"Kyūdō, the Japanese martial art of archery, offers an alternative philosophy where aims matter more than goals, and where success is the process itself."

"“The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed.”"

"the master encouraged him to forget about the goal, and to focus on the way he was aiming — how he held the bow, the way he positioned his feet, the way he was breathing while releasing the arrow."

"As James Clear puts it: “It is not the target that matters. It is not the finish line that matters. It is the way we approach the goal that matters. Everything is aiming.”"

"Thomas Fuller (1608 – 1661), one of the first English writers to have enough patrons to be able to live by his pen, wrote: “A good archer is not known by their arrows but by their aim.”"

"When we focus on our aims rather than our end goals, we learn how to design a daily life where the process itself is so fulfilling that it doesn’t matter whether we ever reach an hypothetical finish line. Success is enjoying the process."

"Some studies show that people are more likely to do stuff if they keep their intentions private."

"goal sharing may give us the same psychological satisfaction of accomplishing a goal without having to do the actual work: because you often receive premature praise from other people"

"What other studies show, though, is that sharing your progress can be beneficial: for example, sharing your weight loss progress on Twitter is a great way to stay motivated."

"“Become a documentarian of what you do.” Austin Kleon, author of Show Your Work."

"Sharing your work in public will allow you to reflect and plan your next steps."

"Sharing your work in public will allow you to take a more iterative approach, and ensure that what you’re working on answers the need you have identified."

"Great ideas are often the result of a network of information in a transparent community. By sharing your ideas, you will increase the likelihood to connect the dots between your ideas and other people’s ideas"

"sharing your work in public is a great way to connect with people who are interested in a similar space. It may result in finding a mentor, or even lead to partnerships."

"working on an idea in a vacuum stifles the creative process. While it may feel uncomfortable at first, sharing your work in public on a regular basis will become easier over time."

"Find the people who care, and connect with them. This may mean joining an online group, or attending offline meetups."

"Sharing your work in public should not derail you from doing the actual work. Done properly and in a way that fits within your workflow, it will dramatically increase your productivity and creativity."

"Once you get into the habit, it will almost feel strange to work in vacuum."

"The term “flow” was coined by Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1960s."

"In his research, Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found that there was no correlation between money and happiness."

"the human brain is at its happiest when engaged in the meaningful pursuit of a goal."

"“The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Author & Psychologist."

"the state of flow can be even better achieved when you decide to focus on an activity for intrinsic reasons—that is, doing the task for your own sake, and not because you feel obligated to."

"to achieve a flow state, you need to find the right balance between the challenge of the activity and your own skills levels. The flow state rises from a tension between the two."

"“Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.” Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Author & Psychologist."

"What is urgent is often different from what is truly important. Short-term and long-term goals do not always align. What’s expected from you and what you actually want to do are not always the same."

"I make time for the things that matter, and not the other way around."

"I say “no” or “let’s do this in a few weeks” a lot. If something is not important and not related to my current goals, I either say no or ask if it’s alright to chat about it in a few weeks."

"Time management is not just about managing your calendar. It’s also about managing your energy levels, your relationships, and much more."

"Get enough sleep. We tend to sacrifice rest in order to get more done. Well, that just doesn’t work. Research shows that being sleep deprived negatively affects your performance. It’s harder to focus and harder to switch between tasks when you’re tired."

"Create mindful routines. Think about the times of the day where you feel more productive. Are you more of an early bird or a night owl? Schedule your time accordingly, with the most important tasks happening when you’re at your highest performance levels."

"Take breaks. It’s easy to fill your calendar with lots of things to do, without taking the time to let your brain recharge. Spend some time alone, go take a walk, meditate"

"There are lots of more tool-oriented tips such as using the Pomodoro technique, but I found that they don’t really matter if you don’t get these fundamentals right."

"The hermeneutic circle refers to the idea that our understanding of a text as a whole is based on our understanding of each individual part, as well as our understanding of how each individual part refers to the whole text."

"The concept of the hermeneutic circle was conceived by German philosopher Martin Heidegger in 1927 in his book Being and Time."

"According to psychologist Wilhelm Dilthey, meaning and meaningfulness are always contextual. In order to practice critical reading, it is crucial to be aware of the context in which a text is read."

"Consider the context. Before reading a text, ask yourself: what are my expectations? What are my existing beliefs? What do I think I know about this topic already?"

"Read the text more than once. To allow for the hermeneutic circle to complete, re-read the text a couple of times."

"interpreting a text is not a linear process. The hermeneutic circle is about constantly refining our interpretation."

"Carl Yung once said: “We don’t have ideas. Ideas have us.” At Deepstash we believe ideas are fundamental. They helped us transcend our animal nature, shape our behaviour and come together as a group."

"Reading can be fun in and of itself, but the magic happens when we can relate to what we’re reading. Unfortunately, social media usually tries to distract us with divisive news and silly entertainment, stuff which we can’t ultimately connect to on a deeper level."

"Eleanor Roosevelt: “Small Minds Discuss People. Average Minds Discuss Events. Great Minds Discuss Ideas”."

"we started Deepstash with this desire to give all people in the world idea-mixing superpowers. Ease of use on the go and social presence were our bets that would get people to connect through ideas."

"An idea can be an inspiring quote, a practical method like the 7 min workout, an explanation for a concept like the compound effect, a story like the parable of the horse, or facts about sleep."

"even if you get lost down a rabbit hole and you realise two hours later that you’re still in the app, it’s not like on social media where you feel you wasted time, instead you actually feel smarter."

"Ideas are curated, not summarised. An idea arises when the author’s words meet the prior knowledge, experience and interests of the curator. Thus curation is an act of creation."

"Most of our users are busy knowledge workers. Curious minds. College educated young creatives working in industries like tech, marketing or HR."

"In Deepstash, your scroll is always followed by a new insight, a bit of knowledge to get you started on your day."

"What we wanted was simple: If we see something we like and want to remember, we want to save it within a second. And if we’re trying to remember it later, we want to be able to find it within seconds."

"Folders, lists, categories, tags, boards, groups, filters and other structures are antiquated systems that can’t keep up with the pace of our minds and our current lifestyles."

"Like stepping stones across a stream, every trigger point leads you closer to your memory. And mymind, in essence, works the same way. It uses contextual and visual clues to provide trigger points to your memory."

"We were curious how we might behave or think differently if no one were watching. Would we be interested in different things? Would we see a new side of ourselves? Or at the very least, would we feel a little more mental peace and relief?"

"No sharing features, no collaboration, no tracking, no curation, feeds, ads or distractions"

"We’re still hearing from people asking why they can’t share their mood boards from mymind or invite friends to collaborate on their minds."

"the majority of our users are designers, marketers, researchers, writers, developers — highly visual minds."

"Our mission, as it was from the beginning, is to build a true extension for your mind. A private place for your ideas and memories, far away from social networks, advertisements or algorithms. A place that you enjoy coming back to, yet at the same time you forget even exists because it fits so seamlessly into your life. A place of utility as much as a place of energy."

"“Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.”"

"the biggest problem with the 10,000 hour rule, there is absolutely nothing in the study that suggests that anyone can become an expert in any given domain by putting in 10,000 hours of practice, even deliberate practice."

"a recent research study from Princeton shows evidence that practice accounts for just a 12% difference in performance in various domains."

"when it comes to entrepreneurship and other creative fields, the rules change all the time, making deliberate practice less useful."

"Research has shown that randomising the information causes your brain to stay alert, helping to store information in your long-term memory. Which means that the next time you want to study a new subject, you could benefit from switching things up."

"“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.” Ancient Greek proverb."

"The more experience and credentials these experts held, the further off the mark their predictions were. In contrast, the participants which had a wider range of knowledge areas and were not bound to a specific “expertise” domain fared better in their predictions."

"What burnout and boreout have in common is that they leave you exhausted, feeling empty, and unable to cope with the demands of work and life. Early symptoms such as demotivation, anxiety, and sadness can, if left unchecked, lead to depression."

"Burnout is when you are overstimulated, and boreout when you are understimulated. In both cases, the way we are stimulated is wrong and doesn’t result in a sense of purpose. We’re less productive and less creative."

"Align: ask yourself why you started working at this company or on this project in the first place. Is your work still aligned with your goals and values? If not, time to consider changing projects or changing jobs."

"Brainstorm: sometimes it’s hard to come up with solutions on your own. Does the lack of meaning come from the projects, the work style, the team? Sit down with a friend or trusted colleague to come up with ideas for moving forward."

"Experiment: don’t take radical decisions while feeling burned out or bored out. Try various small changes at first. One simple step could be to talk to a counsellor."

"You don’t find your purpose, you build it. There is no silver bullet and looking for purpose can actually be one of the most fulfilling aspects of life."

"we believe that one of the most noble pursuits is for people to learn, experience, and pass their knowledge on to future generations."

"When we talk about legacy, it does not necessarily mean to leave a successful business or a lot of money behind. Of course, it is wonderful to be able to leave these things to future generations, but I don’t believe that these are the greatest legacies, in that not everyone can leave them behind."

"I believe that the greatest legacy is to live a courageous life. It is in the attitude of not being daunted by difficulties, not being overly pessimistic, and betting on the possibilities and hopes of humanity. And I believe this means leaving and weaving our knowledge, wisdom, and history for the next generation."

"Through Glasp, we want to empower people to leave, share, and weave the greatest legacy. Our mission is to democratize access to other people’s learning and experiences that they have collected throughout their lives."

"I do not know if what I leave behind is really useful to anyone. It is a matter of subjectivity. However, just as someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure, I believe that by leaving my learning and experiences behind, they can become useful to someone somewhere in the future."

"After breaking our mission into specific components, we decided to focus on the overlap between curation, knowledge management, and community."

"Having learning partners is very inspiring and fun. Glasp can enhance one’s learning process by making the learning process social."

"the pressure that someone might see your highlights works as a social accountability function, which can increase the likelihood of saving something better and more valuable to you."

"we place more value on the insight, idea, emotion, and connection to a particular passage within the content, rather than just the act of liking or saving a link."

"Glasp has a following and saving function, but its focus is on interest graphs and persistence based on knowledge building."

"At Glasp, we hope to create a platform that allows the next generation to build and access knowledge based on topic and interest itself regardless of time."

"All decisions regarding products, including design, are based on whether they are in line with the mission. Our mission is always our north star."

"Although I design most of the UI, I am not an expert in design, so some aspects of my design may seem inconsistent. If anyone has any good ideas, I would love to hear from you."

"The social nature of Glasp is the starting point for content writers to connect directly with their audiences, receive feedback, and get inspiration for future posts, and I think this is an interesting aspect of Glasp."

"We want to spend our lives working on Glasp’s mission."

"Hopefully, in the next few years, we will be one step closer to being like another social profile that shows your learning footprint and like a next-generation search engine that allows you to search from the digital legacy left behind by people whom you trust or follow."

"Nothing would make me happier than to see even a small increase in the number of people who find meaning and value in their lives through Glasp."

"cramming content inside your brain is not the most effective way to learn. Instead, you need to use metacognitive strategies. Metacognition, put simply, is “thinking about thinking” or “knowing about knowing.”"

"The word “metacognition” literally means “above cognition”—it’s one of the most powerful forms of self-monitoring and self-regulation."

"Metacognitive knowledge. What you know about yourself and others in terms of thinking and learning processes. Metacognitive regulation. The activities and strategies you use to control your learning. Metacognitive experiences. The thoughts and feelings you have while studying and learning something."

"Planning. Before you start learning something new, think about the appropriate learning strategies you will use, as well as how you will allocate your time and energy."

"Monitoring. While learning, stay aware of your progress."

"Evaluating. When you’re done with a chunk, consider how well you performed and re-evaluate the strategies you used."

"What do hieroglyphs, flowcharts, road signs, and knowledge graphs have in common? They’re all thinking maps. Humans have been thinking in maps since the very first symbolic communication systems."

"“Thinking in maps is substantively different from thinking in sentences.”"

"Lascaux is home to something I find even more enthralling: one of the oldest known maps in the world. And it is a map of the skies, not the earth."

"the oldest surviving map of the world (circa 600 BC) is symbolic, as opposed to literal."

"Common visual symbols: Pictogram. A symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Ideogram. A graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of specific words or phrases. Logogram. A written character that represents a word or phrase."

"Beyond logograms, almost all cultures use pictograms in addition to their written language to communicate meaning."

"When thinking in maps, word-maps (pictograms, ideograms, logograms and other visual symbols) are often amalgamated with world-maps (physical or mental space maps) to create visual representations of our knowledge, beliefs, or questions."

"Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519) is probably one of the most famous visual thinkers in history, with about 13,000 pages of notes and drawings combining art and natural philosophy."

"“These are the principles for the development of a complete mind: study the science of art, study the art of science. Realise that everything connects to everything else,” Da Vinci wrote in one of his notes."

"“One of the characteristics you will find of polymaths is that they see links where we see separations—for Leonardo everything is linked up.”"

"Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was another great map thinker, using diagrams to explore scientific concepts and research ideas."

"In information science, an ontology is a formal representation and definition of the categories, properties and relationships between the concepts that make up an area of knowledge."

"“I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.” — Tim Berners-Lee."

"“While the indented tree visualisation is more organised and familiar to novice users, subjects found the graph visualisation to be more controllable and intuitive without visual redundancy, particularly  for  ontologies with multiple inheritance,” write Fu et al. in a 2013 study"

"“Consider a future device (…) in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanised so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory,” he writes in 1945, coining the term memex."

"Whichever model prevails in the knowledge management quest, the next logical step seems to be the metamodeling of thinking in maps—a model made of a new language, a new schema for the semantic data constituting our thought processes."

"mental maps as trees with a trunk and branches seem to be the oldest form of node-link diagrams."

"At its core, productivity addiction is based on the same reward systems as other addictions. By providing constant reinforcement — for example financial rewards in the form of salary increases, or social rewards in the form of work recognition — productivity can become a goal in and of itself, resulting in compulsive behaviours."

"in the long term, being obsessed with productivity can have unintended consequences, such as burnout, family issues, and health problems."

"“The problem is that just like all addictions, over time a person needs more and more to be satisfied and then it starts to work against you. Withdrawal symptoms include increased anxiety, depression and fear.”"

"At least in the Western world, our education has often taught us to tie our self-worth to how much we contribute to society. The more we contribute, the better. “I work, therefore I am.” Being productive feels like a way to improve our self-worth."

"Productivity addicts may suffer from time anxiety, an obsession about spending our time in the most meaningful way possible."

"time anxiety stems from these recurring questions: “Am I creating the greatest amount of value with my life that I can? Will I feel, when it comes my time to die, that I spent too much of my time frivolously?”"

"Take breaks, become comfortable with doing nothing, and most importantly, define what “time well spent” means to you so you can make space for these moments."

"1. Understand how your brain works"

"your brain has two modes: a “focused” and “diffused” mode. The focused mode consists in sustaining your attention on one specific task, such as reading this article or solving a coding challenge. The diffused mode consists in letting your mind wander, leaving your brain to make new connections on its own."

"“shower thoughts”⁠—after intently studying a topic, the shower is a place where we usually relax, and new thoughts seem to just pop into our mind."

"Sleeping allows our brain to solidify new connections, get rid of toxins that build up during the day, and be ready for your next study session."

"2. Forget about your learning style"

"A learning style can be defined as “the complex manner in which, and conditions under which, learners most efficiently and most effectively perceive, process, store, and recall what they are attempting to learn” or, alternatively, as “the preference or predisposition of an individual to perceive and process information in a particular way or combination of ways.”"

"A framework that’s historically been used to figure out one’s learning style is called VARK, which stands for Visual, Auditory, Reading/Writing or Kinesthetic learning."

"While most students believe that learning styles influence performance, recent research shows that there is very little evidence to support the idea that learning outcomes are best when teaching styles align with people learning styles."

"what’s most important is to use learning strategies that maximise your recall. Such science-backed techniques include spacing out your study sessions over time, testing yourself on the material, and experiencing the content in multiple ways so you can make meaningful connections."

"3. Just do it"

"You set a timer and do nothing except studying the topic at hand, and keep on focusing until the time is over. A typical Pomodoro timer is 25-minutes with a 5-minute break afterwards."

"learning is not a project with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You need to fall in love with the process."

"Trust the process and you will go from good to great."

"research suggests that there is no difference in student performance between the Cornell method and using free-flow notes. There are also no clear benefits to outlining or using guided notes provided by the teacher."

"Note-taking often happens while listening; the goal is to quickly capture content so we can refer back to it later."

"Note-making is more common while reading; it consists in deliberately crafting our own version so we can learn and create better."

"note-making is slower, more involved, and uses our own language. As a result, the content is easier to understand and remember."

"The generation effect is the underlying process which supports note-making. It’s the phenomenon where information is better remembered if it is actively created from your own mind rather than simply read in a passive way."

"At its core, note-making is about shifting one’s mindset from passive collection to active creation."

"Rephrase the original idea. Don’t use the author’s or teacher’s original language. Instead, distill the ideas into your own words."

"Connect ideas together. We rarely can form memories in isolation."

"Build upon the ideas. Your notes should be living documents. Come back to them to review and revise them."

"At all stages of making notes, the keyword is: active engagement."

"The note-taking tools market is projected to reach $1.35B by 2026."

"When it comes to taking notes and turning them into creative output, simpler is often better."

"try to not keep on switching note-taking apps too often. The shiny toy syndrome is real, and the desire to always use the “latest and greatest” will end up wasting lots of your time."

"The architect. They enjoy planning, designing processes and frameworks, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily structure their ideas."

"The gardener. They enjoy exploring, connecting various thoughts together, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily grow their ideas."

"The librarian. They enjoy collecting, building a catalogue of resources, and need a note-taking tool that allows them to easily retrieve their ideas."

"Architectural note-taking apps rely on a hierarchical structure based on pages and categories. As such, they require a bit of planning to decide whether an idea deserves its own category, its own page, or just its own block of content."

"Note-taking apps for architects"

"Note-taking apps for gardeners"

"Non-linear, these apps offer bi-directional linking, allowing you to not only see what a note links to, but what notes link back to it. Some let you access both explicit and implicit links, so you can discover connections between ideas that you may have not made yourself."

"Note-taking apps for librarians"

"American writer Sidney Sheldon: “Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination.”"

"There are two ways you can choose your note-taking app: based on your note-taking style, or based on your use case."

"Need to store a large amount of mostly static information in order to easily retrieve it later? A library may be appropriate."

"Need to brainstorm new ideas? In this case, you may want to use an app for gardeners, which is better for free thinking and creative work. These note-taking apps are particularly recommended for writers and researchers, where the goal is not to retrieve ideas, but to generate ideas."

"In the early days, I spent a lot of time replying one-on-one to users on Twitter, making sure they knew there was a human behind Notion. We also logged every piece of feedback we got and tagged it so we could use it to develop features."

"About two years ago, we reached out to our biggest power users who were building amazing things on Notion in ways we never imagined, so we could develop closer working relationships and support them as much as possible."

"One exciting trend I’ve noticed recently is more and more startups raising VC rounds with Notion pitch decks instead of slides. A lot of companies use Notion to take notes, share docs, host their wiki, and manage projects all in the same space — it becomes a type of operating system for them."

"Humans are toolmakers by nature, yet very few of us have the skills or knowledge to modify the software tools that we use every day. We want to change this status quo."

"in 2015, Alexandra was sued in the United States by Elsevier, which publishes more than about 500,000 articles in 2,500 journals every year. Elbakyan is currently in hiding due to the risk of extradition, but she is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Philosophy of Science in an undisclosed location."

"Sci-Hub in essence is a tool to connect one brain to another, using research papers as a medium."

"Modern computers do not have enough computational speed to encode and emulate the human brain artificially, and it is hard to do even for animal brains."

"our brain is nothing more than just billions of neurons connected to each other, our consciousness emerges out of their constant communication."

"In 2012, I started a Masters program in Public Administration and Governance. I had an idea to get into the government to fix the law. Currently, we have some weird laws, such as copyright laws, that prevent the free distribution of information on the Internet, such as academic papers and books. Such laws must be fixed."

"Sharing information was easy, but then finding, consolidating and collaborating on those thoughts and ideas was extremely difficult."

"The format of note-taking hasn’t changed too much in hundreds of years, whether it’s written on paper or as a digital document. Almost all notes we take are long-form and independent of each other, leaving knowledge on a topic scattered across multiple different files."

"A solution that was truly an extension of how our brains work. That’s how we created our notecard format: modular, fast and powerful notes that can be tagged, nested, linked and shared, each one being as important as the next."

"we want to give people the freedom to work on their own in a very productive way, while at the same time giving them the freedom to easily and constructively collaborate – “free your thoughts”."

"Using a notecard system allows for fantastic levels of portability, specifically when it comes to embedding Supernotes content in other places."

"You can right now embed any of your Supernotes cards anywhere on the web, and we want to expand this functionality to make it even easier and to take advantage of Supernotes’ other features (specifically our multi-parent hierarchies)."

"Once you have a few notecards, you can start to link, tag and nest them together to build a rich web of interconnected thought. This becomes even more exciting once you start sharing and collaborating on notecards – we like to call it “social note-taking”."

"One of the most important features of the Supernotes platform is that there is no such thing as a “folder”."

"you instead “nest” cards inside other cards, in a parent–child relationship. The primary benefit of this structure is that it more closely matches how our thoughts actually work."

"our nesting system has multi-parent capability, which means that you can stick a card within multiple parent cards – as many as you want. The beauty of this is in how much it aids with the aforementioned collaboration. Different people like to structure their content differently, which can often be a roadblock to collaboration with other systems."

"Supernotes is helping students study remotely together, assisting freelancers with documenting virtual meetings and invoices as well as helping those staying at home to track and share their reading lists, workout routines and recipes."

"The extensibility of code editors inspired us — if I don’t like how Visual Studio Code looks or works, I can customize almost every aspect of it. Why can’t we do this to notes?"

"most of the native features exist as plugins as well. We were testing our plugin system with the core features, and it gives the nice bonus to be able to turn them off if you don’t need them."

"we decided to do the private beta through Discord, both to distribute the early alpha versions and to gather direct feedback from users. From there, the Discord community organically grew until today. As it got larger, we had to recruit a few helpful community members to be moderators."

"Although Discord is great, it’s not suitable for properly keeping track of things. Topics get lost and it’s nearly impossible to discuss things by replying to an old message. The forum shines in these areas though."

"You’re already building a private digital garden in Obsidian, and Publish lets you easily open up part of that garden to the world."

"Obsidian is the IDE for thought. It’s a functional, extensible front-end for notes that you have total control over."

"Joggo was born out of a pivot. The company started as a payments company with a mission to recreate a new payment network that eliminated fees for merchants."

"there is an amazing amount of knowledge freely available and this is growing very fast every day, however, the time available to consume this is not growing."

"It’s a media paradox: you don’t know if you’ll find value in the time spent consuming until after you’ve consumed."

"The summaries are not a replacement for the content itself: they are meant to give the reader an insight into the content and whether they should dig in further."

"We have also found that the summaries are useful as pre-written notes after consuming the full piece of content. These notes are great at “jogging” one’s memory and aiding recall."

"We believe there is an art to a great summary, it’s not just copying select phrases from the text, there is a deeper understanding required and it requires a human, at least for now."

"We limit formatting to maintain a level of consistency so a user can consume the summary as fast as possible."

"we don’t summarize anything under five minutes, as we believe the summary will not be valuable or high quality. We also try to stay away from short-life news as this has limited value to users too."

"People accumulate huge lists of unread content and this is a big problem."

"If you are inspired by something and save it later but never revisit it, that is a missed opportunity to capitalize on what could have been a defining idea in your life."

"Friends are a good source of information but a lot of the time we’re not in the right space to consume and links are shared and forgotten, buried by the conversation being had at the time."

"the summaries we produce enable people to consume more content in less time"

"If you share a 30-minute read with a 10-person team, that’s 300 minutes of productivity you have just laid a claim on. If instead, you share a 1-minute summary that captures the key insights of the article, you’ve made all ten people smarter while only taking ten minutes of their collective time."

"Avid readers or consumers of content who want to learn as much as possible but have limited time are a strong audience for us."

"Access to the right information is hard to come by and sorting signal from noise is an ever-increasing problem. People trust brands, but these brands are being unbundled and talent is starting to create single person media brands. People are willing to pay to support these individuals and want to consume a curated feed of information from them."

"the goal of any knowledge-management system should be long-term focused"

"Human beings have the unique ability to manipulate and understand complex symbolic information. We leverage these capabilities to write, speak, draw diagrams, connect ideas, and more."

"We need to build tools that enable individuals to individually optimize their own thinking and learning so that we can collectively become better and more creative problem solvers."

"As David Deutsch once said, all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge."

"I was frustrated with how hard it was to keep my thoughts, research, and projects organized. I needed a tool to streamline my thinking, connect ideas, and optimize my learning for the long term."

"RemNote is different in both philosophy and focus. Every aspect of the tool is designed to support learning and long-term knowledge growth. We aim to make it easy for you to learn something once and then remember and leverage it forever."

"Our concept-driven knowledge structure enables you to break down and organize ideas to keep your notes organized and automatically find insights even as your knowledge grows."

"Everything in RemNote is a node in a graph — a “Rem”."

"When learning, a core goal should be to break ideas into “mind-sized bites” that you can then link back together."

"Spaced repetition is a learning technique that offers control over what you know. If you learn something and then apply spaced repetition, you should be able to reliably remember and apply what you’ve learned."

"aliasing is a first-class feature. Aliasing a Rem allows it to act as if it had multiple names. For example, if I aliased “Active Recall” to “Retrieval Practice”, both would appear in the search as if the Rem actually had two names."

"You can open PDFs directly in RemNote, and you can directly extract text and area highlights from them. Then, you can directly link to these highlights from other documents"

"we attract people who are excited about learning and who want easier ways to engage with their growing knowledge. We informally break down our user base into students, researchers, and professionals."

"we have a big group of life-long-learners who build mastery and reference material within RemNote. We also see researchers and creators using RemNote as an idea-generation platform, organizing research notes, writing Zettelkasten notes, organizing PDFs, and more. Finally, there’s a long tail of professionals who use the tool in a variety of ways: organizing todos, brainstorming, taking notes on calls, personal journaling, CRM, and more."

"Unread books can be as powerful as the ones we have read, if we choose to consider them in the right light."

"an antilibrary is a private collection of unread books. The concept was first mentioned by Lebanese-American scholar and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan"

"a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool."

"The goal of an antilibrary is not to collect books you have read so you can proudly display them on your shelf; instead, it is to curate a highly personal collection of resources around themes you are curious about."

"embracing the unknown is what drives discovery."

"Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell once said: “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”"

"Make notes of all relevant references. When an author mentions another book, check the exact reference and make a note of it. By doing so, you will have a list of all the relevant sources for a book when you are done reading it."

"Ask fellow readers for recommendations."

"knowledge is a process, not a possession. In addition, building an antilibrary is an investment in yourself which should stay within your means."

"meaning “enables people to interpret and organize their experience, achieve a sense of their own worth and place, identify the things that matter to them, and effectively direct their energies."

"at its heart, meaning in life refers to people’s beliefs that their lives are significant and that they transcend the ephemeral present."

"Studies suggest that people who believe their lives have meaning tend to be happier, with a higher life and work satisfaction, a greater overall well-being, more control over their lives, as well as less negative experiences and mental health conditions, such as fewer instances of depression, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, and post-traumatic disorder."

"researchers seem to agree that a meaningful life requires comprehension (being able to make sense of your experience), significance (perceiving your life to be worthwhile), and purpose (having goals for your life that you deem valuable)."

"According to Dr Michael Steger, most of the research on meaning in life concludes that relationships are a primary source of meaning"

"one of the strongest predictors of how meaningful people perceive their lives to be is… Being reminded of valued sources of meaning."

"“Extended over their lifetime, people who are more aware of what makes their lives meaningful, and who can access that content in a deliberate, cognitive fashion, should enjoy more stable and abundant meaning in life.”"

"ask yourself uncomfortable questions about your values and your goals. What goodness do you want to bring into the world? What will be your legacy?"

"The term “reading online” really consists of several behaviors: deciding what to read, the act of reading, and what you do with your knowledge after you read."

"I was a top 1% Pocket user for about a decade before starting Matter with my co-founder Rob Mackenzie, who was also a Pocket user. Read-it-later has been a core practice of mine for a long time."

"the first generation of read-it-later apps don’t have a lot of smarts built into them. For example, they don’t help with prioritization, resurfacing, or decay"

"Bezos talks about the importance of focusing on needs that won’t change. For instance, ten years from now, customers will still want faster delivery. We know the supply of great content will continue to rise, attention will always be scarce, and the returns to making good decisions about what to read will remain high — and indeed, increase — over time."

"Trust is one of the most important factors when deciding what to read, and people trust people."

"When we started Matter, we made the decision to elevate writers as first-class citizens in our system."

"Good curation is incredibly valuable, especially as a way of finding gems (often obscure, often old) that are overlooked by engagement-based algorithms."

"It’s a better experience if you can draw a highlight with a single press-and-drag."

"In general, our information consumption is heavily biased toward what’s new. Social media is dominated by the news"

"but… It’s also the case that 99.99% of the best stuff that’s ever been written or produced was not written in the past week."

"What’s new is important but we think the bias toward it is too strong, and we’re designing Matter to serve as a counterweight."

"We need to figure out how to deliver them so that they’re relevant and manageable. The design space is large. It’s a fun problem to work on."

"It’s the golden age of newsletters! The problem is, your email inbox isn’t great for reading. Most people want to get through their inbox as quickly as possible, not spend more time there. Plus, you can’t highlight or annotate."

"Highly reliable parsing is fundamental to the user experience, and we’re beginning to incorporate more sophisticated techniques, like NLP and computer vision, to push our accuracy even higher."

"in terms of consumer behavior, audio has become an increasingly important mode of consumption. In part, this rise in “ear time” is driven by hardware that makes listening more convenient"

"We added a feature called “audio highlights” that lets you highlight as you listen without opening your phone! (Triple-tap your Airpods or press both volume buttons at the same time to make an audio highlight.)"

"minimaps. If you two-finger tap an article, we show you a miniaturized version, so you can scan headers and quickly navigate. We took inspiration from video games and code editors. It’s neat on mobile, and I think it’ll be even neater on desktop web."

"Our core users tend to be what we call “active” readers. Not just in the sense that they read a lot, but in the sense that they’re intentional about what they read and proactively curate their information diets. Often they have favorite writers and subscribe to newsletters. Often they frequent obscure blogs."

"Our goal is to increase the ROI of reading. We want to help people get more from the time they invest in reading — more insight, more knowledge, more… thrill"

"explaining our solution is difficult even to this day. The challenge is that there aren’t other mainstream tools we can reference as an analogy."

"Readwise is software that helps you get a higher return on time invested in reading by helping you gather all your annotations into one place, and then making it easy to consistently review those notes and highlights."

"few of us have a system for consistently returning to those notes and highlights."

"the chief complaints we receive these days are questions like: Why can’t I easily return to the context surrounding a specific highlight?"

"You might think you could just cargo cult the concept of a block to a modern reading tool, but reading and writing are just too different. We needed something new."

"Software has clearly “eaten” the practice of writing. Yet the practice of reading is still mostly analog."

"If you want to fill a leaky bucket, you first need to stop the leak. If you want to get more out of reading, you first need to forget less."

"spaced repetition can also be leveraged to enhance creativity by repeatedly resurfacing a hard problem you’re working on — from different angles and in different contexts. I’ve even begun to write essays using spaced repetition"

"To avoid bloat, we always try to keep some “anti-goals” front and center (borrowed from Joel Spolsky)."

"We are not building another note-taking app."

"our passion from the start has been reading, and our frustration continues to be the lack of software innovation in this phase of the knowledge acquisition loop."

"We are not attempting to make reading social or enable an internet-scale annotation layer."

"You couldn’t invent Figma before Sketch and Illustrator nailed the single-player vector-based experience."

"We are NOT trying to apply the wisdom of the crowds, artificial intelligence, or mechanical turks to replace everything you read with derivatives."

"The forgetting curve suggests that we tend to halve our memory of new knowledge in a matter of days or weeks, unless we make a conscious effort to review the newly learned material."

"Ebbinghaus suggests fostering better memory representation by using mnemonic techniques, which are structured strategies to better memorise and remember things."

"Ebbinghaus found that repetition based on active recall, and especially spaced repetition, was practically helpful in reducing his forgetting rate."

"Ebbinghaus defined overlearning as the number of repetitions of information after which it can be recalled with perfect accuracy. Overlearning consists in reviewing newly acquired knowledge beyond the initial point of mastery."

"Lazy people focus on high-leverage activities. Because they carefully manage their energy expenditure, people who are prone to laziness will tend to avoid unnecessary tasks. Instead, they perform high-leverage tasks with minimum input and outsized output."

"Lazy solutions can be smart. Light switch, remote control, escalators, smart speakers… Laziness has been the source of many innovations."

"“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” — Robert A. Heinlein, aeronautical engineer, Naval officer, and science-fiction author."

"Another benefit of letting our mind wander without paying any attention to a productive task is a higher focus on long-term goals, according to a study published in Consciousness and Cognition. A bit of lazy time today, for a more productive time tomorrow!"

"There is extensive research showing the benefits of taking daytime naps and regular breaks, from lowering your blood pressure to clearing your mind."

"“I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things,” said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa. Be more like Lech Wałęsa. Be tactically lazy."

"So why do we later insist on this fabricated idea of having one calling in life?"

"It comes from a good place, of course, but it stems from the idea that the more “defined” you are as a person, the better."

"Growing up is like trying to squeeze through a gradually shrinking funnel, making yourself smaller and smaller until you can describe yourself with as few words as possible."

"For most of them, it seemed hard to find alternative options because, after years of hard work and smart choices, they were sitting at the tip of the pyramid."

"The same research shows that searching for a calling leaves us confused and uncomfortable."

"Because you’re optimizing for opportunities and not trying to define yourself through specific expertise, you can keep expanding your playground all your life."

"This ability to identify yourself across multiple domains and roles, which researchers call “self-complexity”, has been found to support emotional resilience by reducing the impact of failure or setback in any single domain."

"The self-complexity that arises when we invert our pyramid of life also encourages personal growth and self-discovery, as you can explore and evolve across various aspects of your identity, which means a richer, fuller life."

"When you stop trying to nail down your narrative and focus only on the most obvious relationships, life becomes a giant sandbox where we can learn anything, grow in any direction, and connect with anyone."

"Linear model: A then B then C then D."

"Circular model: A feeds B feeds C, which in turn feeds A."

"In a linear model of personal growth, you can only go up or down. By design, there are people below and above yourself."

"In a circular model of growth, nobody is more advanced than anyone. There is no “up” or “down.”"

"People are at a particular point of their own, unique growth loop. Everyone only competes against one’s self."

"It forces people to learn how to learn by designing feedback mechanisms that will allow them to continuously improve."

"When using the circular model of growth, you need to fall in love with the process. Success becomes a by-product of your learning journey, and it’s all about celebrating the small wins rather than chasing a big final victory."

"Unlike single loop learning which is simple and static, double-loop learning is more complex and dynamic, taking into account external factors and the changes in your environment, and adjusting the mental models on which a decision depends."

"As with many neuroscience-based concepts that made it into mainstream media, the hype starts from a fact: it is true that the adult brain is not hard-wired with fixed neuronal circuits."

"Neuroplasticity, short for neural plasticity, is the ability of the nervous system to reorganize its structure, function and connections. These changes can be small, such as a single neuron pathway making a new connection."

"There are two main types of neuroplasticity:"

"Structural plasticity. These are changes to the structure of the brain, including the creation and destruction of connections between neurons, or changes in the strength of these connections."

"Functional plasticity. This type of neuroplasticity refers to changes in how tasks are organized in the brain, and is most easily observed when parts of the brain are damaged, and other areas then “take over” the task."

"The main source of confusion is the loose definition of neuroplasticity used in the media, where it has become synonymous with learning new skills, acquiring new habits, or changing one’s behavior."

"“This is the loosest and most problematic use of neuroplasticity. By definition if we learn something, acquire a habit or tendency, good or bad, something has changed in the brain. Without specifying what the brain is doing, we know nothing more.”"

"In the words of William Schultz from Argosy University: “Neuroessentialism is the view that the definitive way of explaining human psychological experience is by reference to the brain and its activity.”"

"Neuroessentialist thinking makes us consider mental processes and human behavior solely through the lense of brain processes."

"“many claims about human psychology are adequately and entirely addressed at the level of behavior with no need to invoke neuroscientific evidence.”"

"And when we succumb to neuroessentialism and using neuroplasticity as an explanation for everything from habit formation to learning, we’re either ignoring other important factors beside brain processes, or we’re falling prey to pseudo-authoritative marketing designed to sell products that have little to do with the brain."

"Choose the most appropriate level of analysis."

"Consider other factors."

"Question the intent."

"Be critical of the source of information. Are you reading a research paper from neuroscientists trying to understand brain processes, or a landing page for a product promising to help you rewire your brain?"

"Instead, the master encouraged him to forget about the goal, and to focus on the way he was aiming — how he held the bow, the way he positioned his feet, the way he was breathing while releasing the arrow."

"In life like in archery, the goal is the target we want to achieve, while the aim is the course we set to reach that target."

"And we’re more likely to reach our goal when we become fully aware of our aim."

"“A good archer is not known by their arrows but by their aim.”"

"Letting go of outcomes doesn’t mean abandoning your ambitions. Instead, focusing on your aims is a mindset shift that allows you to break free of the arrival fallacy so you can zero in on your output."

"Success is enjoying the process."

"AIMS stands for Aspiration, Implementation, Metacognition, and Success."

"The need for cognitive closure is the motivation to find an answer to ambiguous situations — any answer that aligns with our existing knowledge."

"Not only can it lead us to make mistakes based on erroneous assumptions, but it can obscure the path to innovation."

"Ideally, we should seek knowledge to resolve questions regardless of whether that new knowledge points to an answer that aligns with what we believe or what we want"

"But dealing with uncertainty feels uncomfortable, so we try to get to an answer as fast as possible, sometimes irrationally, as long as it seems to neatly close the open loops we’ve been struggling with — thus providing us with a sense of closure. That’s why our need for cognitive closure is related to our aversion toward ambiguity."

"The urgency tendency: our inclination to attain closure as fast as possible."

"The permanence tendency: our inclination to maintain closure for as long as possible."

"When we find ourselves in an uncertain situation, urgency and permanence act as irrational sources of motivation that push us to try our hardest to eliminate ambiguity and to arrive at a definite conclusion."

"People who score high on the NFCS are more likely to make stereotypical judgments and to distort new information so it aligns with their existing beliefs."

"However, when faced with more complex problems that demand creative thinking, our need for cognitive closure can get in the way by motivating us to accept any answer that fits our existing knowledge, whether explicitly or tacitly."

"A high need for cognitive closure may lead us to select only information that matches our current knowledge and may result in faster resolution."

"Another way cognitive closure impacts the way we think is by making us cling to our current ideas to maintain our sense of expertise."

"In contrast, a lower need for cognitive closure means we are more comfortable playing with many shades of gray and remaining in a situation where we don’t have an answer yet — and may never get to a satisfactory resolution."

"The first step is to know where you sit on the scale."

"Design a psychologically safe environment. Our need for closure goes up when we feel threatened, and it goes down when we feel safe to make mistakes."

"Fall in love with problems. Instead of trying to find answers as quickly as possible, train yourself to become comfortable with open issues that you know are unsolved."

"Richard Feynman recommended keeping a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind. He said: “Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.”"

"Learn in public. Similarly, don’t wait until you have an answer to share it with the world, as this may lead you to rush to a clear solution. Instead, publish your early ideas, especially if they feel half-baked."

"Artificial creativity, also known as computational creativity, is a multidisciplinary field of research that aims to design programs capable of human-level creativity."

"Artificial creativity is a new liminal space between machine and human, between productivity and creativity, which will affect the lives of billions of workers in the coming years."

"“As the models get bigger and bigger, they begin to deliver human-level, and then superhuman results.”"

"To understand what’s going on and why it matters for the very future of knowledge work and creative work, we need to understand the difference between Discriminative AI and Generative AI."

"There are two main classes of statistical models used by AI."

"The first one, which has been used the longest and is what you’ll find in classical AI, is called “discriminative”: it discriminates between different kinds of data instances."

"The second class of model, much more recent, is called “generative”: it can generate new data instances."

"1. Linguistic creativity."

"2. Visual and artistic creativity"

"Websites like Lexica offer massive libraries of pre-tested prompts you just have to copy and paste."

"Opus lets you turn text into movies. Tavus allows you to record one video, and to generate thousands, automatically changing some words."

"And Colossyan provides you with AI actors ready to deliver the lines you provide."

"3. Audio and musical creativity"

"Using advanced machine translation and generative AI, Dubverse automates dubbing so you can quickly produce multilingual videos."

"Innovative apps like Endel (whose founder we have interviewed here) use AI to create personalized soundscapes to help their users focus, relax, and even sleep."

"4. Scientific creativity"

"Elicit uses language models like GPT-3 to automate parts of researchers’ workflows, allowing researchers to ask a research question and to get answers from 175 million papers."

"Genei automatically summarizes background reading and produces reports. In biochemistry, Cradle uses AI to predict a protein’s 3D structure and generate new sequences, saving days of work for scientists who use it."

"Wizdom continuously monitors billions of data points about the global research ecosystem to automatically provide actionable insights to their users."

"Rewind has the ambition of becoming the search engine for your life, helping you find anything you’ve seen, said, or heard."

"Glean connects the dots across all the applications used by an organization to generate insights."

"The first one envisions AI as a way to enhance human creativity—a creative companion of sorts, here to spark inspiration, suggest ideas, and overcome creative blocks."

"But others dream of an AI able to emulate human creativity—an independent creative thinker that can fully formulate and produce novel creative work on its own."

"There are two schools of thought regarding artificial creativity."

"Exploratory creativity is the process of searching a creative space governed by certain rules."

"Transformational creativity is the process of transforming the rules and thus creating a new creative space."

"Whether they’re exploratory or transformational, whether they enhance or emulate human creativity, AI tools are here to say."

"In many ways, artificial creativity is a vector for augmented cognition; another step towards unlocking our potential by freeing us from the burden of low-level tasks."

"In short, there’s nowhere to escape. Yes, it’s unlikely AI will completely take over the book industry. We will still read human-written stories the same way we still buy handmade goods because we value what is rare."

"Our brain is wired to reduce uncertainty. The unknown is synonymous with threats that pose risks to our survival. The more we know, the more we can make accurate predictions and shape our future."

"Metacognitive strategies can help us think better and manage the anxiety that arises from the unknown."

"To ensure our survival, we become hypervigilant to potential threats."

"First, uncertainty impacts our attention. The sense of threat degrades our ability to focus."

"Put simply, their results suggest that our brain redirects its energy towards resolving uncertainty, at the expense of other cognitive tasks."

"And uncertain situations force us to use additional working memory resources."

"In the words of Samuli Laato, a researcher at the University of Turku: “Uncertainty always increases cognitive load. Stressors such as health threat, fear of unemployment and fear of consumer market disruptions all [cause] cognitive load.”"

"By using thinking tools, we can offload some of the burden uncertainty puts on our mind, so we can regain control of our attention and free our working memory resources—and, ultimately, think more clearly in times of uncertainty."

"Rather, uncertainty is multifaceted, with many flavors that should be treated differently."

"The Uncertainty Matrix, sometimes called the Rumsfeld Matrix, is a tool that can be used to help make decisions when facing an uncertain situation"

"The matrix consists of four quadrants: Known-Knowns, Known-Unknowns, Unknown-Knowns, and Unknowns-Unknowns."

"When dealing with a Known-Unknown, we conduct experiments to gather more information, so we can close some of our knowledge gaps and turn those Known-Unknown into Known–Knowns."

"For Unknown-Knowns, explore our assumptions—the things we don’t know we know—and identify biases in those assumptions, so we can potentially replace them with factual data."

"“The oldest and strongest emotion of humankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” wrote H.P. Lovecraft."

"Why is it that we like having choices, but we don’t like choosing?"

"Yet, we tend to exhibit a preference for the default option when presented with a selection of choices. This is called the default effect, and it rules many aspects of our lives from the products we buy to the career we build."

"One of the theories behind the default effect is that humans are hardwired to avoid loss."

"This aversion is so strong that it can override our logical thinking and lead us to stick to what seems like the safest path."

"Another theory relates to the cognitive effort needed to consider alternative options."

"In each of these cases, we’re letting the default effect guide our decision-making, and as a result, we’re not reaching our full potential."

"“If you do not change direction, you might end up where you are heading.”"

"It’s a powerful evolutionary force that’s hard to resist."

"We’re often so busy thinking about how to get things done, we forget to think about why we want to get these things done."

"Practice deliberate decision-making."

"“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”"

"Breaking free from the default effect so you can choose your own path is not easy, but it can make all the difference."

"In her seminal book Mindset, American psychologist Carol Dweck explains the two main mindsets we have when approaching new challenges—or even life in general."

"Fixed mindset — “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits."

"Growth mindset — “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”"

"The idea is that what is commonly called intelligence can be “grown” incrementally by means of hard work, positivity, resilience, and training, and that people can be placed on a continuum according to their implicit views of where their abilities come from."

"Contrary to what many people think, the adult brain is not “hard-wired” with fixed neuronal circuits. It’s actually very plastic. Neuroplasticity can be defined as the ability of the brain to change continuously throughout your life."

"It means your brain keeps on changing, adapting, and forming new connections even as you grow older."

"More importantly, it means your cognitive abilities are not fixed."

"Before we explore ways to foster a growth mindset, it’s crucial to be able to spot your own fixed mindset triggers."

"Having to work hard."

"Facing setbacks."

"Getting negative feedback."

"Being challenged."

"Seeing success in others."

"“In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.”"

"When you have a growth mindset, the hand you are dealt is just a starting point for personal growth."

"Remember the concept of neuroplasticity."

"Don’t say failing, say learning."

"Place growth before speed."

"Grow with others."

"Having a growth mindset is related to having an open mind. Instead of seeing your abilities, skills, knowledge and values as fixed, you always push into the unfamiliar, to ensure you are always learning."

"What am I struggling with right now?"

"What is one thing I will try that will get me out of my comfort zone?"

"What new strategies did I try?"

"What mistake did I make that taught me something?"

"For example, your brain has two modes: a “focused” and “diffused” mode. The focused mode consists in sustaining your attention on one specific task, such as reading this article or solving a coding challenge."

"Even beyond notoriously idle species such as pythons—which sleep about 18 hours per day—most animals spend a majority of their time doing nothing in particular."

"“For all these arguments against laziness, it is amazing we work so hard to achieve it,” writes Hal Cranmer in In Defense of Laziness."

"Rather than a sign of inefficiency and unproductivity, it can be the result of smart work freeing up time for well-deserved idleness."

"Furthermore, it can be the trigger for smart work in and of itself."

"Lazy solutions can be smart."

"“I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”"

"Slacking off can be a form of active procrastination."

"In contrast, active procrastinators are a “positive” type of procrastinator. They prefer to work under pressure, and they make deliberate decisions to procrastinate.”"

"Lazy people focus on high-leverage activities."

"Unproductive time helps us manage our stress."

"Being lazy makes you less prone to burnout."

"Lazy time encourages diffuse thinking."

"Our mind has two modes of thinking: the diffuse mode and the focused mode of thinking. We need to maintain constant oscillation between the two modes in order to be our most creative and productive."

"Laziness can be good for our mental health."

"by resorting to manic-like behavior we suppress the truth of our feelings and concerns, consciously or unconsciously avoiding periods of uninterrupted, freely associative thoughts"

"Being lazy is a way to recharge our energy stores."

"Problems can solve themselves if you leave them alone for long enough."

"Laziness can be a helpful symptom."

"If you perpetually feel lazy, you may need to dig a bit deeper into your thoughts and emotions to figure out what the source of the problem is."

"“I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things,” said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa."

"In French, “cultiver son jardin intérieur” means to tend to your internal garden—to take care of your mind."

"The garden metaphor is particularly apt: taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits)."

"“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”"

"First, you need to seed your mind garden with quality content."

"The depth of the content you consume is not a measure of quality. Reading broad content is also a way to plant many seeds, which you may decide to nurture or not in the future."

"When consuming content, grow branches on your knowledge tree by taking notes."

"When you find some of these new combinations particularly interesting, share the seeds with fellow gardeners."

"Your note-taking app, such as Roam or one of its open source alternatives for instance, can be used for collating snippets, ideas, and raw thinking. Use it to seed your garden and connect the dots."

"Once you have managed to articulate a new idea (new to you at least), write down a few more structured sentences, and add it to your digital garden as an evergreen note."

"Ultimately, the goal is to make sure all the information you consume (your input) can lead to increased productivity and creativity (your output) instead of festering and getting forgotten in your mind backyard."

"In fact, external competition can have a terrible impact on our performance."

"Competition should be about chasing your own unrealised potential. You will never beat your future self—by definition, your future self will always be one step ahead."

"When you try to compete with others, you are following rules instead of creating your own game. You are creating additional stress for yourself by letting others define your performance indicators. You are moving towards someone else’s accomplishments instead of just moving forward in a direction that’s yours to shape."

"Set ambitious, exciting goals."

"Make your past self your competitor, and your future self the hero you look up to."

"Note-taking often happens while listening; the goal is to quickly capture content so we can refer back to it later."

"Rephrase the original idea. Don’t use the author’s or teacher’s original language."

"Connect ideas together."

"At all stages of making notes, the keyword is: active engagement. Don’t just ingurgitate whatever you are studying. Proactively use your own language and create your own systems."

"I asked readers what they wanted me to write about, and what came up most often is how I manage my time."

"Everything goes in there. This means—beside work meetings—quick calls with friends that live in another country, time to think, dinner parties, networking events, gym time, study time, reading time, and even taking breaks."

"I say “no” or “let’s do this in a few weeks” a lot."

"The scientific method is considered one of the most rigorous ways of acquiring new knowledge. The scientific method involves formulating an hypothesis, performing an experiment, measuring the results, and refining the hypothesis based on the experimental findings."

"Scientific experiments are not designed to succeed. They are designed to explore a question, and potentially increase knowledge of a problem."

"To fail like a scientist is to embrace the experimental nature of life. Everything is an experiment, every failure a learning opportunity. It’s about having a growth mindset—where uncertainty is a positive sign that you are learning and growing."

"Focus on progress over success."

"Failing like a scientist is also about continuously challenging your assumptions instead of blindly following a linear path to a specific goal."

"Replace imitation with exploration."

"it’s limited by multiple cognitive bottlenecks."

"Because these cognitive bottlenecks limit how much information we can process at one time, how many tasks we can simultaneously focus on, and how many parameters we can consider while making a decision."

"we tend to overestimate our cognitive capacities — our ability to concurrently process multiple streams of information or to work on several tasks at the same time."

"our thinking mind is limited by two Big Bad Bottlenecks: our attention and our working memory."

"Simply put, we’re bad at dividing our attention between different tasks."

"“Working memory is the mental space where we do conscious, active thinking — and that space has limited capacity."

"A fundamental problem in learning is that working memory is a bottleneck — everything new that we learn has to go through working memory before we can commit it to permanent or long term memory,” he adds."

"Offload some of your thinking."

"Once we get rid of the illusionary multitasking and the toxic productivity, cognitive bottlenecks are not inherently bad. They are just characteristics of our mind we need to consider when we plan our work and interact with the world."

"No concern, no conscience of time—just pure, invigorating work driven by heightened awareness."

"But the state of flow can be even better achieved when you decide to focus on an activity for intrinsic reasons—that is, doing the task for your own sake, and not because you feel obligated to."

"“Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.”"

"Even so, we keep on buying new products, upgrading to the latest version, and filling our lives with possessions we don’t need."

"a tendency to over consume, mostly caused by our natural need for betterment."

"In a short amount of time, Diderot bought a new golden clock, a bronze sculpture, a console table, and more art pieces, ending up in debt."

"“I was the absolute master of my old robe. I have become the slave of the new one.”"

"Our natural tendency is to always consume more, better, newer. However, with a bit of self-control, it is possible to go from impulse buying to mindful consumption."