“We should all take responsibility for our diets, but overeating isn’t simply a failure of willpower or discipline. It’s much more insidious than that. Our brains regulate intake subconsciously, using ancient, evolved systems to manage metabolic rate, hunger, and satiety. The energy we pour into producing and processing our food transforms it from a source of nourishment to something more akin to a drug. The highly processed, flavor-engineered foods that dominate our supermarket shelves and commercials easily overwhelm our brain’s capacity to regulate energy balance.”
15 Jul 2024 at 9:37 PM
Burn
Herman Pontzer PhD
“Starting from the principle that the brain must infer the hidden causes of its sensory inputs, we’ve reached a new understanding of why and how our inner universe is populated with everything from coffee cups to colours to causality-ness – things that seem to be properties of an external objective reality, where this seeming-to-be is itself a property of perceptual inference.”
8 Jul 2024 at 9:05 PM
Being You : A New Science of Consciousness
Seth, Anil
“Advertisers don’t like the public sphere, where audiences are relatively small, upsetting controversy takes place, and the settings are not ideal for selling goods. Their preference for entertainment underlies the gradual erosion of the public sphere under systems of commercial media”
8 Jul 2024 at 6:36 PM
Manufacturing Consent
Edward S. Herman
“This was extraordinary. Morita deeply mistrusted customer surveys, and Sony prided itself on never consulting consumers in developing new products. “The public does not know what is possible,” he wrote in his memoirs. “We do.”
30 Apr 2024 at 9:24 PM
Pure Invention
Matt Alt
“How many hours of our youths—and adulthoods—were spent plugged in to various iterations of karaoke machines, Walkmans, and Game Boys? These things were more than the fads of a global consumer society. They had a strange ability to nourish our dreams as they entertained, to deliver and cultivate new fantasies in us.”
16 Apr 2024 at 7:32 AM
Pure Invention
Matt Alt
“But if you make your best effort just to continue your practice with your whole mind and body, without gaining ideas, then whatever you do will be true practice. Just to continue should be your purpose. When you do something, just to do it should be your purpose.”
16 Mar 2024 at 9:56 PM
Zen mind, beginner's mind
Shunryū Suzuki
“Everything is sales. This is usually framed as career advice—no matter what your role in a company is, your ultimate job is to help sales. But it applies to so many things. Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if only subconsciously. Since they’re crafting the image, it’s not a complete view. There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.”
21 Jan 2024 at 9:14 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“(Best story wins) … Author Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which can drive the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. One of his books—The Body: A Guide for Occupants—is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it’s so well written—he tells such a good story—that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and The Washington Post’s Book of the Year.”
2 Jan 2024 at 9:12 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“the constant reminder that wealth and happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect/need. When you realize that each part is equally important, you see that the overwhelming attention we pay to getting more and the negligible attention we put on managing expectations makes little sense, especially because the expectations side can be so much more in your control.”
1 Jan 2024 at 8:17 pm
Same as Ever
Morgan Housel
“Helping these clients required a skill that came easily to me: writing the way I talked, instead of the way we were taught to write in school—and helping them write the way they talked, too. Most people have a problem breaking rules; it happens to be where I soar.”
19 Dec 2023 at 9:43 pm
Tough Titties
Laura Belgray
“Now that I’m on the right meds, I sort of get it. There is something fun about being at a new or old place with or without other people.”
30 Nov 2023 at 9:34 pm
Sure, I'll Join Your Cult
Maria Bamford
“Birdseed” was slang for the popular press, the newspapers, broadcasts, and fiction manufactured for the urban working people.”
25 Nov 2023 at 8:47 pm
The Dispossessed
Ursula K. le Guin
“This leverages the first and second ways to get out of a scarcity loop. First, it takes the opportunity away. When we make a big change, new and more enticing opportunities can open up, and those come with their own set of unpredictable rewards. And that alters the second phase. These new rewards outweigh the short-term comfort of substance use.”
21 Nov 2023 at 9:14 pm
Scarcity Brain
Michael Easter
“Once we know something is pleasurable or rewarding, dopamine is primarily released when we’re pursuing and anticipating receiving that pleasurable thing, not when we’re actually receiving the pleasurable thing.”
19 Nov 2023 at 9:17 pm
Scarcity Brain
Michael Easter
“Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation”
12 Nov 2023 at 7:49 pm
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
“There are dozens of new topics on my current list, and that doesn’t discourage me — it excites me.Buy some new clothes and start emptying your head to make room for even more exploration. You should always have a list with getting to “know” topics on it.Quit protecting what you learned in the past and spend that energy on new things right now.”
25 Sep 2023 at 9:45 pm
The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth
David C. Baker
“We are not meeting our full obligations to our clients when we make recommendations that they find easy to ignore. The price we charge for such guidance should be enough that our clients feel compelled to act, lest they experience a profound sense of wasted resources. There must be the appropriate amount of pain associated with our pricing. This implies the need for our pricing to change as the size of the client changes. Larger organizations need to pay more to ensure their commitment.”
24 Sep 2023 at 9:35 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“This led him to develop what he called an “idiot index,” which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques.”
24 Sep 2023 at 8:36 pm
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
“If we want to build deep expertise we must take pains to document how we work, to define how we will work in the future and to continuously refine and improve our approach.”
12 Sep 2023 at 9:48 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“When your choices turn you into someone who has to worry about money, then you are not rich”
20 Aug 2023 at 8:59 pm
Discipline Is Destiny
Ryan Holiday
“We are hired for our expertise and not our service. It is a mistake to believe that the service sector mantra of “The customer is always right” applies to us. Like any engagement of expertise, we often enter into ours with the client not truly knowing what he needs, let alone recognizing the route to a solution. For us to do our best work we need to leverage our outside perspective.”
6 Aug 2023 at 9:14 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition.”
6 Aug 2023 at 9:09 pm
A Win Without Pitching Manifesto
Blair Enns
“Under his leadership, the teams at Apple and Pixar transformed four very different industries: computing, telecommunications, music, and film. The engine driving these transÂformations was a remarkably consistent set of values that Steve held dear: Life is short; don’t waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter. The world we know is a human creation—and we can push it forward.”
26 Jul 2023 at 9:53 pm
Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs
“Why shouldn’t life generally be comfortable? Still, we must understand that the modern world is conspiring against us, working to degrade our ability to endure even the slightest difficulty. It spoils us”
20 Jul 2023 at 9:14 pm
Discipline Is Destiny
Ryan Holiday