“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”
― How Proust Can Change Your Life
― How Proust Can Change Your Life
“Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.”
― Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
― Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
“The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.”
― How Proust Can Change Your Life
― How Proust Can Change Your Life
“Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.”
― Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
― Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
“if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.”
― Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
― Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Carey’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Carey’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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