Mindful Startups

I’ve long realized that email is the biggest killer of my productivity. E.g. if I’m trying to code, I never stop to go and play video games. But I did stop and check my email because I could justify it as work (“work” that is both significantly easier and provides a quicker dopamine hit than trying to solve a hard problem). But once I rid myself of the habit of checking email constantly on my phone, suddenly I had less of a habitual urge to check my email in general. It feels wonderful.

Harj Taggar of venture capital investor/incubator Y Combinator, on his decision to remove email access from his smartphone, as well as Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Thinking in Solitude

He also quotes a great lecture delivered to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point by William Deresiewicz titled “Solitude and Leadership:”

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.

The full blog post by Taggar is here and the lecture by Deresiewicz is here. Both are must-reads.

[W]hat we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Of dragons and princesses →

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

(via examined-life)

The only devils in this world are those running around in our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought.

Mahatma Gandhi

Don’t take anything personally. Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. Their point of view and opinion come from all the programming they received growing up. When you take things personally, you feel offended and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflict. You make something big out of something so little because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong.

Don Miguel Ruiz

(via myrealityofdragonflies)

(via myrealityofdragonflies)

longreads:

Does our body tell us when we can’t go any farther, or does our brain? A look at marathon runners and the science behind human endurance.

A classic situation in which athletes believe they have hit a true physical limit is ‘bonking’ during a marathon: you stagger to a halt, ostensibly because your body runs out of carbohydrates. When Noakes started running in the 1970s, the standard advice was to drink only water during long races. Then, in the late stages of a sixty-four-kilometre race one year, he tried a few spoonfuls of corn syrup. ‘Five minutes later, I just started running. I finished that race faster than I ever finished,’ he recalls. ‘It was like the brain released something.” The discovery led to the first external funding (‘a thousand rand in a brown paper packet,’ he says) for his nascent sports science lab, to study the effects of corn syrup on participants in South Africa’s Stellenbosch marathon.

The fact that the corn syrup worked seems to support the idea that the body is limited by its finite store of carbohydrates. But it almost worked too well, and Noakes began to question whether carbohydrates could even reach the muscles that quickly. Sure enough, recent experiments in Britain have shown that your brain picks up the presence of carbohydrates in your mouth via previously unknown sensors, anticipates that fuel is headed to your muscles, and allows you to go a bit faster — even if you trick it by spitting out the carbs rather than swallowing them to replenish your muscles.

“The Race Against Time.” — Alex Hutchinson, Walrus Magazine

See more from Walrus Magazine

(via longreads)

The Examined Life: Anonymity →

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation…

Study of the Day: Why Crowded Coffee Shops Actually Help Creative Thinking

The next time you’re stumped on a creative challenge, head to a bustling coffee shop, not the library. As the researchers write in their paper, “[I]nstead of burying oneself in a quiet room trying to figure out a solution, walking out of one’s comfort zone and getting into a relatively noisy environment may trigger the brain to think abstractly, and thus generate creative ideas.”

Read more. [Image: Global X/Flickr]

(via theatlantic)

Everyone must know that within them burns a candle and no one’s candle is identical with the candle of another. It is our obligation to work hard to reveal the light of our candle, and make of it a great torch to enlighten the whole world.

- Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook