Mickey Mellen

“According to Buddhist legend, on the night Gautama Buddha was conceived, his mother dreamed of a white elephant. And so for many centuries, white elephants were sacred in many Southeast Asian countries. Receiving a white elephant as a gift from a monarch was a great honor. But it was also a curse, as the animal was extremely expensive to maintain, protected from labor by local laws, and impossible to give away. People were stuck with this beautiful but useless possession with ruinous maintenance costs.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“When I stopped trying to shoot the messenger—to “just do it” and plow through—then procrastination turned out to be a helpful friend. When I treated resistance as evidence, it helped me to understand why it was so hard to write this chapter in the first place. And once I started talking to people, it became impossible to keep on delaying the work.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“We fancy ourselves adept multitaskers, but studies show that our performance drops dramatically when we attempt to focus on more than one thing at a time. That’s because the human brain has an attentional bottleneck impacting both perception and action. In short, our efforts to get more done actually slow us down.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Our ancestors’ daily routines included organic opportunities to shape their inner world—on long walks, in meditative moments while completing repetitive tasks such as sewing and tending to crops, or in nightly reflection when praying before bed. But we in the present day have largely lost those quiet natural pauses. Instead, we grind on a near-constant flood of social media and emails. This leaves little space for thinking, let alone thinking about thinking.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World