feature or a bug?

how advantages can be disadvantages and strengths can be weaknesses

I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)

The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. DAVID WHYTE

Paul Millerd • The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

THE GREAT TRIUMPH (OR horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality.

Caitlin Doughty • Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

We’re good at learning by tinkering—which is fortunate, because we’re terrible at getting things right the first time.

Bent Flyvbjerg • How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Outlook

“It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Give yourself permission to be a beginner.” — Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

A 2018 study found that people typically pursue higher levels of education because they believe it will lead to more leisure time. But, in fact, more educated people tend to have less leisure time.13 They earn more money, but also work more hours. This upends their expectations and ends up having a net zero effect on overall happiness.

Rob Henderson • Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.

-Jack Kornfeld

The human mind is a remarkable contraption, great at keeping us psychologically buoyant in periods of chaos and allowing us to pay the price later, once the storm has settled.