Sublime

The Wayward Mind by Guy Claxton.

knowledge workers operate as a state of “divided attention,” in which the mind rarely gets closure before switching tasks, creating a muddle of competing activations and inhibitions that all add up to reduce our performance.

The purpose of education is to develop agency within a child. Purposeful work and achieving mastery are tools to getting there. They aren’t the results of learning and imagination, it’s the other way around—learning is simply the consequence of doing. To understand this is to understand the ecology that fosters genius and talent.

was a young chess master named Maurice Ashley.

Stan Davis,

Mihaly Csikzentmihaly, the legendary University of Chicago psychologist and author of Flow, has written that “work requiring great skills that is done freely refines the complexity of the self ”—but