Omar Mohammad

“Writing is a way to explore a question and gain control over it,”
― William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write--And Think--Clearly about Any Subject at All

“In a sense, every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want. Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit. Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

“Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction. Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom. We can find evidence for this claim in the research of Clifford Nass, the late Stanford communications professor who was well known for his study of behavior in the digital age. Among other insights, Nass’s research revealed that constant attention switching online has a lasting negative effect on your brain. Here’s Nass summarizing these findings in a 2010 interview with NPR’s Ira Flatow: So we have scales that allow us to divide up people into people who multitask all the time and people who rarely do, and the differences are remarkable. People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted. They initiate much larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand … they’re pretty much mental wrecks. At this point Flatow asks Nass whether the chronically distracted recognize this rewiring of their brain: The people we talk with continually said, “look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused.” And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task. [emphasis mine] Once your brain has become accustomed to on-demand distraction, Nass discovered, it’s hard to shake the addiction even when you want to concentrate. To put this more concretely: If every moment of potential boredom in your life—say, having to wait five minutes in line or sit alone in a restaurant until a friend arrives—is relieved with a quick glance at your smartphone, then your brain has likely been rewired to a point where, like the “mental wrecks” in Nass’s research, it’s not ready for deep work—even if you regularly schedule time to practice this concentration.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“You may now be wondering, If bankers know that the state will come to their rescue in their time of need, what incentive do they have to limit the loans they dish out during the good times? Wouldn’t a better solution be for the state to rescue the banks – so that people’s savings and the economy’s payment system are preserved – but not to rescue the bankers themselves? Why not send them home penniless as a warning to any other banker who is tempted to do the same? Unfortunately, this obvious solution crashes on the shoals of harsh reality. More often than not, the politicians in charge of government are elected with the help of large contributions from those same bankers. Too often, the politicians need the bankers every bit as much as the bankers need them.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter