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Direction over Distraction

No. 663 – January 11, 2026

Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives). Not subscribed? Learn more and sign up.

Tiny Thoughts

If you don’t give your life a direction, the world will give it a distraction.


Intensity makes for a good story. Consistency makes for good results.


Edit yourself for approval and you become a minority shareholder in your own life.

The cost of being easy to live with is destroying the person who has to do the living.

Insights

Benjamin Franklin on the best investment:

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”


Stephen and Mara Klemich on love:

“Love is our greatest need. Rejection is our greatest fear. We spend our lives seeking love and avoiding rejection.”


Former UFC champion Georges St-Pierre on accepting fear:

“When I was young, I thought that nervousness and fear would disappear over time. But I realized that not only does it not disappear, it gets even worse. The only thing that changed is, now I accept it. I know it’s going to be there. I know how to deal with it. Now, with experience, I know I’m gonna be scared when the fight is coming; I know I’m not going to sleep well the week of the fight, but I accept it. [Early on in my career] I would freak out, sleeping only four hours the night before a fight. I put more pressure on myself, because I thought I wouldn’t be able to perform my best because of lack of sleep. But now I know it’s normal. I accept it. It’s a suffering process that I have to go through before a fight. But it’s still as bad as it was; the only difference is that I accept it now.“

The Knowledge Project

As I decided to release ​the episode on better habits​ on Jan 1, there is no new episode this week.

I wanted to draw your attention to some clips from the episode, in case you missed them.

+ ​making invisible progress visible​

+ ​one of the greatest lessons in life​

+ ​our desire for belonging over accuracy​ (with ​some push back​ from a previous guest)

+ ​who you follow online determines your thoughts

Thanks for reading,

— Shane Parrish

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