James Clear on Power and Peace

vutran | June 24, 2020, 5:44 p.m.

"Power is influence over external events.

Peace is influence over internal events." 

— James Clear

Sharon Salzberg on the unretrieved messages

vutran | June 24, 2020, 1:01 p.m.

"Each of us has our own individual histories, families, and life events that broadcast messages like a twenty-four-hour cable news channel. Some of these messages penetrate our conscious minds, while the majority are received by our unconscious and may take years to retrieve and articulate." 

— Sharon Salzberg

Michael C. Feathers on the code legacy we leave behind

vutran | June 23, 2020, 5:15 p.m.

"We start to refactor the code a bit. We extract some methods and move some conditional logic. After every little change that we make, we run that little suite of unit tests. They pass almost every time that we run them. A few minutes ago, we made a mistake and inverted the logic on a condition, but a test failed and we recovered in about a minute. When we are done refactoring, the code is much clearer. We make the change we set out to make, and we are confident that it is right. We added some tests to verify the new behavior. The next programmers who work on this piece of code will have an easier time and will have tests that cover its functionality."

—  Michael C. Feathers

Anna Quindlen on building a spirit

vutran | June 23, 2020, 5:09 p.m.

"There are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit. But a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve gotten back the chest X ray and it doesn’t look so good, or when the doctor writes “prognosis, poor.”

... You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are."

— Anna Quindlen

James Clear on the Cycle of Improvement

vutran | June 23, 2020, 5:03 p.m.

"The Cycle of Improvement:

1. Awareness - identify what you need to improve.

2. Deliberate practice - focus your conscious effort on the specific area you want to improve.

3. Habit - with practice, the effortful becomes automatic.

4. Repeat - begin again." 

— James Clear

James Clear on mental toughness

vutran | June 23, 2020, 5:02 p.m.

"Mental toughness is persistence not intensity." 

— James Clear

James Clear on The Paradox of Freedom

vutran | June 23, 2020, 4:59 p.m.

"The Paradox of Freedom:

The way to expand your freedom is to narrow your focus.

Stay focused on saving to achieve financial freedom.

Stay focused on training to achieve physical freedom.

Stay focused on learning to achieve intellectual freedom." 

— James Clear