29 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. Dr. Harry McNeill’s June 1940 assessment in Interracial Review

      Interesting commentary here on conversion of African-Americans to Catholicism as well as self-help nature of reading for improvement. Analogizes African-Americans without Catholicism to Mortimer J. Adler as a Jew.

      Possible tone of colonialism to assimilate African-Americans into Western Culture here? Though still somehow some space for movement and growth.

  2. Feb 2024
  3. Dec 2022
    1. Although some of them took a lot of time to create (I literally wrote whole book summaries for a while), their value was negligible in hindsight.

      What was the purpose of these summaries? Were they of areas which weren't readily apparent in hindsight? Often most people's long summaries are really just encapsulalizations of what is apparent from the book jacket. Why bother with this? If they're just summaries of the obvious, then they're usually useless for review specifically because they're obvious. This is must make-work.

      You want to pull out the specific hard-core insights that weren't obvious to you from the jump.

      Most self-help books can be motivating while reading them and the motivation can be helpful, but generally they will only contain one or two useful ideas

  4. Oct 2022
    1. Goutor defines self-help notes as notes which one would use to refresh their memory about what remains to be done or researched, problems that remain to be solved, or information which is needed to be researched or found. (p26) These are akin in some sense to what I call "open questions". He also indicates that these notes might be triggered by one's daily activities or occasional musings which relate to one's project but occur outside of its active pursuit. In this sense, they have a similar feel to the idea of Ahrens' fleeting notes, but in Goutor's practice they aren't defined as occurring while one is doing active reading or research.

      He suggests that one keeps these notes in a separate area so that they might be systematically and regularly visited for review, further research, or answering as the opportunities to do so present themselves. Once the questions have been answered and appropriate notes updated or added, these self-help notes can be discarded.

    2. Goutor acknowledges that there are a variety of note types, but focuses on bibliographic notes, content notes, and self-help notes as being the most common and most important. (p12)


      These first two are broadly self-explanatory, but the third should be intriguing given the other literature in which this type is rarely, if ever, used. We'll see what comes of it...

  5. Jul 2022
    1. We can go through the list of Forer statements above, and rephrase each one as a useful potential update you can make to your model of the world:

      this is very clever

  6. Jun 2022
    1. Giving Your First Brain a New Job

      This entire chapter thus far (to the end of this section at minimum) sounds like it would have been better motivating material.

      It also has a more touchy-feely and less concrete nature which puts in the self-help category and not so much in the tools for thought space.

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  7. May 2022
    1. It’s also been a secret code for most of history—now it’s finally time to reveal how it works

      A nice hallmark of writing self-help books: indicating that you're going to reveal an ancient secret that no one knows...

    2. I’m evenwilling to bet that you’re doing them already in some form, whetheryou realize it or not.

      Are self-help books with sentences that highlight the fact that one is already practicing the described/prescribed method really necessary?

      Perhaps speaking about the process and making the steps discrete to assist people in actually "touching all the bases" will help them score their homeruns.

    3. You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in adeeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is aboutoptimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to you

      imitations and constraints, leaving you happily unoptimized and free to roam, to wonder, to wander toward whatever makes you feel alive here and now in each moment.

      Some may categorize handbooks on note taking within the productivity space as "self-help" or "self-improvement", but still view it as something that happens outside of ones' self. Doesn't improving one's environment as a means of improving things for oneself count as self-improvement?

      Marie Kondo's minimalism techniques are all external to the body, but are wholly geared towards creating internal happiness.

      Because your external circumstances are important to your internal mental state, external environment and decoration can be considered self-improvement.


      Could note taking be considered exbodied cognition? Vannevar Bush framed the Memex as a means of showing associative trails. (Let's be honest, As We May Think used the word trail far too much.)

      How does this relate to orality vs. literacy?

      Orality requires the immediate mental work for storage while literacy removes some of the work by making the effort external and potentially giving it additional longevity.

  8. Apr 2022
    1. An alternative kind of note-taking was encouraged in the late Middle Agesamong members of new lay spiritual movements, such as the Brethren of theCommon Life (fl. 1380s–1500s). Their rapiaria combined personal notes andspiritual reflections with readings copied from devotional texts.

      I seem to recall a book or two like this that were on the best seller list in the 1990s and early 2000s based on a best selling Christian self help book, but with an edition that had a journal like reflection space. Other than the old word rapiaria, is there a word for this broad genre besides self-help journal?

      An example might be Rhonda Byrne's book The Secret (Atria Books, 2006) which had a gratitude journal version (Atria Books, 2007, 978-1582702087).

      Another example includes Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan, 2002) with a journal version (Zondervan, 2002, 978-0310807186).

      There's also a sub-genre of diaries and journals that have these sort of preprinted quotes/reflections for each day in addition to space for one to write their own reflections.


      Has anyone created a daily blogging/reflection platform that includes these sorts of things? One might repurpose the Hello Dolly WordPress plugin to create journal prompts for everyday writing and reflection.

  9. Sep 2021
    1. John Murray's publication, in 1859, of two seminal works:  Darwin's The Origin of Species, and the original self-help book, Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct. Smiles's book, now somewhat less familiar than Darwin's, tapped into a Victorian trend for self-improvement, and was a best-seller in its day.
  10. Jan 2021
    1. Anyone can apply these same methods on the job. Say you have someone in your company who is a masterly communicator, and you learn that he is going to give a talk to a unit that will be laying off workers. Sit down and write your own speech, and then compare his actual speech with what you wrote. Observe the reactions to his talk and imagine what the reactions would be to yours. Each time you can generate by yourself decisions, interactions, or speeches that match those of people who excel, you move one step closer to reaching the level of an expert performer.• • •

      Many everyday events present an opportunity to learn, but only if they are reframed into an "action-feedback" perspective. Learn to recognize these opportunities and reconstruct the frame so that you can learn to judge the quality of an action by the response it produces. Critique it against your own thought process and improve iteratively.

  11. Oct 2020
      1. The best projects start with goals and plans.
      2. The subconscious has so much to do with success.
      3. Our subconscious decides whether to accept something into our awareness based on something called "Hot Goals".
      4. From this udemy course, I will learn how to set goals with the MOMA subconscious method, by which I convert what's not working for me into a HOT GOAL.
      5. Achieving hot goals is the means of the subconscious mind to keep you safe even if it isn't necessary.
      6. If your goals have to become hot goals then, your conscious goals must translate to subconscious goals.
    1. He says that he sees the combination of long form pieces and Q&A as a new level of support. “We used to have level one, which was sending a ticket to the help desk, and it was something we could easily resolve for you. Level two was a more complex problem that maybe required an engineer or specialist from a certain team to figure out. I look at this new system as a level zero.” Before sending us a ticket, folks can search Teams. If they find a question that solves the problem, great. If they need more details, they can follow links to in-depth articles or collections that bring together Q&A and article with the same tags.“
  12. May 2020
  13. Apr 2020
    1. Keeping a goal in mind and using it to direct our actions requires constant willpower. During times when other parts of our lives deplete our supply of willpower, it can be easy to forget our goals. For example, the goal of saving money requires self-discipline each time we make a purchase. Meanwhile, the habit of putting $50 in a savings account every week requires little effort. Habits, not goals, make otherwise difficult things easy… While goals rely on extrinsic motivation, habits are automatic. They literally rewire our brains.

    1. The importance of self-compassion in tempering the brittleness of self-efficacy

      The main reason is that most people’s risk tolerance is very low, because self-efficacy (defined as “a person’s conviction or confidence about his or her abilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources or courses of action needed to successfully execute a specific task within a given context”) is remarkably fragile. When it comes to trying and learning new things, people have difficulty transferring success in one arena to even highly related ones. Even small failures lead to learned helplessness so quickly, we learn to protect against that eventuality by not trying new things unless success is guaranteed.

      The primary risk of entrepreneurship and other free agent lifestyles is not financial or even social — it is the risk to a person’s very self-concept as someone who does what they set out to do.

      What we need if we want to change behavior at this fundamental level is to replace predictive models of behavior change—do this and you’ll get that —with exploratory models.

      Stories may actually be a more accurate way of describing how people think about and use mental models of behavior change. Stories, like emergent systems, only move in one direction. They cannot be rolled back and played again. This irreproducibility suggests the importance of another form of psychological capital that is also highly correlated with successful behavior change: self-compassion. They are two sides to the same coin — you need self-efficacy to believe you can do it, but you equally need self-compassion to be ok when you don’t. Self-compassion aids change by removing the veil of shame and pain that keeps you from examining the causes of your mistakes (and often, leads you to indulge in the very same bad habit as a way of forgetting the pain). Self-forgiveness is the first step in fostering an invitational attitude that is open to feedback and learning, from yourself and others.

      There is something about the turning of this coin — between efficacy and compassion — that I believe lies at the heart of the experimentation framework I’m envisioning. And the more I think about it, the more I suspect compassion is the far more radical and important side.

    1. Taken from a graduation address delivered at West Point, which is just so good and worth quoting many sections of at length

      That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.

      We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

      What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

      That’s the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think? Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

      One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

      Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

      So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.

      “Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.” Notice that he uses the word lead. Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.

      So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

      Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.

      This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

    1. I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.

      "the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible"

      I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

      More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants.

      The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.

  14. Sep 2019
    1. Only 1% of Americans rewrite their goals on a daily basis.Giving yourself even five minutes per day to orient your life in the direction of your goals is the difference between success and average.
    2. It’s easy to focus on the constraints of your circumstances rather than the power of your capabilities.
    1. Other consequences of present bias include procrastination or eating unhealthily, even though we promised ourselves we wouldn’t.
  15. Nov 2018
    1. The Modern Stoicism movement traces its roots to Victor Frankl’s (Sahakian 1979) logotherapy, as well as to early versions of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, for instance in the work of Albert Ellis (Robertson 2010). But Stoicism is a philosophy, not a therapy, and it is in the works of philosophers such as William Irvine (2008), John Sellars (2003), and Lawrence Becker (1997) that we find articulations of 21st century Stoicism, though the more self-help oriented contribution by CBT therapist Donald Robertson (2013) is also worthy of note. All of these authors attempt to distance the philosophical meaning of "Stoic"—even in a modern setting—from the common English word "stoic," indicating someone who goes through life with a stiff upper lip, so to speak. While there are commonalities between "Stoic" and "stoic," for instance the emphasis on endurance, the latter is a diminutive version of the former, and the two should accordingly be kept distinct.
  16. Sep 2017
  17. Jul 2017
    1. The students who exerted more self-control were not more successful in accomplishing their goals. It was the students who experienced fewer temptations overall who were more successful when the researchers checked back in at the end of the semester.

      Reduce the number of distractions you get better results.

  18. Feb 2017
  19. Jun 2016
    1. As a context, we must understand that there are four major types of these "technologies," each a matrixof practical reason: (I) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulatethings; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, orsignification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them tocertain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permitindividuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on theirown bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I themselves in order toattain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

      It's great to ask what are the trends? How are we working on ourselves? Is their a role capitalism plays in what is currently being "valued"? Where's the profit?