The Heart Is the Bottleneck

the book will endure as the minimum amount of concentrated attention required to become immersed in a story.

if you cut off access to any emotion – fear, disappointment, love, anger – you also lose joy in the process.

Books like Antifragile, Seeing Like a State, and Incomplete Nature have given me a deep appreciation for the power of randomness to produce resilience, strength, and creativity.

In other words, taking on the work of healing involves more heartbreak, and more grief.

The voice is so often speaking from the neediest, most fearful, most lonely parts of us.

your memories are sequential, like symbols on a ticker tape. They are designed to be read in a certain direction and in order.

Small is good, small is all (The large is a reflection of the small)

What matters is not the container wrapped around a bunch of exclusive text, but the service wrapped around the container.

But the more fundamental need to take away something tangible from the experience of reading is one of the things driving the return of commonplace books – personal, curated collections of facts, insights, musings, quotes, and research originally invented in 19th century Europe as a way to deal with the information explosion of the Industrial Era.

Brown’s question for us is, “What are you embodying in your work and in your life?” Given that you are a seed of the future, what are you a seed of?