Highlights from all books

Sometimes understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much.

We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring. And there may be an unspoken sense that once we’ve achieved this long-sought goal, once we’ve reached the summit, we’ll be able to relax, or at least things will be enduringly better.

Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productivity. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

One thing I occasionally do when I’m feeling very sad…is sit down, close my eyes, and study the sadness: accept its presence and just observe how it actually makes me feel.

One of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.

True, pure enlightenment, in this view, is like what mathematicians call an asymptote: something you can get closer and closer to but never quite reach.

The idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.

So too with perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Are any of these things really under control—so completely under control that they never lead to suffering? And if they’re not under control, then how can we think of them as part of the self?

If you followed the Buddha’s guidance and abandoned the massive chunks of psychological landscape you’ve always thought of as belonging to you, you would undergo a breathtaking shift in what it means to be human. If you attained the state he’s recommending, this would be very different from having a self in the sense in which you’ve always had one before.

Separate the act of observation from the act of evaluation.

Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions—the power to disengage from some of them; the power to, in a sense, disown them, to define the bounds of your self in a way that excludes them.

…sit down, close your eyes, focus on your breath, and then, once you start failing to focus on your breath (which shouldn’t take long!), try to focus on the things that are keeping you from focusing on your breath. And I don’t mean just focus on whatever thought is distracting you—I mean see if you can detect some feeling that is linked to the thought that is distracting you.

…brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system, the system involved in motivation and reward, in desire and pleasure.

[Judson] Brewer said the basic idea is to not fight the urge to, say, smoke a cigarette. That doesn’t mean you succumb to the urge and light up a cigarette. It just means you don’t try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you’d apply to other bothersome feelings—anxiety, resentment, melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you. There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment.

The bad news is that you don’t exist; the good news is that you’re everything.

Nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence.

However complicated you think it is, everything is more complicated than that. There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can’t put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn’t the same as any other stone, so I don’t know where you all think you get off labeling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need.

Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor.

Bones, like anything, strong until they weren’t.

Oh girl, we have known little bit love…we have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

We don’t think of ourselves as “prayer warriors.” A man must’ve come up with that term—men think anything difficult is war.

Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

That’s what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it’s from and where it’ll return.

It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way.

She got her mother in her, holding the knife, and her own spirit flinted over, and each time they struck, she would spark. Her whole life, a spark.

We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.

What we regard as precious, we will naturally protect.

Concern, connectedness, dignity, forgiveness, patience, tolerance, gratitude, and an inclusive intelligence: this is what the world needs. This is what we need.

Whatever our culture, religion, or language, we want food, shelter, and good health. We want to be able to get up in t he morning enthusiastically and sleep safely at night. We want health, safety, and happiness for our loved ones. We want to know that our lives are purposeful and sometimes gracious. We want to feel part of something greater than ourselves. We want and neeed inspiration and meaning.

Acknowledging your gift of life as sacred doesn’t mean I have to like you, agree with you, or support your views. It doesn’t mean that I have to lie down like a doormat for your feet. It doesn’t mean that I should stand by passively or indifferently if you are harming yourself or others. It doesn’t mean that I can afford to harm or diminish myself. What it does mean is that I have no right to denigrate, hurt, or kill you because you see the world and its problems differently from how I do. I have no right to crush your spirit to make myself feel bigger or more important. I have no right, either, to ignore or compound your suffering because it is taking place in a country far from my home, because your religion is not mine or because I loath and despise your political or cultural ideology. Nor dor I have the right to scorn or trample on my own precious, unique gift of life because it isn’t measuring up to the plan I had for it.

Tell people how innately worthless they are and their feelings of spiritual entitlement will be impoverished.

“Believing” in love as a value, and perhaps also in a God of love, while living unlovingly, is progressively less convincing.

Our inner changes are not always “convenient” to outer timetables. We can’t and we do not always move right along at a pace that others would like and we might also desire.

We are drowning in an ocean of self.

It takes tremendous courage to consider that whatever is unwelcome in our lives is not happening to us but possibly FOR us.

…to see our lives as sacred is literally life-saving.

Great doubt: great awakening. / Little doubt: little awakening. / No doubt: no awakening.

How we think about ourselves will emerge loud and clear through the way we think about and treat other people.

We need to know that it always harms our own sense of self when we reduce “the other” to little more than an object of our contempt. Such behavior demonstrates a brutal ignorance of the subtle and even the gross complexities of each individual’s unfolding situation, and of spiritual claims that in our vast and uncomfortable diversity we are a single family.

Conditional love lets me love my life (and myself) when I am giving or doing “enough”. Unconditional love lets me love and value my life. Period.

Your inner critic and mine…knows little or nothing about sufficiency. On the contrary, [they] may mistake “sufficiency” for bigheadedness, for being “spoiled”, smug, or self-satisfied. Inner critics might vary their messages between criticisms, warnings, whining, bullying, or belittling, but are unlikely ever to be spacious, kind, light, or forgiving, or to remind us of the preciousness of this fleeting life, the preciousness of our own lives, and the capacities we have to meet even the most difficult moments with courage and hope.

Yvonne’s inner story paralyzes even her capacity to imagine effective change and, like any one of us, Yvonne will never achieve what she cannot first imagine.

Identity is always a mix of the conditioned and the chosen.

It took me so many years to discover that the value of my life does not rest on my work. My life—like yours—is intrinsically precious. Has intrinsic meaning. Is already a gift and always has been.

We receive love more confidently when we feel able to give it.

I am part of something wondrous. My life has value.

What seekers do need and often year for is…“a direct and unmediated contact with the Divine, free of the divisiveness, body hatred, and bias towards transcendence that disfigures all the inherited patriarchal religions.”

Yet a sense that our inner world is a place of love and a resource for all the highest qualities can be extremely difficult to grasp with the intellect alone. Surrender some of our usual ways of thinking is needed to make way for these kinds of experiences.

“We are not spiritual beings having spiritual experiences. We are spiritual beings living a human life.”

What a delight to find that you are not the center of an anxious universe, with other people waiting to judge and condemn you, but that instead you are part of an intricately connected, sacred universe, filled with people whom you can positively influence, support, and encourage—and who will sometimes similiarly support you.

Wisdom teaches me I am nothing. Love teaches me I am everything. Between these two poles my life flows.

I don’t feel a need to know the details of the afterlife experience. I have a profound trust that my spirit knows where it came from and therefore knows where it’s going.

Worldwide spending on war and war readiness is greater than the sum needed for every human being on earth to have food, clean water and shelter, and the chance to live in their homeland.

When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spotaneously. When you realize the depth and fulness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection.

“One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of.”

“Believe nothing because someone wise has said it. / Believe nothing because it is generally held. / Believe nothing because it is written down. / Believe nothing because it is said to be Godly. Believe nothing because someone else believes it. / Believe only what you yourself discover to be true.”

The journey inward is risky. People know that instinctively. Maps that take us in that direction are handmade and patchy. What they may do for me today may not help me tomorrow. Staying awake demands mindfulness writ large.

“Horizons are smashed [and] people of different beliefs and cultures are colliding with each other. That transformation is really of the whole sense of humanity and what it means to be a cultured and world-related human being. Anything from the past–such as an idea of what [humankind] of this, that, or another culture might be, or should be—is now archaic. And so we have to leave our little provincial stories behind. They may guide us as far as structuring our lives for the moment, but we must always be ready to drop them and to grab the new experience as it comes along, and to interpret it.

“We live at a pace where it is normal to jump when someone snaps their fingers. And to feel guilty and ashamed if we can’t. It’s so normal to ‘serve’ a whole fleet of ‘masters’ that we hardly know we are doing it: the masters of the media, of commercialization, of semmingly trivial things like what we should wear or eat or how slim or fit we should be, as well as the more obvious ‘masters’ of work and its demands.”

We need time for reverie and daydreaming, a necessary precursor to any kind of original thinking or creativity, and so often ignored as we sit in front of electronic screens both for work and rest.

How we understand or accept the inevitability of death will starkly affect how we regard life, and move through it.

How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time.

These women are not divided into functions. They have to do everything; if they can.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping.

I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.

But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.

To want is to have a weakness.

I feel like cotton candy, sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.

You can't help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help how you behave.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

Who can tell what they really are? Under their daily-ness.

Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man. If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too.

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.

I can't quite believe it. Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this. She will think of something. But I know this isn't true. It is just passing the buck, as children do, to mothers.

I remind myself that he is not an unkind man; that, under other circumstances, I even like him.

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulent.

Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. You need to decide to take the fate of the product into your own hands through assertive risk-taking and innovation.

If you are doing best practices, you are not innovating.

Two-sided markets are what make the Internet go around.

The reality is that people often use products or combinations of products in ways that the product makers do not expect.

Simply offering as many features as you can overlooks the holistic UX and business model, and it doesn’t address what features the customers actually want or need to accomplish their primary goal.

The big payoff of exposing yourself to new experiences outside of your comfort zone is that they make it possible for us to grow as people. You change when you disrupt habitual patterns, and it affords you new ways of doing, being, and experiencing.

Innovation can happen in small, incremental steps. You can innovate around a feature or an interface or in phases, and ultimately it builds up to this really extraordinary, meaningful, hard-to-replicate experience.

Listen to those you don’t agree with. Are they making sense? Have you overlooked something? Seek opinions from people with different areas of expertise to gain different perspectives.

The lesson is that strategy is iterative just like everything else. You come up with a hypothesis, you create a plan, and you move forward until you learn new information, reposition the hypothesis, and adjust the plan.

We need to accept that failure, while an insurmountable barrier to some, might be an essential part of our product’s journey toward success.

What if we got into a scrape? They couldn’t boost me up a cliff or lower me down an embankment or squeeze me through a tight fissure or hoist me from the hot jaws of a bear.

They tell you that if you hate yourself hard enough, you can grab just a tail feather or two of perfection.

Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet.

Studies have shown that visual exposure to certain body types actually changes people’s perception of those bodies—in other words, looking at pictures of fat people makes you like fat people more. (Eternal reminder: Representation matters.)

The tide of public opinion has always turned, invariably, on coolness. People just want to be cool.

All of those changes are small, but they tell us something big: Our world isn’t fixed, the way those currently in charge would have you believe. It’s malleable.

Voting is world-building. So is kindness, compassion, listening, making space, saying yes, saying no. We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better.

It’s not easy, but I’m not easy, so we match.

Blackness is not a monolith. There’s nerdy black, jock black, manic pixie dream black, sassy black, shy black, conscious black, hipster black...the list goes on and on. But some people don’t want to believe that, because if varying degrees of blackness become normalized, then that means society has to rethink how they treat black people.

coded language—which is language that, on the surface, seems to mean one thing to the average person but has a different, often pejorative, meaning to the person or group of people being talked about...

Do everything you intend to do with no regard for how people want you or expect you to behave.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes.

I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

I suppose that is the nature of the monument. Be it a small house or a mansion of Corinthian columns and wrought-iron lace. The monument does not say that this or that man walked here. No, that what he felt in one time in one spot continues. The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises. As long as the monuments stand, it still rises. The feeling, at least here … and there … it remains the same.

Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.

The sky had come down to meet the sea and that some great secret was to be revealed in that meeting, some great gulf miraculously closed forever.

I had one of those rare moments when it seemed I thought of nothing. My mind had no shape. I saw that the rain had stopped. I saw that the air was clear and cold. That the street was luminous.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.

The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.

Enforce at least a five-minute gap between the current moment and the next time you can go online. This gap is minor, so it won’t excessively impede your progress, but from a behavioralist perspective, it’s substantial because it separates the sensation of wanting to go online from the reward of actually doing so.