change

It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefit. For example, when students are presented with a body of material to master, say a stack of foreign vocabulary flashcards, and are free to decide when to drop a card out of the deck

The ego likes big, dramatic actions that seem as if they’ll magically change the future. This gives the ego a sense of power. Real discipline is quite the opposite. It’s made up of an endless number of small steps, each of which can seem meaningless on its own. The ego has to humble itself to keep going on a productive course.

regular sitting practice has been shown to enhance concentration, lower blood pressure, and improve sleep. It is used to treat chronic pain, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Meditators develop valuable insights into their personality, behaviors, and relationships, making it easier to recognize and

ADHD can make the future seem hopelessly distant. A goal that requires a significant investment of time, incorporates waiting periods, or has to be done in a sequence of steps can prove so elusive that you feel overwhelmed. When that happens, many adults with ADHD yield to the temptation to find an escape route.

this is the point where people self-destruct. At the first taste of success, they stop working on themselves. But reality hasn’t changed. They need the tools even more than before.”

This change cannot possibly be brought about without knowing oneself, self-knowledge. This is not knowledge of the “higher self” or knowledge of some “supreme consciousness,” for they are still within the field of thought. Unless one understands one’s self, the self of every day—what it thinks, what it does, its devotions, its deceptions, its

As you're presumably aware, this is a terrible mindset for actually making lasting changes. What you need, instead, are tiny goals and a commitment to incremental progress (" small wins"), plus a willingness to encounter failure after failure as you stumble toward improvement. To put it another way: fresh- startism is a form of perfectionism, and

“The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter- instinctual.” I take him to mean that if you’re trying to get better at life in some way– more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self- sabotage– the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel

We have the best chance to change our behaviour over the long term if we start with a realistic idea about the difficulties of behavioural change (Dean 2013).