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• embodied fortitude: an introduction to the finnish construct of sisu
  lahti, e. et al. 2019
  http://dx.doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v9i1.672

  • 'Sisu is a Finnish word that goes back hundreds of years and a quality that Finns hold dear but the phenomenon itself is universal,' says Emilia Lahti, a doctoral student at Aalto University and author of the study. 'Taking a close look at the concept reminds us that, as humans, not only are we all vulnerable in the face of adversity but we share unexplored inner strength that can be accessed in adverse times.'

    In her study, Lahti analysed more than 1000 responses from Finns and others knowledgeable about sisu on what the concept means -- as well as whether it is inherently a good thing. One of the most prominent aspects apparent in the data: extraordinary perseverance, in other words, an individual's ability to surpass preconceived limitations, either mentally or physically, by accessing stored-up energy reserves.

    Lahti also found the concept to be marked in the responses by a consistent courageous approach to taking action against slim odds, in some cases appearing to the respondents almost as a 'magic' source of power that can help pull through tremendous challenges, whether self-selected like an ultra-run or something unexpected like a health struggle.

    It is hard to exhaustively describe sisu but, according to the study, it denotes an internal, latent force that moves you forward when you think you have reached your limit. It is almost like a spare tank of gas, Lahti explains; its benefits are thanks to adversity, not in spite of it. Sisu is not always, however, for the better.

    'Sisu will help us take the next step -- or the first one -- but the outcome of that action will depend on how we use it. In that sense, sisu can be constructive or it can be destructive.'

    It was apparent from the data that too much sisu can result in burnout, exhaustion, disconnection and even create an attitude of mercilessness as the individual imposes his or her own harsh standards on others. It seems that sisu is neither good nor bad, but a tool you must learn to master.

    While the public discourse at large glorifies mental strength and perpetuates a 'faster, higher and stronger' mentality, the answers in the data displayed an alternative view. '[Too much sisu leads to] denying the realities of life, as well as the limits of human strength, therefore denying the very core of our humanity in ourselves and others,' one respondent wrote.

    As an action researcher, Lahti sees the study results as an opportunity to engage in a broader societal conversation on how we might improve the quality of human life through greater self-understanding that includes the sisu construct.

    'Finland is an interesting case,' she says. 'We've again been named world's happiest country and in global terms we have an excellent social welfare system, but at the same time we are a country that, also, struggles with things like suicide, depression and domestic violence.' With global conversations on burnout and the tolls of modern life, understanding the extent and limits of human strength through new cultural contexts, like Finland, can contribute to a roadmap toward a more harmonious way of living.

    'We need sisu, but we also need things like benevolence, compassion and honesty with ourselves, Lahti says. 'The study is basically an invitation to talk about balance.'

  • abstract in the Nordic country of Finland, a cultural construct known as sisu has been used for centuries to describe the enigmatic power that enables individuals to push through unbearable challenges. Sisu, however, lacks a direct translation and the construct has remained poorly defined and understudied. This article seeks to answer the question “What is sisu?” through the thematic analysis of two sets of qualitative data (n = 500 and n = 569) that were collected as part of a survey (N = 1,208) among a sample group of primarily Finnish respondents. The most prominent part of the conceptual core of sisu is the ability to surpass one’s preconceived limitations by accessing stored-up energy reserves. Sisu is invoked by adversity and is more about finding energy in the moment than about long-term endurance, goal-setting and achievement. Instead of being about conscious willing or mental fortitude, it implies a strength that is connected to the visceral and somatic dimension of human endurance. I propose that sisu points to a universal phenomenon of latent energy in the human system, lends it a name and contributes toward a more culturally rich conversation on the human experience of overcoming adversity across life challenges.

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• the big ones: how natural disasters have shaped us (and what we can do about them)
  lucy jones 2018

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• peak: how all of us can achieve extraordinary things
  anders ericsson, robert pool 2017

  • “So here we have purposeful practice in a nutshell: Get outside your comfort zone but do it in a focused way, with clear goals, a plan for reaching those goals, and a way to monitor your progress. Oh, and figure out a way to maintain your motivation.”
  • the peak book is great but it is enthralled by precision. the author assumes there is always discrete and sensible goals that can be articulated and worked towards.
  • “Consider how professional baseball players are able to consistently hit balls that are pitched toward them at speeds that may exceed ninety miles per hour — something that’s impossible for anyone who hasn’t spent years training in that particular skill.”
  • this is not true. i hit balls coming out of a machine at 100mph on the first try, having never played baseball (grew up in england mostly), though people were very surprised that i did hit them…
  • here again the problem is our expectations, and our mental structures that get in the way of our potential. if we expect to fail, we will. letting ourselves adapt to a situation instead of trying to mentally analyse it, it is possible to do really well — but only if we have rid ourselves of the mental clutter beforehand.
  • they expect specialisation to be a big factor, and in most cases it is, but this means they miss those for whom specialisation is not such a big factor, or where specialised notation or jargon is not a barrier…
  • now i understand why they have this issue — they believe in mental representations as the sole key to deliberate practice, rather than also involving non–mental representations.
  • this is entirely the problem — trying to explain non–mental representations to people who don’t realise they exist is an exercise in futility — they might start getting an inkling of it, but they will not appreciate them, nor can we expect most people to appreciate what they do not know or understand.
  • ugh. the more i read the book the more it is like a geneticist insisting that junk dna is junk.
  • they are using a staircase metaphor for assembling learning, rather than a non–linear metaphor.
  • is it true that our metaphors are limited because of the dimensionality of our thinking? linear, one–dimensional thinking…
  • “In short, there were no students who just loved to practice and thus needed less motivation than the others. These students were motivated to practice intensely and with full concentration because they saw such practice as essential to improving their performance.”
  • ack! so they didn’t come across any so they assume for all time there will be none who love practice…
  • it’s really interesting to read this researcher’s work because am learning the (unjustified) assumptions behind the 10000 hours myth, which originates with him.
  • he succumbs to the “narrative myth” where assumptions from a narrative of history are held to represent facts and causation.
  • while i do “deliberate practice” in normal everyday life, that is neither the only nor perhaps even the most important approach.
  • does the concept of “pushing beyond comfort zones” still apply for “deliberate practice” if you have expanded your comfort zones by techniques such as mindfulness, stoic equanimity, or diversification?
  • i wonder if the problem with ai screening will be the disproportionate false positives due to the narrative effect in the original data sample provided by humans, and through narrative effect by humans mediating feedback to the ai? e.g. “cancer was found in that case after 1 year, and the image shows the incipient growth, therefore classify this kind of image as a positive in future” — when the causation and progression is not so clear in reality?
  • in effect, the “narrative fallacy” is a subset of the “knowledge gap” — where we place too much importance on what we believe we know, “due to” lack of knowledge beyond what we believe.
  • “we can see exactly how this sort of training might work in the case of laparoscopic surgery, for which researchers have done much more work in assembling an understanding of the types of mental representations that effective doctors use in their work. In one study, a group led by Lawrence Way, a surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, set out to understand what led to a particular type of injury to patients’ bile ducts during laparoscopic surgery to remove their gallbladders. In almost every case, these injuries were due to what the group called a “visual perceptual illusion”— that is,19 the surgeon mistook one body part for another. This led the surgeon to cut a bile duct instead of, say, a cystic duct, which was the intended target. The misperception was so strong that even when a surgeon noticed an anomaly, he would often keep going without stopping to question whether something might be wrong. Other researchers studying factors in the success of laparoscopic surgery have found that expert surgeons develop ways of getting a clearer look at the body parts,20 such as pushing some tissues aside in order to produce a better view for the camera that is used to guide the procedure.”
  • why “choose your own adventure” trains us in deliberate practice: by allowing us to see the immediate consequences of all the options (by flipping to each of them in turn), we get training in evaluating “clues” in the original situation, the “assumptions” we were making, against a “result” in multiple scenarios. the deliberate practice book misses this because the emphasis is on the “correct” answer, whereas we learn from the “failures”. this is similar to the logic problems where we must find the conditions where the rules are broken, not where they are confirmed.
  • this has relevance to AR and VR training simulations — we need to understand the failures as well as the successes.
  • “KNOWLEDGE VERSUS SKILLS
  • One of the implicit themes of the Top Gun approach to training, whether it is for shooting down enemy planes or interpreting mammograms, is the emphasis on doing. The bottom line is what you are able to do, not what you know, although it is understood that you need to know certain things in order to be able to do your job.
  • This distinction between knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the difference between traditional paths toward expertise and the deliberate-practice approach. Traditionally, the focus is nearly always on knowledge. Even when the ultimate outcome is being able to do something — solve a particular type of math problem, say, or write a good essay — the traditional approach has been to provide information about the right way to proceed and then mostly rely on the student to apply that knowledge. Deliberate practice, by contrast, focuses solely on performance and how to improve it.”
  • “you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.”
  • “Only two of sixty-two studies had found doctors to have gotten better with experience.” according to a harvard medical school review.
  • i guess i (unintentionally) trained in “deliberate practice” as a child…
  • “Louise Forsetlund updated Davis’s work,26 looking at forty-nine new studies of continuing medical education that had been published in the meantime. That group’s conclusions were similar to Davis’s: continuing medical education can improve doctors’ performance, but the effect is small, and the effects on patient outcomes are even smaller. In addition, it is mainly those education approaches with some interactive component that have an effect; lectures, seminars, and the like do little or nothing to help doctors improve their practice. Finally, the researchers found that no type of continuing medical education is effective at improving complex behaviors, that is, behaviors that involve a number of steps or require considering a number of different factors. In other words, to the extent that continuing medical education is effective, it is effective in changing only the most basic things that doctors do in their practices.”
  • “Louise Forsetlund et al. 2012 “Continuing education meetings and workshops: Effects on professional practice and health care out-comes”
  • i guess the major difference between my practical form of deliberate practice is that i (unintentionally) practice what i have learned and read about, whereas most people are happy that they have read a theory and/or do not apply it.
  • “over the long term I believe the best approach will be to develop new skills-based training programs that will supplement or completely replace the knowledge-based approaches that are the norm now in many places. This strategy acknowledges that because what is ultimately most important is what people are able to do, training should focus on doing rather than on knowing — and, in particular, on bringing everyone’s skills closer to the level of the best performers in a given area.”
  • “Research into the mental processes of the best doctors has shown that while they may have prepared surgical plans before they start, they regularly monitor the surgeries in progress and are ready to switch gears if necessary. This was apparent from a series of recent studies done by medical researchers in Canada who observed operations that the surgeons had predicted would be challenging.38 When the researchers interviewed the surgeons after the operations about their thought processes during the surgery, they found that the main way the surgeons detected problems was by noticing that something about the surgery didn’t match the way they had visualized the surgery in their preoperative plan. Once they noticed the mismatch, they came up with a list of alternative approaches and decided which was most likely to work.”
  • “This points to something important about how these experienced surgeons perform: over time they have developed effective mental representations that they use in planning the surgery, in performing it, and in monitoring its progress so that they can detect when something is wrong and adapt accordingly.”
  • “The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do — that takes you out of your comfort zone — and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better. Real life — our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies — seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities. Franklin did it with his exercises, each focused on a particular facet of writing. Much of what a good teacher or coach will do is to develop such exercises for you, designed specifically to help you improve the particular skill you are focused on at the moment. But without a teacher, you must come up with your own exercises.”
  • “will vary their patterns proactively so they don’t get stuck on plateaus in the first place.”
  • exactly this.
  • “having difficulty getting better, it will be just one or two of the components of that skill, not all of them, that are holding you back. The question is, Which ones?”
  • “figure out exactly what is holding you back. What mistakes are you making, and when? Push yourself well outside of your comfort zone and see what breaks down first. Then design a practice technique aimed at improving that particular weakness.”
  • “The power of this technique is that it targets those specific problem areas that are holding you back rather than trying this and that and hoping that something works. This technique is not widely recognized, even among experienced teachers, even though it might seem obvious as described here and is a remarkably effective way to rise above plateaus.”
  • “As a rule of thumb, I think that anyone who hopes to improve skill in a particular area should devote an hour or more each day to practice that can be done with full concentration”
  • “you can either strengthen the reasons to keep going or weaken the reasons to quit. Successful motivation efforts generally include both.”
  • “When I studied the violin students in Berlin I found that most of them preferred to practice as soon as they got up in the morning. They had set up their schedules so that there was nothing else to do at that time. It was set aside specifically for practice. Furthermore, identifying that period as their practice time created a sense of habit and duty that made it less likely they’d be tempted by something else.”
  • “Expert performers do two things — both seemingly unrelated to motivation — that can help. The first is general physical maintenance: getting enough sleep and keeping healthy. If you’re tired or sick, it’s that much harder to maintain focus and that much easier to slack off.”
  • “The second thing is to limit the length of your practice sessions to about an hour. You can’t maintain intense concentration for much longer than that — and when you’re first starting out, it’s likely to be less. If you want to practice longer than an hour, go for an hour and take a break.”
  • “once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation”
  • “As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.”
  • “The psychologist Benjamin Bloom once directed a project that examined the childhoods of a number of experts in various fields. One of his findings was that when these future experts were young, their parents would use various strategies to keep them from quitting. In particular, several of the experts told of a time in their youth when they were sick or injured in some way that prevented them from practicing for a significant amount of time. When they eventually resumed practicing, they weren’t at nearly the same level they had been at before, and, discouraged, they wanted to quit. Their parents told them that they could quit if they wished but that first they needed to keep practicing enough to get back to where they were. And this did the trick. Once they’d practiced for a while and gotten back to where they were, they realized that they could indeed keep getting better and that their setback was just temporary.”
  • “Perhaps the most important factor here, though, is the social environment itself. Deliberate practice can be a lonely pursuit, but if you have a group of friends who are in the same positions — the other members of your orchestra or your baseball team or your chess club — you have a built-in support system.”
  • this is maybe what i am aiming for right now, i know that it is lonely being out on the frontier and want my friends to be here too.
  • “Begin by identifying what students should learn how to do. The objectives should be skills, not knowledge. In figuring out the particular way students should learn a skill, examine how the experts do it. In particular, understand as much as possible about the mental representations that experts use, and teach the skill so as to help students develop similar mental representations. This will involve teaching the skill step by step, with each step designed to keep students out of their comfort zone but not so far out that they cannot master that step. Then give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations.”
  • “In addition to more effective teaching methods, there are other, less obvious ways that deliberate practice can be applied to education. In particular I think there would be tremendous value in helping children and, especially, adolescents develop detailed mental representations in at least one area, for reasons that we will discuss below. This is not a goal of the current educational system, and generally the only students who do develop such representations are those who are pursuing some skill outside of school — playing a sport or a musical instrument, for instance — and even then the students do not really understand what they’re doing or recognize that their representations are part of a larger phenomenon that stretches across fields.
  • One benefit that a young student — or anyone, really — gets from developing mental representations is the freedom to begin exploring that skill on his or her own. In music, having clear representations of what musical pieces sound like, how the different sections of a piece fit together to create the whole, and how variations in one’s playing can affect the sound allows student musicians to play music for themselves or for others and to improvise and explore on their instruments. They no longer need a teacher to lead them down every path; they can head down some paths on their own.
  • Something similar is true for academic subjects. Students who develop mental representations can go on to generate their own scientific experiments or to write their own books — and research has shown that many successful scientists and authors started their careers at a young age in just this way. The best way to help students develop their skills and mental representations in an area is to give them models they can replicate and learn from, just as Benjamin Franklin did when he improved his writing by reproducing articles from The Spectator. They need to try and fail — but with ready access to models that show what success looks like.”
  • “Having students create mental representations in one area helps them understand exactly what it takes to be successful not only in that area but in others as well. Most people, even adults, have never attained a level of performance in any field that is sufficient to show them the true power of mental representations to plan, execute, and evaluate their performance in the way that expert performers do. And thus they never really understand what it takes to reach this level — not just the time it takes, but the high-quality practice. Once they do understand what is necessary to get there in one area, they understand, at least in principle, what it takes in other areas.”
  • “expert performers get great satisfaction and pleasure from exercising their abilities, and they feel a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment from pushing themselves to develop new skills, particularly skills that are on the very edges of their fields. It is as if they are on a constantly stimulating journey where boredom is never a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities. And those experts whose skills relate to some sort of performance — the musicians, dancers, gymnasts, and so forth — report getting great pleasure from performing in public. When everything goes well they experience a level of effortlessness similar in many ways to the psychological state of “flow” popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This gives them a precious “high” that few people other than experts ever experience.”
  • “Even those who don’t reach the frontiers of a field can still enjoy the challenge of taking control of their own lives and improving their abilities. A world in which deliberate practice is a normal part of life would be one in which people had more volition and satisfaction.”
  • “The most important gifts we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job. They will need to see firsthand — through their own experiences of developing abilities they thought were beyond them — that they control their abilities and are not held hostage by some antiquated idea of natural talent.”
  • “it may be that the only answer to a world in which rapidly improving technologies are constantly changing the conditions under which we work, play, and live will be to create a society of people who recognize that they can control their development and understand how to do it. This new world of Homo exercens may well be the ultimate result of what we have learned and will learn about deliberate practice and about the power it gives us to take our future into our own hands.”

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• born to run: a hidden tribe, superathletes, and the greatest race the world has never seen
  christopher mcdougall

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• evoking the ineffable: the phenomenology of extreme sports
  eric brymer, robert d. schweitzer 2017
  dx.doi.org/10.1037/cns0000111

  • extreme sports as invigorating experience, inadequacy of words, and participants’ experience of transcendence.

    We explored an aspect of the life-world of extreme sports participants from a phenomeno-logical perspective. We focused on describing the ineffable element of the extreme sport ex-perience. However, any attempt to describe the indescribable immediately reduces the intensity and power of such an experience to defined, bound verbalizations and conceptualizations. Attempts to clarify certain experiences poten-tially results in the experience being lost, or, perhaps worse still, being obliterated in the pro-cess. A contemporary phenomenologist, van

    71 EVOKING THE INEFFABLE

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• tardigrades use intrinsically disordered proteins to survive desiccation
  boothby et al. 2017
  dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2017.02.018

  • •Tardigrade intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs) are enriched during desiccation
    •TDPs are required for tardigrades to survive desiccation
    •Expression of TDPs increases desiccation tolerance in heterologous systems
    •TDPs vitrify, and this vitrified state mirrors their protective capabilities

    Tardigrades are microscopic animals that survive a remarkable array of stresses, including desiccation. How tardigrades survive desiccation has remained a mystery for more than 250 years. Trehalose, a disaccharide essential for several organisms to survive drying, is detected at low levels or not at all in some tardigrade species, indicating that tardigrades possess potentially novel mechanisms for surviving desiccation. Here we show that tardigrade-specific intrinsically disordered proteins (TDPs) are essential for desiccation tolerance. TDP genes are constitutively expressed at high levels or induced during desiccation in multiple tardigrade species. TDPs are required for tardigrade desiccation tolerance, and these genes are sufficient to increase desiccation tolerance when expressed in heterologous systems. TDPs form non-crystalline amorphous solids (vitrify) upon desiccation, and this vitrified state mirrors their protective capabilities. Our study identifies TDPs as functional mediators of tardigrade desiccation tolerance, expanding our knowledge of the roles and diversity of disordered proteins involved in stress tolerance.

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• hormetic heat stress and hsf-1 induce autophagy to improve survival and proteostasis in c. elegans
  caroline kumsta, jessica t. chang, jessica schmalz, malene hansen 2017
  ncomms14337

  • Stress-response pathways have evolved to maintain cellular homeostasis and to ensure the survival of organisms under changing environmental conditions. Whereas severe stress is detrimental, mild stress can be beneficial for health and survival, known as hormesis. Although the universally conserved heat-shock response regulated by transcription factor HSF-1 has been implicated as an effector mechanism, the role and possible interplay with other cellular processes, such as autophagy, remains poorly understood. Here we show that autophagy is induced in multiple tissues of Caenorhabditis elegans following hormetic heat stress or HSF-1 overexpression. Autophagy-related genes are required for the thermoresistance and longevity of animals exposed to hormetic heat shock or HSF-1 overexpression. Hormetic heat shock also reduces the progressive accumulation of PolyQ aggregates in an autophagy-dependent manner. These findings demonstrate that autophagy contributes to stress resistance and hormesis, and reveal a requirement for autophagy in HSF-1-regulated functions in the heat-shock response, proteostasis and ageing.

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• allegory versus literal interpretation

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• musical structure of plato's dialogues
  j. b. kennedy 2011
  Link: search.lib.cam.ac.uk/

  • useful for background on allegory in ancient philosophy, speculations on structures common to each of plato’s dialogues

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• lost in time and space: states of high arousal disrupt implicit acquisition of spatial and sequential context information
  thomas maran et al. 2017
  dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00206

  • Biased cognition during high arousal states is a relevant phenomenon in a variety of topics: from the development of post-traumatic stress disorders or stress-triggered addictive behaviors to forensic considerations regarding crimes of passion. Recent evidence indicates that arousal modulates the engagement of a hippocampus-based “cognitive” system in favor of a striatum-based “habit” system in learning and memory, promoting a switch from flexible, contextualized to more rigid, reflexive responses. Existing findings appear inconsistent, therefore it is unclear whether and which type of context processing is disrupted by enhanced arousal. In this behavioral study, we investigated such arousal-triggered cognitive-state shifts in human subjects. We validated an arousal induction procedure (three experimental conditions: violent scene, erotic scene, neutral control scene) using pupillometry (Preliminary Experiment, n = 13) and randomly administered this method to healthy young adults to examine whether high arousal states affect performance in two core domains of contextual processing, the acquisition of spatial (spatial discrimination paradigm; Experiment 1, n = 66) and sequence information (learned irrelevance paradigm; Experiment 2, n = 84). In both paradigms, spatial location and sequences were encoded incidentally and both displacements when retrieving spatial position as well as the predictability of the target by a cue in sequence learning changed stepwise. Results showed that both implicit spatial and sequence learning were disrupted during high arousal states, regardless of valence. Compared to the control group, participants in the arousal conditions showed impaired discrimination of spatial positions and abolished learning of associative sequences. Furthermore, Bayesian analyses revealed evidence against the null models. In line with recent models of stress effects on cognition, both experiments provide evidence for decreased engagement of flexible, cognitive systems supporting encoding of context information in active cognition during acute arousal, promoting reduced sensitivity for contextual details. We argue that arousal fosters cognitive adaptation towards less demanding, more present-oriented information processing, which prioritizes a current behavioral response set at the cost of contextual cues. This transient state of behavioral perseverance might reduce reliance on context information in unpredictable environments and thus represent an adaptive response in certain situations.

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• dan heath, chip heath
  to read next

  • switch: how to change things when change is hard
    dan heath chip heath to read next

  • made to stick
    to read next

  • decisive: how to make better choices in life and work
    chip heath, dan heath 2013 to read next

    • advocates for thaler’s nudge…

  • the power of moments
    chip heath

  • upstream: the quest to solve problems before they happen
    dan heath 2020

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  • a passion for this earth
    michelle benjamin 2009

  • rewild: the art of returning to nature
    nick baker 2017

  • the sense of wonder: a celebration of nature for parents and children
    rachel carson 1956, 2017

  • emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds
    adrienne brown

  • the consciousness instinct: unraveling the mystery of how the brain makes the mind
    michael gazzaniga 2018

  • endure: mind, body, and the curiously elastic limits of human performance
    alex hutchinson 2018

  • extremes: life, death and the limits of the human body
    kevin fong 2013

  • extreme medicine: how exploration transformed medicine in the twentieth century
    kevin fong 2014

  • endgame, vol. 1: the problem of civilization
    derrick jensen 2006

  • 59 seconds: think a little, change a lot
    richard wiseman 2010

    • sadly many of the papers cited in this book may not replicate

  • the need for roots: prelude to a declaration of duties towards mankind
    simone weil, arthur wills 1943, 2001

  • peak performance: elevate your game, avoid burnout, and thrive with the new science of success
    brad stulberg, steve magness 2017

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• not recommended

  • resilient: how to grow unshakable core of calm strength and happiness
    rick hanson 2018

  • the impact code: live the life you deserve
    nigel risner 2006

  • train your mind for peak performance: a science-based approach for achieving your goals
    lyle bourne 2011

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• our limitations are mostly mental, spells that we have learned. an introvert is made when they become convinced that talking to someone new is too much effort.

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• things with which we are not entirely comfortable, that challenge us, are some of the things which most help us to grow.

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• like a baby with a wet nappy, ‘greatness’ is not achieved without some measure of discomfort.

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• sadly, living through great suffering seems to be one of the few paths that can help us move beyond our current limits

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• the question is, can we do what einstein could not? can we find a way to challenge ourselves and our thinking?

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• What do you believe are the major issues we need to solve in life, in society?

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• it's true that it's amazing that we can find positive emotions and power from the right environment but also super amazing that we can do so sometimes no matter what the environment is.

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• the more rigid, inflexible, a system becomes, the more magnified, the greater the effect of change agents that will arise within it.

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• anticipation
• to do nothing about the things that you know and do not know are slowly killing you and your family. is that not hell?

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• when caring for someone, for example someone who has mental health issues, you must care for yourself first. this is not because you love yourself more, but because if you are not capable, you will not be capable of looking after them either. it is the same rationale that adults must put on their oxygen masks on before helping the children do theirs — it is time–critical as you can lose consciousness very quickly, so to be able to look after the child past the initial problem, you must be conscious to do so, so you must put on your mask first.

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• i use obstacles to hone my creativity, adapting skills
  • this is good because most obstacles are caused by self-righteous people. no one has changed in my experience just because they were shown to be wrong; end up hbing to work around the obstacle they present on those issues

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• exactly those things or processes that are most challenging for us to face are exactly those that we most need to face — by definition, they could not be most challenging if we could face them easily

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• imagine, for just a minute, that I suddenly make a small sphere of force right here in this room. you can see it has disintegrated a chunk of the desk. you hear the crackle as the air and dust passing at its boundary disappears, you feel the soft breeze of the disappearing air raise the hairs on the back of your neck, you smell the sharp smell of molecules ripped apart, and feel a tingle, a rumble, even, of a force you don't understand.
• now the response of most of those of you reading this might be “what is that?” or “how is that done?” — a civilised response, but precisely the wrong one. “why is it wrong?” you might ask. well, just imagine also that this sphere is growing a little, or maybe it just seems so because it is moving towards you.
• you will have many examples from your own experience that show how people can be very wrong, even when we believe we are right. and much of the time, this doesn't matter — we muddle through regardless. but just sometimes, just enough times to matter, our errors have very bad consequences.
• sadly, even those errors that didn't seem to matter, turn out to matter.

00232

• evoke
  • kindling what already lives inside you
    • more than words
  • movies that i don’t like can make me think as much as movies I do like. I wonder why it is that I don’t like them, what did the characters do that I would hope not to have done if I were in their place. what beliefs did they have that held them back from living happily as they professed to want to live?

00132

• challenge
  • it isn’t that ‘bad’ situations bring out the ‘best’ in people — it is that extreme situations are where the necessary ability to survive and thrive shows in the people who happen to have those latent abilities that match the particular situation
  • if people could do any better right now, don’t you think we would be doing it? yet also, how we are doing now need not determine how we do in future — just because we are not doing better right now, is no excuse for not doing better in future
  • we maybe shouldn’t fret so much about the state of the world, even while trying our utmost to improve it — the probability is that no matter what the state of the world is, there will be seemingly insuperable problems to solve, because every solved problem leaves others to be solved.

00032

• germanium Ge (germania, germany)
• thorby
  • operating missile guns
  • trader spaceship sisu
• CB
• http link back to 00100