“Focus, damn you. I thought back to this moment when, over a year later, I interviewed Professor Gloria Mark, who has spent years studying the science of interruptions. She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions.”
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
“We now use our phones so habitually that I don’t think we consider doing a task and checking our phones at the same time as multitasking, any more than we think scratching your butt during a work call is multitasking. But it is. Simply having your phone switched on and receiving texts every ten minutes while you try to work is itself a form of switching – and these costs start to kick in for you too. One study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse.”
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
“John’s was a lived and practical wisdom. “The self-renewing man,” he wrote, “looks forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between his potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims he encounters but the claims he invents.” He was a half century older than me, but John’s enduring curiosity, his sense of possibility and willingness to try made him seem the youngest person I knew. So, just start.”
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
“The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting emails and calls – caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.”
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
― Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention
“Moral imagination means to view other people’s problems as if they were your own, and to begin to discern how to tackle those problems. And then to act accordingly. It summons us to understand and transcend the realities of current circumstances and to envision a better future for ourselves and others. Moral imagination starts with empathy, but it does not content itself simply to feel another’s pain. Empathy without action risks reinforcing the status quo. Rather, moral imagination is muscular, built from the bottom up and grounded through immersion in the lives of others. It involves connecting on a human level, analyzing the systemic issues at play, and only then envisioning how to go beyond applying a Band-Aid to making a long-term difference.”
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
― Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World
Jehan’s 2025 Year in Books
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