Mickey Mellen

“As theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once said: “One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist. Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“Metacognition might feel uncomfortable at times. It’s easy to write about what went well, regardless of the specifics that led to that success. It is more difficult to write about what went wrong. And it is even harder when, as is sometimes the case, we ourselves must take sole responsibility for why things didn’t go so well.”
― Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

“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

“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