Mindful Reading

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield has the subtitle, "break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles." It's about the war against what Pressfield calls resistance, a term that Pressfield pears at from many different angles, and exposes as the ultimate enemy. Beat resistance, and you win the war.

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A discussion of the book Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday.

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday is a book about ego and all its dangers. It looks at how ego is the enemy throughout different stages in our lives such as when we aspire, when we succeed, and even when we fail. Through various stories and quotes these ideas are explored, and we see how ego leads to demise, with humility being the better option.

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"How Emotions Are Made" is a book by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and a neuroscience researcher. This book delves into Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotions, offering a fresh perspective on how emotions are formed. Initially, the book presents the classical view of emotions, which suggests that emotions are simply reactions to external events. Something happens, and as a result, we feel a certain way. In the classical view, these emotions are thought to have distinct markers in the brain, akin to a "fingerprint". For example, it is often said that the amygdala is the center of fear.

The book then goes on to discuss recent research that challenges this classical view, advocating for the Theory of Constructed Emotions. This theory proposes that emotions aren't mere reactions. Instead, they are complex predictions shaped by our past experiences and current context. According to this theory, we perceive and experience these predictions as reality, rather than experiencing the raw sensory input as reality. This theory suggests that our emotions, and even our perception of reality, are essentially a continuous flow of these constructed predictions.

In the concluding chapters, Barrett explores the broad implications of this theory on various aspects of life, including health, law, and our general understanding of the world around us.

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*Apologies for any rain noise that came through or distorted the audio.

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport is about the philosophy of Slow Productivity, which in turn is about, as the subtitle suggests, "The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout". It looks at the structure of work over time, from hunter gatherers to modern knowledge workers, focusing on the foundations of how we came to a point where we're working frantically, on the edge on burnout. A point brought across in these early chapters is the idea that even though we both look and are busier throughout each day, we aren't actually achieving more - it's what he calls Pseudo-Productivity. The book then goes on to discuss three principles that encompass the philosophy of Slow Productivity: Do Fewer Things, Work at a Natural Pace, and Obsess Over Quality.

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A discussion of the book Effortless by Greg McKeown.
Effortless, as it says on the cover, is about making it easier to do what matters most. Put differently, making it easier to do the essential things, and hard to do the pointless. The book looks at various situations where people take the difficult path and various situations where people take the effortless path. In some sense, the books claim is that often, we equate success with working hard and working endless hours, but, it doesn't have to be that way. As the title of the introductory chapter says, "not everything has to be so hard", in other words, often, there is an effortless way. Whether that's solving a challenging problem, generating wealth, or dealing with the difficulties of being human; "not everything has to be so hard".
The book is split into three parts:

• Part 1: Effortless State - "How can we make it easier to focus?"
  How can we get into that effortless state? Think along the lines of what many know as the flow state. Where we don't feel like we're continually fighting an uphill battle, but rather we feel we're in the flow state - "rested, at peace, and focused". pg. 15
• Part 2: Effortless Action - "How can we make essential work easier to do?"
  How can we make the work we do, the actions, effortless? Where it's easy to do what matters. It's "about simplifying the process to make the work itself easier to do." pg. 17
• Part 3: Effortless Results - "How can we get the highest return on the least effort?"
  How can we make it effortless to get results? That is, getting results without continued effort, these results are what Greg calls residual results - think along the lines of automation and compound interest. We should use leavers that give us leverage to get residual results. There are various levers, 5 of which are: learning, teaching, automating, trusting, and preventing. The effortless results section looks at those leavers.

Those are the three main parts of the book, and lastly, to end the introduction, here is a sentence and a story that sum up the book well:
The sentence goes: "Of course, you can't make everything in your life effortless, but you can make more of the right things less impossible - then easier, then easy, and ultimately effortless" pg. 19
And the story goes, "Discovering the effortless way of living is like using special polarized sunglasses while fly-fishing. Without them, the glare on the water makes it difficult to see anything swimming below the surface. But as soon as you put them on, their angled surface filters out the horizontal light waves coming off the water, blocking the glare. Suddenly, you can see all the fish underneath. When we're accustomed to doing things the hard way, it's like being blinded by the glare coming off the water. But once you start putting these ideas into practice you will start to see that the easier way was there all along, just hidden from your view." pg. 17-18

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