Нотатки:
Denying reality never works […]. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it canʼt ever bring the sense that youʼre doing enough — that you are enough — because it defines ‘enough’ as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life. For example, the more you believe you might succeed in ‘fitting everything in’, the more commitments you naturally take on, and the less you feel the need to ask whether each new commitment is truly worth a portion of your time — and so your days inevitably fill with more activities you donʼt especially value. The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks […] that wonʼt be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties […]. And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get.
The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing, the clearer it became to him that the real problem had been not the activity itself but his internal resistance to experiencing it. When he stopped trying to block out those sensations and attended to them instead, the discomfort would evaporate.
Personal or household rules, such as the increasingly popular idea of a self-imposed ‘digital sabbath’, can fill the vacuum to some extent. But they lack the social reinforcement that comes when everyone else is following the rule too, so theyʼre inevitably harder to abide by — and because theyʼre reliant on willpower, theyʼre prone to all the hazards involved in trying to force yourself to be more ‘present in the moment’.
I know there are people whoʼd prefer to be relaxing on a Caribbean beach, instead of getting drenched while trudging through gorse bushes under a glowering sky; but Iʼm not going to pretend I understand them.
Things just are the way they are […], no matter how vigorously you might wish they werenʼt — and your only hope of exercising any real influence over the world is to work with that fact, instead of against it.
Until the age of thirty-seven […] he considered himself a ‘mechanical idiot’, almost entirely inept when it came to fixing household appliances, cars, bicycles and suchlike. Then one day he came upon a neighbour who was midway through fixing his lawnmower, and paid him a self-deprecating compliment: ‘Boy, I sure admire you. Iʼve never been able to fix those kinds of things!’
‘Thatʼs because you donʼt take the time’, the neighbour replied.
If youʼre willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself.
The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day. They cultivated the patience to tolerate the fact that they probably wouldnʼt be producing very much on any individual day, with the result that they produced much more over the long term. They wrote in brief daily sessions — sometimes as short as ten minutes, and never longer than four hours — and they religiously took weekends off.
[…] Approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity: to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when youʼre bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.
Сonsider the possibility that many of the things youʼre already doing [...] are more meaningful than youʼd supposed — and that until now, youʼd subconsciously been devaluing them, on the grounds that they werenʼt ‘significant’ enough.
His sole advice for walking such a path was to ‘quietly do the next and most necessary thing […]’
Seek out novelty in the mundane.
When presented with a challenging or boring moment, try deliberately adopting an attitude of curiosity.
Книга з корисними непопулярними думками. Радий, що прочитав, але іноді було нудно через затягнуті речення і, як на мене, трохи складну мову.
«Ще», — пише дизайнер Олександр Зайцев, — «по всій книзі багато розірваних цитат, які можна було б написати значно простіше». Згідно з Зайцевим, можна було б так не ускладнювати. Він додає: «Цю цитату можна було б написати за один раз».
Погоджуюсь з автором, що нема сенсу безперервно оптимізовувати життя, аби втиснути в нього якомога більше задач — так їх кількість буде тільки збільшуватись. Не варто також чекати, що колись ми успішно завершимо усі справи, і завдяки цьому настане момент щастя і безтурботності.