No. 507 – January 15th, 2023
Timeless ideas and insights for life.
FS
Stop reading the news:
Our obsession with being informed makes it hard to think long-term. We spend hours consuming news because we want to be informed. The problem is, the news doesn’t make us informed – quite the opposite. The more news we consume, the more misinformed we become.
— Source
TKP
Buddhist practitioner Jack Kornfield sits down for a candid, in-depth interview to help you suppress self-doubt and find inner calm.
This episode is full of actionable wisdom to help you find peace, harness the power of rituals, feel feelings without letting them control you, and reduce stress and anxiety.
Listen and Learn or read the transcript.
Insight
“It doesn’t get any less scary. All that happens is that you have less life left. It helps if you do your falling early, and it really helps if you do your reaching early.”
— Mary H.K. Choi
Tiny Thought
Here is something counterintuitive: it’s easier to do something daily rather than a few times a week.
For example, last March, I started going to the gym. I told myself I would go three days a week. And that worked for a few weeks, but then I found myself slacking off. Since I was only going three days a week, it was easy to tell myself I didn’t have to go today – I could go tomorrow instead.
As someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy going to the gym, going tomorrow always sounded better than going today. Within a month, I stopped going to the gym altogether.
I needed a new approach. One that didn’t involve willpower. I made a rule to go to the gym every single day. And that subtle change made all the difference.
Doing something every day turns desired behavior into default behavior.
When willpower is lacking, routine takes over.
(Share this Tiny Thought on Twitter)
Etc.
It’s ok to sigh loudly and often:
“Cyclic sighing is most effective at improving mood and reducing respiratory rate”
— Source
The Consolidation-Disruption Index Is Alarming:
“These incentives might create a surplus of papers that just aren’t any good—that is, they exist purely to advance careers, not science.
“I definitely think there’s something to the idea that there are just a lot more bullshit papers out there,” Funk told me. Rather than blame individual scientists, he said the fault lies in a system that encourages volume over quality: “There are journals, which I’d consider predatory journals, that make researchers pay money to publish their papers there, with only symbolic peer review, and then the journals play games by making the authors cite articles from the same journal.””
— Source (The Atlantic)
Cheers,
— Shane
P.S. This is Fly Geyser