Cara Yap

“What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“There's a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“One day, James Williams--the former Google strategist I met--addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: "How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?" There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again

“If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again