Louise Erdrich on taking risks

vutran | May 17, 2021, 8:53 p.m.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”  

— Louise Erdrich

Arthur Brooks on Tune Out to Tune In

vutran | May 14, 2021, 7:45 a.m.

"Beethoven became more original and brilliant as a composer in inverse proportion to his ability to hear his own — and others’ — music. But maybe it isn’t so surprising. As his hearing deteriorated, he was less influenced by the prevailing compositional fashions, and more by the musical structures forming inside his own head. His early work is pleasantly reminiscent of his early instructor, the hugely popular Josef Haydn. Beethoven’s later work became so original that he was, and is, regarded as the father of music’s romantic period. ... Deafness freed Beethoven as a composer because he no longer had society’s soundtrack in his ears.."

— Arthur Brooks at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-holiday-season-we-can-all-learn-a-lesson-from-beethoven/2019/12/13/71f21aba-1d0e-11ea-b4c1-fd0d91b60d9e_story.html

Enrico Bertini on deepening understanding helps in intepreting the related phenomena

vutran | May 13, 2021, 12:51 p.m.

"The interpretation of a type of attribute, a given attribute is also depends on understanding at a deeper level the real meaning of these attributes and how they relate to the phenomena or objects that they describe in the world." 

— Enrico Bertini on Data Visualization

Amelia Barr on the difference between mediocrity and genius

vutran | May 12, 2021, 12:28 p.m.

“Everything good needs time. Don’t do work in a hurry. Go into details; it pays in every way. Time means power for your work. Mediocrity is always in a rush; but whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing with consideration. For genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly.”

— Amelia Barr

James Clear on assigning meaning to our past

vutran | May 12, 2021, 12:27 p.m.

“The events of your past are fixed. The meaning of your past is not.  The influence of every experience in your life is determined by the meaning you assign to it.  Assign a more useful meaning to your past and it becomes easier to take a more useful action in the present.”

— James Clear

James Clear on ignoring things over attacking as an option

vutran | May 12, 2021, 12:27 p.m.

"Some things are better off ignored than attacked.  Attention is the oxygen of conflict. When you fight a problem, you breathe life into it. When you starve a problem of your attention, you suffocate it.  In a surprising number of cases, the way to solve a problem is to ignore it." 

— James Clear

Lynn Marriott on productive practice

vutran | May 11, 2021, 7:56 p.m.

“If you can pay attention for only five minutes in practice, then take a break every five minutes. If you can pay attention for only twenty balls, don’t hit fifty. 

To be able to practice longer and maintain the quality of the practice, train yourself to pay attention for longer periods of time….Productive practice is about how present you can stay with your intention and is measured in the quality of the experience as opposed to the quantity of time used.”

— Lynn Marriott in The Game Before the Game