Appealing words
A collection of words and concepts I personally found appealing.
Hectic
Adjective
Full of incessant or frantic activity.
The hectic days before the holidays.
Silver Lining
Metaphor
A sign of hope or a positive aspect in an otherwise negative situation.
Eudaemonia
Greek concept
Seeking fulfillment from hard work and constant learning.
Kairos
Greek concept
Different moments in time have different significance.
There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
Selected pieces of wisdom
Trying to master the best of what other people have already figured out.
World view
Life is about deciding what you want to be and creating the abilities required to reach your goals.
Growth
Your growth as a conscious being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.
Embrace challenges even when path to achievement is not immediately clear.
Timing
About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
Greatness
The first step in becoming great is recognizing that you’re likely not already great. In fact, it comes from recognizing that there is no such thing as greatness at a specific instance in time.
Consistency
Nothing beats small things done every day, which is way more important than what you do occasionally.
Learn
Dont keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.
Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed. Everything you need to master the lesson is within you. Once you have truly learned a lesson, you will be presented with the next one. If you are alive, that means you still have lessons to learn.
Brain wires
Trying to understand how we're wired.
Thinking
Our reasoning is context-dependent and mostly based on simple heuristics.
We tend to disproportionately ascribe successes to our own abilities, and failures to “bad luck”.
The route with which we arrive at a given situation dictates how we think about it.
In retrospect, we always find patterns, causes and explanations in past events, but they are mostly useless for predicting the future.
We are inherently poor at understanding the impact of rare events.
Emotions
Emotions can help us make decisions, but also overwhelm our capacity for rational reasoning.
We feel emotions first, then try to rationalize an explanation for them. This means emotions have a stronger influence on rational thinking than the other way around.
The route with which we arrive at a given situation dictates how we think about it.
Technology
We spend 25% of our lives in artificial social systems. It shapes the way that we now thinks.
We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
– Edward O. Wilson
Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
– Melvin Kranzberg
Mental models
Framing our complex world with simplicity. Favorite mental models aggregated.
First principles thinking
Break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up.
Second-Order Thinking
Often when we solve one problem, we end up unintentionally creating another one that’s even worse. The best way to examine the long-term consequences of our decisions is to use second-order thinking.