May 2023

Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possib`le. Instead aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.

“You are the open, empty site of a ceaseless display of an infinite variety of experience.”

—JAMES LOW

What does your dream day look like?

I’m not talking if you had 1 day to live and how would you spend it. If you had thousands of days left to live and you had to do something, be somewhere, what would you be doing?

You might not come up with the answer straight away but keep asking.

If you’re used to telling yourself you’d do things and never actually do them, step one is building back your trust in yourself. You do that by starting unbelievably small.

We worry about having all the right answers.

But I think it’s better to focus on asking the right questions.

The right question at the right time can change the course of a life, can still a turbulent situation, can provide a totally different perspective.

You have devoted your life to the light: devote what remains to obscurity. It is impossible to give up your pursuits if you do not give up their fruits. Renounce all concern for name and glory. … Among other gratifications, give up the one which comes from other people’s approval.

• On Solitude, Montaigne

Socrates was told that some man had not been improved by travel. ‘I am sure he was not,’ he said. ‘He went with himself!’

Making time for what matters to your life requires setting boundaries and prioritizing tasks based on personal intuition and a balance of urgency, pleasure, and joy. It is important to listen to your intuition and identify that one thing that worths your attention.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

“It’s hard to grow beyond something if you won’t let go of it.”

“Broaden your interests. It’s nice to have at least one surprising hobby or passion. People find it interesting. In many ways, the part of you that is least expected is more respected.”

“People don’t need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don’t need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth.

Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs—for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy—with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.”

• Donella Meadows

When you’re living a good day, what is one habit that tends to be part of that day? Can you find time for that habit today?

“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.”

• Audrey Hepburn