Marcelo Oliveira

“There’s a famous finding in the psychological literature,” Ochsner explains, “showing that six months later, someone who has become a paraplegic is just as happy as someone who’s won the lottery. It seems clear people are doing something to find what’s positive in even the most dire of circumstances. The one thing you can always do is control your interpretation of the meaning of the situation,”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“like the time he’d dashed into Minton’s out of the pouring rain and seen this kid playing tenor, making it wail and wriggle around like the horn was a bird whose neck he was trying to wring. Breathing heavy, dripping rain on the floor, he listened to the loops and knots of sound tying and untying themselves. Hearing the horn squealing and wailing that way was like seeing a child he loved getting hit. He’d never seen the guy before, so he just rolled up to the stage, waited for the guy to end his solo, and said, as if it was his horn the guy’d been messing with: —Tenor ain’t supposed to sound that fast. Grabbed it out of the guy’s hands and laid it gentle on a table. —What’s your name? —Charlie Parker. —Well, Charlie, you gonna make cats crazy blowing the horn that way. Then laughed that big snorting laugh, like someone blowing their nose hilariously, and walked out into the rain again, a sheriff who had just taken a dangerous weapon off a drunk cowboy. He”
― Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz

“Without this ability to stand outside your experience, without self-awareness, you would have little ability to moderate and direct your behavior moment to moment. Such real-time, goal-directed modulation of behavior is the key to acting as a mature adult. You need this capacity to free yourself from the automatic flow of experience, and to choose where to direct your attention. Without a director you are a mere automaton, driven by greed, fear, or habit.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long

“More people than ever are being paid to think, instead of just doing routine tasks. Yet making complex decisions and solving new problems is difficult for any stretch of time because of some real biological limits on your brain. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to improve mental performance is to understand these limits. In act 1, Emily discovers why thinking requires so much energy, and develops new techniques for dealing with having too much to do. Paul learns about the space limits of his brain, and works out how to deal with information overload. Emily finds out why it’s so hard to do two things at once, and rethinks how she organizes her work. Paul discovers why he is so easily distracted, and works on how to stay more focused. Then he finds out how to stay in his brain’s “sweet spot.” In the last scene, Emily discovers that her problem-solving techniques need improving, and learns how to have breakthroughs when she needs them most.”
― David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long