Nonfiction

⭐ Rating: 4.5/5.0✍🏻Notes THE FUNDAMENTALS Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up, which is why understanding the details is crucial. You need to know how habits work and how to design them to your liking, so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade. Negative thoughts compound. The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way....

⭐ Rating: 4.5/5.0✍🏻Notes Introduction Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. A 2012 McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone....

⭐ Rating: 4.5/5.0✍🏻Notes Introduction In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. For heavy internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don’t even realize they’re paying to support their compulsive connectivity. Andrew Sullivan meant when he lamented: “I used to be a human being.” What you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else....

⭐ Rating: 3.5/5.0✍🏻Notes Prologue How does it inspire people to stay active until the very end? What is the secret to a long and happy life? What is the meaning of my life? This Japanese concept, which translates roughly as “the happiness of always being busy,” is like logotherapy, but it goes a step beyond. Okinawans live by the principle of ichariba chode, a local expression that means “treat everyone like a brother, even if you’ve never met them before....

⭐ Rating: 4.0/5.0✍🏻Notes An actor in cinematography might as well be in a foreign country. He does not speak its language Two types of film: 1) those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc. ) and use the camera in order to reproduce; 2) those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create Rid myself of the accumulated errors and untruths. Get to know my resources, make sure of them....

⭐ Rating: 4.0/5.0🌱 Top-Level Thought How can one make his thinking more insightful? The ways are rather simple, but they are fundamental and can change one’s life remarkably. Make every effort for rock-solid understanding, make mistakes and learn from the failure, build and ask challenging and meaningful questions, follow the flow of ideas and consider the learning as a lifelong journey - these are the fundamental concepts of effective thinking....

⭐ Rating: 5.0/5.0🌱 Top-Level Thought When it comes to academic or non-fiction writing, how can one learn, think, take notes, and connect the ideas from that notes? Taking notes doesn’t mean collecting information on a piece of paper or on a hard disc, it’s all about building bridges among those information to make it remember when one needs that. To do that remarkable German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has developed a prominent system called ‘Zettelkasten’ or ‘slip-box’, where he collects all of his notes, ideas and connects them in a meaningful way which made him publish over 600 publication in his lifetime....

⭐ Rating: 5.0/5.0🌱 Top-Level Thought What are the gravitational forces that pull us down to the ground and don’t let us make time for the work that is the most value to us? In the world of distraction and interruption, how could we push ourselves to get rid of the force of Busy wagon and Infinity pool and make time in our daily life for our highlighted task by converting our to-do list into a might-do list; instead of doing what is in front of us to what we want to do?...