13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings — by Maria Popova
Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2019 6:28 pm
Maria Popova is, in my estimation, a brilliant thinker who shares her love of learning and wonder on her site, BrainPickings. These life lessons are exemplary suggestions to take to heart. I'm going to just tease you with the first two from the list...
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/10/2 ... -13-years/
13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings — by Maria PopovaHere are the initial ten learnings, as published in 2016, which I continue to stand and live by:
Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/10/2 ... -13-years/
