Colvin on stepping out of one’s mind to become the best performers

vutran | May 1, 2021, 1:55 p.m.

“The best performers observe themselves closely. They are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition—knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.”

— Colvin

Anne Lamott on the value of reading

vutran | April 28, 2021, 7:38 a.m.

"If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.

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Books are paper ships, to all the worlds, to ancient Egypt, outer space, eternity, into the childhood of your favorite musician, and — the most precious stunning journey of all — into your own heart, your own family, your own history and future and body.

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Out of these flat almost two-dimensional boxes of paper will spring mountains, lions, concerts, galaxies, heroes. You will meet people who have been all but destroyed, who have risen up and will bring you with them. Books and stories are medicine, plaster casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits. And in reading, you will laugh harder than you ever imagined laughing, and this will be magic, heaven, and salvation. I promise."

— Anne Lamott on the value of reading

Ernest Hemingway on working habits

vutran | April 28, 2021, 7:36 a.m.

“My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing."

— Ernest Hemingway

Charlie Munger on Academic Economics: Strengths and Weaknesses, Considering Interdisciplinary Needs

vutran | April 28, 2021, 7:29 a.m.

"What I’ve urged is the use of a bigger multidisciplinary bag of tricks, mastered to fluency, to help economics and everything else. And I also urged that people not be discouraged by irremovable complexity and paradox. It just adds more fun to the problems. My inspiration again is Keynes: Better roughly right than precisely wrong. And so I end by repeating what I said once before on a similar occasion. If you skillfully follow the multidisciplinary path, you will never wish to come back. It would be like cutting off your hands."

—  Charlie Munger

Geoff Colvin on deliberate practice

vutran | April 27, 2021, 8:10 p.m.

“Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance and tons of it equals great performance.” 

— Geoff Colvin

H.L. Mencken on the best teacher

vutran | April 27, 2021, 7:57 p.m.

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.” 

—H.L. Mencken 

Abraham Maslow on growth and fear

vutran | April 27, 2021, 7:50 a.m.

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”

― Abraham Maslow