Sunday, February 6, 2022

Brain Food: Small Steps

FS | BRAIN FOOD

No. 458 — Feb 6, 2022 — Read on FS

Welcome to Sunday Brain Food: a weekly newsletter full of ideas and insights that never expire.

FS

"The mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn."

— Too Busy To Pay Attention

Insight

"Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness."

— Leo Tolstoy

Tiny Thought

At over 600 words, this week's Tiny Thought turned into a full article: The Small Steps of Giant Leaps

Explore Your Curiosity

★ "There is and can be no ultimate solution for us to discover, but instead a permanent need for balancing contradictory claims, for careful trade-offs between conflicting values, toleration of difference, consideration of the specific factors at play when a choice is needed, not reliance on an abstract blueprint claimed to be applicable everywhere, always, to all people."

— Against Dogma

★ "He has a thing about celebrating, Kipchoge. Sees it as something sinister, something dangerous, a self-indulgent act that might derail his mindset, make him think, somewhere in his subconscious, that he has arrived, the inference being he has nowhere left to go. He'll punch the air at the finish, alright, but try to get him into an open-top car or to attend a huge welcome-home party and you'll get a polite but firm rejection. Which begs a question: If he can't bask in the glow of his achievements, when is Kipchoge truly content? Maybe that's the thing about all-time greats. Maybe they never are. "I'm a believer that if you climb to one branch," he says, "then you reach for the next branch.""

— Inside The Mind of Eliud Kipchoge

Et Cetera

+ Some people never forget a face.

+ "We like to think we have conscious control over our behavior, but the more we learn, the more we know that that's not entirely true. We're less in control than we'd like."

+ Home court habits.