Overall, compassionate people tended to be healthier, happier, more popular, and more successful at work. Most
Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shu...
Mark had helped me see that the point of getting behind the waterfall wasn’t to magically solve all of your problems, only to handle them better, by creating space between stimulus and response. It wa...
It’s neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can’t do it.
It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do...
In fact, when you're mindful, you actually feel irritation more keenly. However, once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it's easier to stop gett...
In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it. Accord...
I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano's point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, c...
Don’t you ever get pissed off, annoyed, irritated, sad—anything negative? No, I accept what is. And that’s why life has become so simple. Well, what if somebody cuts you off in your car? It’s fine. It...
All we can do is everything we can do. (David Axelrod)
Didn't need to waste so much time envisioning some vague horribleness awaiting me in my future.
Although I tried to always keep in mind something a friend had once told me: Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.) At
People would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it.
Once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it’s easier to stop getting carried away.
Often it’s not the unknown that scares us, it’s that we think we know what’s going to happen—and that it’s going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don’t know. The smart play, she said, was to tur...
Main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won’t last.
Does. America, as then senator Barack Obama had noted after Hurricane Katrina, goes from shock to trance faster than any other nation on earth.
While I may not have been physically addicted, I was certainly psychologically hooked. I missed getting high so badly that it was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I fa...
When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions.
What he really meant was something like, Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.