MM

“We blame ourselves, our boss, the mortgage, the government, the school system. But it’s not really their fault. It’s the modern deal that we all signed up for on the day we were born. In the premodern world, people were akin to lowly clerks in a socialist bureaucracy. They punched their cards, and then waited for somebody else to do something. In the modern world, we humans run the business, so we are under constant pressure day and night.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Though we know precious little about how the brain works, our evolutionary history tells us this: The brain appears to be designed to (1) solve problems (2) related to surviving (3) in an unstable outdoor environment, and (4) to do so in nearly constant motion. I call this the brain’s performance envelope. Each subject in this book—exercise, sleep, stress, wiring, attention, memory, sensory integration, vision, music, gender, and exploration—relates to this performance envelope. We were in motion, getting lots of exercise. Environmental instability led to the extremely flexible way our brains are wired, allowing us to solve problems through exploration. To survive in the great outdoors, we needed to learn from our mistakes. That meant paying attention to certain things at the expense of others, and it meant creating memories in a particular way. Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. We have not outgrown this.”
― John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

“Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsigh”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow