Four Thousand Weeks

Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time – our culture’s ideal is that you alone should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want – because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperati

I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems.4 With that thought an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.’

Choose uncomfortable enlargement over comfortable diminishment whenever you can.

The overarching point is that what we think of as ‘distractions’ aren’t the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation.

distracted person isn’t really choosing at all.

Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament.

a life devoid of all problems would contain nothing worth doing, and would therefore be meaningless.

each time a project starts to feel difficult, or frightening, or boring, you can bounce off to a different one instead.

pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.

it’s only unbearable for as long as you’re under the impression that there might be a cure.