Nu Fetterhoff

“Alec had comfort books—stories so familiar that they made reading feel like coasting downhill on a bike, or water-skiing on a smooth lake.”
― Andrew Clements, The Losers Club

“I’d heard the expression about living in glass houses, but I never expected to actually be doing that.”
― Steven Decker, Child of Another Kind

“Before machine learning, multivariate regression provided an efficient way to condition on multiple things, without the need to calculate dozens, hundreds, or thousands of conditional averages. Regression takes the data and tries to find the result that minimizes prediction mistakes, maximizing what is called “goodness of fit.”
― Ajay Agrawal, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

“to show us the way—the easier life is to handle.
'So, to begin, we have to put a sticky note on the bathroom mirror, or tell a friend to call us first thing in the morning, anything to remind ourselves to set up an expectation for Synchronicity first thing each day. Eventually, it becomes a habit.

And once all the mysterious coincidences are happening and our destiny seems to be unfolding, all that is left is to stay in that flow.”
He paused dramatically.

“And to do that,” he went on, “we have to learn to communicate what’s going on with us to others.”
“What?”
“Think about what happens when we lose the Flow,” he explained.
“Doesn’t it occur because we hit some situation where we have to interact with others who aren’t in a flow, and who can’t readily see the meanings we are seeing? The effect is to knock us out of it altogether.”

I thought about what happened to me with the skeptic. It was certainly true in that case.
“When I’m in the flow,” I said, “I usually try to get away from most people, so they can’t knock me out of it.”
“I know,” Wil said in a mock accusatory tone.

“Are you saying' 'I asked, “that I should have taken the time to talk with that skeptic, even though that’s not what I wanted to do?”

“No, I’m suggesting that you should have been open and truthful with him, maybe asking him to wait a minute while you talked to the people at the table. He was needling you, but you didn’t lose your flow because of him.
You lost it because you didn’t find a way to honestly communicate who you were and what you were doing.”

“I don’t think he was interested in hearing anything from me.”

“You’re missing the point. I’m not telling you to defend yourself or to convince him of anything. You just have to give him the truth of the situation as you see it, with the main purpose being to keep yourself centered in the flow.”
― James Redfield, The Twelfth Insight: The Hour of Decision