capacity, no matter which section of
the run you’re on. Even on the last 100 m. And you’d be faster.
How?
The individual muscles in groups fall into one of two
categories: agonists and antagonists. They’re push-and-pull types, meaning the
agonist muscle will work to push you forward, while the antagonist muscle
simultaneously pulls you back and slows you down.
So if you run at 100%, both of them will work their hardest
and struggle against one another the most. But if you cap it at 90%, your
agonist can use its power advantage over the antagonist better, because the
antagonist won’t work as hard – and thus, you’ll be faster.
Fascinating, right?
Lesson 3: Live a life of love, learning and labor.
Forget external yardsticks to measure your success by. Those
by definition always depend on other people, so screw that. What you can
instantly answer every time you look into the mirror is: Am I living a life
that’s filled with love, learning and labor?
Loving your work is one of the best things that can happen
to you. It may take a while to develop and it doesn’t make work fun all the
time, but if you love what you do, it’s a lot easier to get up every morning
and push right through the hard parts.
Of course loving your work also makes you work more and
harder. Ironically, this isn’t a one-way street though. The more you work, the
more and faster you’ll grow to love it too. Most importantly though, how much
labor you put in is up to you. You can’t get more talent, or luck, or time. But
you can sure work more.
Lastly, learning not only connects love and labor, it also
ensures that once whatever talent you do have subsides (which is more a problem
for athletes than for thinkers, of course), because you get older and less fit,
you capitalize more and more on your brain.
He who learns, loves and labors has nothing to fear of life.
Only good things to look forward to.
My personal take-aways
I like how memorable this book is, because it uses so many
alliterations. Seven C’s, three L’s, and so on. This makes the concepts easy to
recall. Very good book for athletes, but even for mental marathon runners, this
one has a lot to offer!
How To Create A Mind breaks down the human brain into its components, in order to then draw parallels to computers and find out what is required to let them replicate our minds, thus creating true, artificial intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil is known for many things, such as receiving the
world’s largest innovation prize, writing seven books, five of which are
bestsellers, and making predictions about the future, many of which turn out to
be accurate years later.
Artificial intelligence is one of the topics most dear to
him, which is why he’s dedicated this book to describing the prerequisites
technology would have to fulfill, in order to create it.
He takes apart the human brain in detail, to then piece it
back together with technology, which shows you that we’re not nearly as far
away as you’d think.
Here are 3 lessons from How To Create A Mind:
The reason you can recall a lot of memories with just one piece of information is that your brain stores patterns.
Pattern recognizers are responsible for most of the things you do, even being angry, creative, or horny.
Current artificial intelligence uses the same method of pattern recognition already, for example in Apple’s Siri.
Are you curious to find out what the blueprint of your brain
looks like? Let’s take a look!
Lesson 1: Your brain stores information in sequences, which
lets you remember many things with just one tiny hint.
Have you ever returned to a place you haven’t been to in a
while, looked at a certain object, like a fountain on a square or a sign on the
wall, and all of a sudden were flooded with memories from the last time you
were there?
That’s the power of sequential ordering. Your brain catalogs
all information and memories in a strict, step-by-step order, which is why you
only need one small part of it to trigger the entire pattern.
For example, when your grandma makes cookies, you can
vividly remember the last time you ate one just from smelling the new batch as
it roasts in the oven. But when you try to remember details from walking on the
sidewalk earlier today, that’s a lot harder. Only when you think “where did I
come from and where was I before I walked on the sidewalk” can you recall more
details.
Police sketch artists make use of this phenomenon, trying to
sketch all details of a criminal’s face as accurately as you can describe them,
so hopefully you’ll be able to recall the entire face from seeing one,
perfectly matching detail.
This is also the reason reciting the alphabet backwards is
hard, as is playing a piece on the piano from the middle, instead of the
beginning!
Lesson 2: Creativity, anger and our sex drive are all
originate in the neocortex, where pattern recognizers deal with incoming
information.
So how does your brain recognize what information matches
which sequence in your head? Simple: with pattern recognizers.
Pattern recognizers consist of around 100 neurons each, you
have roughly 300 million of them in your neocortex, the newest part of your
brain, and they sit right within the 500,000 cortical columns, where all of the
step-by-step information is stored. Low-level pattern recognizers can spot the
right category of information, for example “letters” and then pass this on to
high-level recognizers, which then determine “words” as the next step.
When you touch a hot stove, your sensory cortex gets a pain
input, which goes to the instinctive thalamus that notes “ouch, this hurts and
isn’t pleasant,” before passing the feedback on to a part of the neocortex
called the insula.
There, so-called spindle cells will light up and create a
strong, emotional response, in this case probably anger. Love, sexual desire,
sadness, it’s all created here, and the reason these feelings make it hard for
you to make good decisions lies in the structure of these cells. Spindle cells
are big, long-winding neurons, which connect very distant parts of your
neocortex – so many of your abilities and brain areas are affected when something
happens here!
Lastly, when the pattern recognizers get the information,
they fire 100 times per second, letting you decipher millions of metaphors in
just a fraction of time and thus interpret the world, assign meaning to symbols
and also, make art.
Lesson 3: Artificial intelligence already uses pattern
recognition right now, for example to understand what you’re saying.
Since our brains rely so heavily on it, pattern recognition
must also be a key part of creating artificial intelligence – and it is! Basing
software on pattern recognition allows it to learn on its own. One such pattern
recognition system is called HHMM, the hierarchical hidden Markov model, and it
works like this:
When given a set of new information or data, the software
doesn’t look at all the data, it starts with just one piece and tries to
predict what comes next, based on its past experience. For example if a
word-completion tool sees the letters “T” and “H” in sequence, it’ll likely
suggest “E” as the next one, followed by a space symbol.
If predictions are correct, they’re followed by more
predictions, and if not, the feedback is saved.
HHMM is already widely used, for example in Apple’s Siri,
which feels like a lot more than voice recognition. Instead of trying to guess whole
word strings correctly, Siri looks for keywords and context, thus acting much
more like a human would and being able to understand your request for the
nearest restaurant, no matter how exactly you phrase it.
Note: A great movie about artificial intelligence
(especially if you like Siri) is Her.
My personal take-aways
A very cool way of approaching artificial intelligence, full
of Ray’s usual, visionary ideas and an objective status report on something
we’ve been chasing for 70 years. Free biology lesson included. Recommended read
for sure!
Happiness will teach you how our desire for it developed, what its benefits are, why money actually hurts our happiness and where it really comes from, and how Western countries could easily increase their happiness with a few changes.
Richard Layard has been researching happiness since the 70s.
His book “Happiness: Lessons from a new science” came out in 2005. It is a
holistic approach to happiness, meaning it explains lots of aspects of it, and
doesn’t just focus on where to find it, for example.
One of the 3 biggest lessons wasn’t really new to me, but
the other 2 were all the more shocking.
Our capability to feel happiness in the first place has evolved, we weren’t always able to feel happy.
More money actually makes you less happy, unless you live in poverty.
One of the simplest ways for Western countries to increase happiness would be to raise taxes.
I know, right? All 3 of them make you go: “Whaaaaaaaaaat?”
That’s why we should probably take a look at them in detail.
Lesson 1: Our desire for happiness has evolved – it wasn’t
always there.
Think about the last decision you made. Maybe it was to
click on the “Read More” button of this summary. Why did you do it?
Let’s say you liked the 1-sentence summary and the quote of
the author, so you wanted to learn more.
By knowing more about happiness, you would become a smarter
person and therefore, more likely to achieve your goals, whatever they may be –
and thus, happier.
All of our decisions ultimately come down to whether the
result makes us happier, or not.
Now this is old news, but get this: It wasn’t always this
way. Over thousands of years, our brains developed the ability to feel
happiness.
Researchers have learned this when taking real-time EEG
scans of the brain during different activities. The parts that lit up in states
of happiness belonged to the left side of the prefrontal cortex – a fairly new
part of the brain, which is also where the neocortex sits.
The fact that this part of the brain has only developed
recently in human history, makes happiness an adaptive trait, meaning its
partially genetic and a driver of survival.
I knew that stress and fear were survival mechanisms, but
now you can add happiness to the tool box, which is crazy.
It makes sense of course, after all, friendships, sex and
good food makes us happy and all these things were crucial to the survival of
our ancestors.
However, thinking that the drive behind all of our decisions
is yet another remaining survival tool from the past is kinda scary, don’t you
think?
Lesson 2: Beyond a certain threshold, more money makes you
less happy.
Surprise surprise, money doesn’t make us happy. While this
is old news, there are some interesting facts around it in this summary.
First, being in poverty crushes your happiness. Naturally,
getting more money until your basic survival is ensured makes you happier. The
summary says $20,000 per year, but I assume that figure varies a lot, depending
on where you live.
Getting out of poverty in Asia requires less money than it
does in Europe.
$75,000 per year is a common figure for Western countries.
But this even varies across states, ranging from $65,000 to $122,000 per year
inside the US alone.
After that, more money will do no good.
Actually, it might hurt. How happy you are about the number
on your bank account depends heavily on who your neighbor is.
Let’s say you are promoted to a whopping $250,000 per year
salary job and move to Beverly Hills. Your new salary won’t do you any good
here, because you’re surrounded by millionaires. If everyone around you makes
more than you, you’ll be miserable from all the comparing.
Each additional dollar becomes a little dopamine hit, and
you’ll get addicted to chasing money. Instead, try to exit the rat race early,
by focusing on what really matters in your life: family, health, meaningful
work and close friends.
Lesson 3: Countries should increase taxes to make people
happier.
Following from lesson 2, a simple way for Western countries
to increase their populations happiness would be to raise taxes progressively.
A progressive tax system makes people who earn more pay more
taxes than others, redistributing the wealth equally. This is supposed to
increase overall happiness, due to two things:
Chasing that next hit that comes with another raise becomes
much harder and therefore less attractive.
Comparing yourself to others becomes less of an issue,
because the desire to compete is diminished.
Initially it sounds counterintuitive, but if you think about
it it makes sense. Sadly, so far, Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan country, is the only
country that focuses on happiness as their main statistic – they measure Gross
National Happiness (GNH) instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
However, a lot of countries are taking steps in the right
direction, with more flexible work hours, better support for parents and remote
jobs reducing commutes, which hurt our happiness.
Final thoughts
At first glance this summary seemed to hold not many new
insights, especially when you’ve already read The Happiness Hypothesis, but as
I read on I found the 3 shocking lessons I just shared with you.
If you’re new to all this happiness research, I think this
summary and book could be the perfect starter.
After this you can dive deeper into happiness research by
learning about specific topics and tools, which will help you get there.
Further recommended books: Learned Optimism, Mindset, and Better Than Before.
Flow explains why we seek happiness in externals and what’s wrong with it, where you can really find enjoyment in life, and how you can truly become happy by creating your own meaning of life.
Flow is a simple title for a book the author’s name I can’t
pronounce to save my life, you do it: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (apparently it’s
mi-ha-yee cheeks-sent-me-high). Published in 1990, Mihaly digs into “the state
of effortless work”, where challenges and skills align perfectly and time seems
to fly.
Here are my 3 take-aways:
Pleasure and enjoyment are two different things.
Flow is where challenges and skills match.
Life goals are irrelevant, so set a life goal.
I bet 1 and 3 have you scratching your head, so let’s do
some explaining!
Lesson 1: Pleasure and enjoyment are not the same thing.
This is a really cool differentiation. Pleasure is what most
people nowadays confuse with happiness. It comes from sensory experiences, like
eating a pizza, getting a massage, or having sex and takes away your control of
your attention.
When you’re busy munching on a tasty slice of chicken
supreme, you can’t really control what you pay attention too, because all of it
is taken up by your sense of taste.
Enjoyment, on the other hand, comes from concentrating and
consciously focusing, which gives you back your control over your attention.
This is where true happiness lies, as enjoyment allows you
to work towards your most important goals and to go beyond the limitations of
your genes.
Many people opt for pleasure instead of enjoyment, which the
world makes easy, as we seem to live in instant gratification-land now, which
is also why many people are so miserable.
But how can you find enjoyment? By trying to spend a lot of
time in flow.
Lesson 2: Flow is the state where challenges and skills
match, so that time flies by.
Flow is what’s behind every good video game. It is the state
where you are so immersed in the activity you’re doing, that you’re completely
forgetting about all your worries and anxieties, and you look up after hours,
wondering where time went.
How can you trigger it?
2 things:
Pick an activity you find rewarding, something that’s
meaningful to you, without any external incentive (like money or fame).
Make sure the challenge of the activity matches your skill
level.
The first part is straight forward. It means you should have
fun. Plant a tree, draw a comic, write an article about the Minions, whatever
you think is meaningful to you.
There can’t be any money involved. Don’t do it for fame,
wealth, or even religion. Just because you think it’s awesome.
Part 2 is a bit harder. Flow is triggered when the challenge
isn’t so hard you’ll get frustrated, while your skills aren’t so good already
that you get bored.
It’s right in between.
If you decide to pick up chess, play on an easy setting
against your computer first. Then, get a friend to play against you who’s
slightly better than you. Once you consistently beat her, you can move to the
next level.
Basically, flow is where your life feels like the perfect
game: you just want to keep on going and going and going.
So make some time for your hobbies or take up a fun project
– you never know what the skills might be good for.
Lesson 3: Life goals are irrelevant, so set a life goal.
I love this. The summary says you can create your own
meaning of life. To do so, you simply have to set an ultimate goal for your
life.
Here’s the best part: It doesn’t matter what that goal is,
as long as it keeps getting you into flow without caring what other people
think.
This is the best thing a book could tell you.
It’s all you want to hear.
Go set some crazy goal and tell others to get lost if they
tell you it’s stupid. If it keeps you challenged so your skills keep growing
and gets more complex as you go along, you’re golden.
This is exactly what I’m doing with Four Minute Books. I
make sure I read and write every day, no matter if no one reads it. I do share
it, so people can benefit, but I’m doing it for the sake of itself.
I have a hunch that the more you do of that, the more
successful you’ll be.
My personal take-aways
First tip: Read the Happiness Hypothesis first, then this
will make even more sense. It lists flow as the best option of one of the two
voluntary activities you should strive for, to maximize your happiness.
Second tip: Think back to when you were 8-14 years old. What
did you enjoy doing the most? Chances are your flow activity is somewhere in
there.
I can’t recommend this summary enough, it’s so packed with
insights, I had some serious trouble picking 3 things. It makes sense from
start to finish and it’s a very down-to-earth call-to-action for happiness.
It doesn’t scream at you to get happy, like some of the more
over-enthusiastic self-help books (which have their place, ain’t that right,
Spartan Up?), but just shows you the path that’ll most likely get you there.
He also has a TED talk, which I have to check
out yet, but I’m sure is worth watching
10% Happier gives skeptics an easy “in” to meditation, by taking a very non-fluffy approach to the science behind this mindfulness practice and showing you how and why letting go of your ego is important for living a stress-free life.
Life as a ABC News correspondent must feel pretty good
right? The pay is great, millions of people know your face and name, and you
get to tell everyone what’s important. But for some, the pressure can become
too much – and they crack.
This happened to Dan Harris 12 years ago and his voice broke
in a live, on-air panic attack on national television. Convinced that it was
time to do some digging into his self and life, he started a long journey into
the science of stress and eventually, mindfulness. Originally a skeptic
himself, Dan eventually learned to tame his ego with the power of meditation,
and shared his lessons in this 2014 bestseller.
Here are 3 lessons to show you why your ego causes problems,
that letting it go won’t make you lose your touch and how meditation helps with
this process:
The problem with your ego is that it’s never satisfied.
Be simple, not a simpleton – why letting go of your ego
won’t make you a pushover.
Meditation increases your mindfulness and compassion by giving
you a fourth habitual response.
Ready to crank up your happiness by at least 10%? Let’s go!
Lesson 1: Your ego gets in the way of your happiness by
constantly wanting more.
The friction between acting in the present, but constantly
thinking about the future and past is what causes your ego to be impossible to
satisfy. This issue is also addressed in The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle in a
very similar manner.
Dan Harris says your ego constantly assesses your worth by
looking at your own wealth, looks and social status, and then finding the next
best person with more of it to compare it against. Therefore, your ego’s
default setting is more. The minute you feed your ego a new achievement, toy or
compliment, the baseline for desire is reset and it starts looking for the next
thing.
It thrives on drama and worry, and will instantly look for
the next bigger achievement to compare yourself to, and if none is there, dig
up some ancient problem or crisis and pester you with it. That’s why the ego is
never happy, and it’s up to you to take charge of that, because no matter which
new heights you reach, it’ll never be enough.
Time to reign it in!
Lesson 2: Be simple, not a simpleton – why letting go of
your ego won’t make you a pushover.
Now you might say: “If my ego is my drive to achieve greater
things, won’t I lose my edge if I completely let go of it?”
Nope! That doesn’t have to be the case at all. To the
contrary. Often people overdo it with the Buddhist attitude of letting go and
in some cases even end up not letting themselves orgasm during sex or letting
other people order for them at restaurants in order not to express personal
preference.
That’s just stupid. As Indian meditation teacher Munindra
taught his students to keep things simple and easy, one of them approached him
when he was fiercely negotiating the price of a bag of peanuts at the local
market about how this matched his earlier lesson. Munindra replied: “I said be
simple, not a simpleton!”
Mindfulness just makes you more creative and productive, not
a pushover. It removes the need for competition and fuels your drive by
removing wrong assumptions and bad thoughts, so instead of the usual stress
you’ll approach things more clearly, because you’re not giving in to aggressive
temptations.
Dan found himself filling pages upon pages with notes during
a meditation retreat, because his mind was less cluttered and chaotic, and his
creativity flowed freely.
Lesson 3: Meditation makes you more mindful and
compassionate by giving you a fourth habitual response.
So what is it that meditation can help us do to tame the ego
and fuel our drive?
It makes us more mindful and helps us live in the moment, as
well as act more compassionately towards others. Meditation achieves this by
giving you a fourth habitual response. According to ancient Buddhist wisdom, we
usually exhibit three characteristic habitual responses to all of our
experiences:
We want it. Ever passed by a hamburger place when you were
hungry? Yeah. That.
We reject it. Did a spider ever land on your hand? You
probably instantly threw it off.
We zone out. I bet you always listen to the flight
attendant’s safety instructions all the way to the end too. Yeah, right.
But once you start meditating, you’ll be able to choose a
fourth alternative: Observing, without judging.
It usually starts with physical pain, and you notice when
your legs are sore or your nose itches, but you can resist the urge to scratch
it and just let it be. But after a while, this transfers to your emotions and
thoughts as well. You’ll catch yourself while gossiping, acting out on a bad
habit, or when you’re thinking negative thoughts – and can just observe your
feelings until they pass by, without reacting to them.
It’s this little pause between thinking and acting that makes
you realize often no action is necessary and thus helps you make better choices
altogether.
My personal take-aways
I’m skeptic about meditation. If you are too, this book is
perfect for you. It does away with all the mumbo-jumbo flower power hippie stuff
and takes a purely scientific, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness.
I like that this book spends more time on convincing you to
give it a try, than it does on explaining the process, because it’s really
simple: sit and focus on your breath. If your thoughts wander off, bring them
back. That’s all there is to it. 10% Happier explains that and then focuses on
the benefits, which are much more important for beginners than nailing the
technique.
It takes a lot of guts to write a book about one of your
most embarrassing moments in life – Dan’s boldness sure paid off!
What else can you learn from the blinks?
A way to describe the ego everybody understands (even if you
have no idea who Sigmund Freud is)
What Harvard found out about people who meditate when they
put them into an MRI
How meditation reduces toxic chemicals in your body
Which diseases meditation can help prevent (it’s actually a
whole lot of them!)
The 4-step process to accept negative emotions and remove
yourself from them
Who would I recommend the 10% Happier summary to?
The 15 year old, who often gets angry at her classmates, the 32 year old with a demanding and stressful career in a competitive environment, like journalism, and anyone who thinks meditation is hocus-pocus.
10% Happier gives skeptics an easy “in” to meditation, by taking a very non-fluffy approach to the science behind this mindfulness practice and showing you how and why letting go of your ego is important for living a stress-free life.
In 3 Sentences: Practicing meditation and mindfulness will make you at least 10 percent happier. Being mindful doesn’t change the problems in your life, but mindfulness does help you respond to your problems rather than react to them. Mindfulness helps you realize that striving for success is fine as long as you accept that the outcome is outside your control.
Favorite quote from the author: “When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.” ― Dan Harris, 10% Happier
Life as a ABC News correspondent must feel pretty good right? The pay is great, millions of people know your face and name, and you get to tell everyone what’s important. But for some, the pressure can become too much – and they crack.
This happened to Dan Harris 12 years ago and his voice broke in a live, on-air panic attack on national television. Convinced that it was time to do some digging into his self and life, he started a long journey into the science of stress and eventually, mindfulness. Originally a skeptic himself, Dan eventually learned to tame his ego with the power of meditation, and shared his lessons in this 2014 bestseller.
Here are 3 lessons to show you why your ego causes problems, that letting it go won’t make you lose your touch and how meditation helps with this process:
The problem with your ego is that it’s never satisfied. Be simple, not a simpleton – why letting go of your ego won’t make you a pushover. Meditation increases your mindfulness and compassion by giving you a fourth habitual response. Ready to crank up your happiness by at least 10%? Let’s go!
Lesson 1: Your ego gets in the way of your happiness by constantly wanting more. The friction between acting in the present, but constantly thinking about the future and past is what causes your ego to be impossible to satisfy. This issue is also addressed in The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle in a very similar manner.
Dan Harris says your ego constantly assesses your worth by looking at your own wealth, looks and social status, and then finding the next best person with more of it to compare it against. Therefore, your ego’s default setting is more. The minute you feed your ego a new achievement, toy or compliment, the baseline for desire is reset and it starts looking for the next thing.
It thrives on drama and worry, and will instantly look for the next bigger achievement to compare yourself to, and if none is there, dig up some ancient problem or crisis and pester you with it. That’s why the ego is never happy, and it’s up to you to take charge of that, because no matter which new heights you reach, it’ll never be enough.
Time to reign it in!
Lesson 2: Be simple, not a simpleton – why letting go of your ego won’t make you a pushover. Now you might say: “If my ego is my drive to achieve greater things, won’t I lose my edge if I completely let go of it?”
Nope! That doesn’t have to be the case at all. To the contrary. Often people overdo it with the Buddhist attitude of letting go and in some cases even end up not letting themselves orgasm during sex or letting other people order for them at restaurants in order not to express personal preference.
That’s just stupid. As Indian meditation teacher Munindra taught his students to keep things simple and easy, one of them approached him when he was fiercely negotiating the price of a bag of peanuts at the local market about how this matched his earlier lesson. Munindra replied: “I said be simple, not a simpleton!”
Mindfulness just makes you more creative and productive, not a pushover. It removes the need for competition and fuels your drive by removing wrong assumptions and bad thoughts, so instead of the usual stress you’ll approach things more clearly, because you’re not giving in to aggressive temptations.
Dan found himself filling pages upon pages with notes during a meditation retreat, because his mind was less cluttered and chaotic, and his creativity flowed freely.
Lesson 3: Meditation makes you more mindful and compassionate by giving you a fourth habitual response. So what is it that meditation can help us do to tame the ego and fuel our drive?
It makes us more mindful and helps us live in the moment, as well as act more compassionately towards others. Meditation achieves this by giving you a fourth habitual response. According to ancient Buddhist wisdom, we usually exhibit three characteristic habitual responses to all of our experiences:
We want it. Ever passed by a hamburger place when you were hungry? Yeah. That. We reject it. Did a spider ever land on your hand? You probably instantly threw it off. We zone out. I bet you always listen to the flight attendant’s safety instructions all the way to the end too. Yeah, right. But once you start meditating, you’ll be able to choose a fourth alternative: Observing, without judging.
It usually starts with physical pain, and you notice when your legs are sore or your nose itches, but you can resist the urge to scratch it and just let it be. But after a while, this transfers to your emotions and thoughts as well. You’ll catch yourself while gossiping, acting out on a bad habit, or when you’re thinking negative thoughts – and can just observe your feelings until they pass by, without reacting to them.
It’s this little pause between thinking and acting that makes you realize often no action is necessary and thus helps you make better choices altogether.
My personal take-aways I’m skeptic about meditation. If you are too, this book is perfect for you. It does away with all the mumbo-jumbo flower power hippie stuff and takes a purely scientific, down-to-earth approach to mindfulness.
I like that this book spends more time on convincing you to give it a try, than it does on explaining the process, because it’s really simple: sit and focus on your breath. If your thoughts wander off, bring them back. That’s all there is to it. 10% Happier explains that and then focuses on the benefits, which are much more important for beginners than nailing the technique.
It takes a lot of guts to write a book about one of your most embarrassing moments in life – Dan’s boldness sure paid off!
Who would I recommend the 10% Happier summary to? The 15 year old, who often gets angry at her classmates, the 32 year old with a demanding and stressful career in a competitive environment, like journalism, and anyone who thinks meditation is hocus-pocus.
Long notes
“My preconceptions about meditation were misconceptions.”
“In my experience, meditation makes you 10% happier.”
Some of the traits we think are fixed like a quick temper or
moody-ness or compassion are learned skills, not fixed characteristics.
Many people assume they must be paranoid and worry if they
want to stay at the top of their game.
People care a lot about the bio on an author’s page.
“The best parts of Eckhart Tolle were a form of Buddhism.”
Most improvements in life make very little difference and
that’s fine. We spend so much time searching for transformational change in one
easy step, but can we all just admit that were looking for the easy way out
here? Just because you can’t change everything at once doesn’t mean you can’t
get better. In many cases, most cases in fact, you are only going to see a very
small increase from each action. One workout builds a very small amount of
muscle. That is what is to be expected. You’re not doing it wrong if you get
very tiny results. Most strategies deliver tiny results and require consistent
over a long period of time. In the book, Harris makes a comment about therapy
only working a little bit: “The limit isn’t your therapist. The limit is
therapy itself.” It makes a small difference, but it still makes a difference.
The key is to embrace these daily marginal gains rather than dismissing them
because they are small.
Meditation is like doing focused reps for your mind. Focus
on the breath, lose your focus, bring it back to the breath, repeat. This is
the whole game. Keep bringing your mind back to the breath.
How to meditate: sit somewhere comfortable, keep a straight
spine, focus on a spot, and bring your focus back to your breath whenever you
lose it.
Meditation helps you shut down your monkey mind for a
moment.
We have 3 habitual responses to everything we experience: 1)
We want it. 2) We reject it. 3) We zone out. Mindfulness is a fourth response.
Viewing what happens in the world without an emotional response about it.
“Mindfulness represents an alternative to living
reactively.”
Interesting self-sabotage insight: many people worry that if
they meditate they will lose their edge and no longer be competitive or driven.
“When you squelch something you give it power. Ignorance is
not bliss.” You should not run from your problems and pain. You should
acknowledge them.
The R.A.I.N. Technique for meditation: Recognize. Allow.
Investigate. Non-identification. 1) Recognize: Acknowledge your feelings. 2)
Allow: Where you lean into the pain. Let the pain be. 3) Investigate: Check out
how the situation is impacting your body. Is my face hot? Is my back tight?
Etc. 4) Non-identification: Realize that just because you feel pain or frustration
or guilt or anger right now does not mean you are an angry or broken person. It
is simply a phase happening at this moment, not your identity as a person.
Mindfulness seems to be about awareness of the self. You
recognize and acknowledge the things going on around you and the emotions you
are feeling. Rather than let the emotion drive everything, you step outside of
it and see it from afar.
Being mindful doesn’t change the problems in your life. You
still need to take action, but the key is that mindfulness allows you to
respond rather than react to the problems in your life.
Hedonic adaptation: the observed tendency of humans to
quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive
or negative events or life changes.
A simple question to ask yourself when you’re worrying: “Is
this useful?”
“I do meditation because it makes me 10 percent happier.”
“Everything we experience in this world goes through one
filter — our minds — and we spend very little time bothering to see how it
works.”
Meditation will make you more resilient, but it is not a
“cure all” that fixes your problems or relieves all stress in your life.
One Harvard study shows that gray matter grows in
meditators. This is known as neuroplasticity.
Scientists have developed a term for the consequence of all
our multitasking: continuous partial attention.
The Dalai Lama has a theory on selfishness: We should strive
to be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish. Foolish selfish is when you
focus on self-centered and shallow activities. Wise selfish is when you show
compassion and help others because it benefits you and makes you feel good.
Compassion is in our own self-interest.
Make eye contact and smile at people. This simple habit that
will make you feel more connected and much better each day.
When police officers or first responders are interviewed
about how and why they acted in a particular way during an emergency they often
say, “My training kicked in.” I like this idea of training yourself to be
mindful, aware, compassionate, and so on. These are traits that can be trained
and then will automatically reveal themselves when needed (assuming you’ve
practiced enough).
Don’t confuse letting go with going soft. Just because
you’re aware of what is going on and being mindful about it does not mean you
just let things go when you have the ability to take action on them and
improve. The way to respond to adversity is often to work through it, not to
avoid it altogether in the name of acting Zen.
Striving for success is fine as long as you realize that the
outcome is not under your control. Be as ambitious as possible, but let go of
the result. This makes it easier for you to be resilient and bounce back if the
result is poor.
Buddhism is “advanced common sense.” It requires you to
analyze simple fundamentals until a deeper understanding is achieved.
10 Buddhist Principles for the Modern Worker: 1) Don’t be a
jerk. 2) When necessary, hide the Zen. 3) Meditate. 4) The price of security is
insecurity, until it’s not useful. 5) Equanimity is not the enemy of
creativity. 6) Don’t force it. 7) Humility prevents humiliation. 8) Go easy
with the internal cattle prod. 9) Non-attachment to results. 10) Ask, “What
matters most?”
“Meditation is the super power that makes all the other precepts
possible.”
Reading Suggestions
This is a list of authors, books, and concepts mentioned in
10% Happier, which might be useful for future reading.
