Kindle Book 23. Oliver Burkeman's Help!: How To Be Slightly Happier and Get A Bit More Done. I think this is the longest highlights section I've got - and it's not just because I'm in it.
In essence, it's common sense advice like this:
"I’d always wondered why my efforts at such extreme self-discipline seemed to fail every time. But then, gradually, I began to understand that real self-discipline is almost the exact opposite: the willingness to make small, incremental adjustments, to tolerate imperfection and bumpy progress, and not to throw in the towel in frustration the moment something starts to go wrong. In this sense, modest action (a phrase you won’t find in Robbins’s work) in fact takes more guts than massive action. But it has the inestimable advantage that it really works."
He expresses it again, even better, towards the end:
"Choose a moderate goal, then stick to it with an extremist’s zeal"
There's lots in it that explains thing I feel. Like my suspicion of Random Acts of Kindness:
"Some despair of people like me, who are freaked out by the kindness of strangers: has trust in others really been so depleted? But there’s something uncomfortably self-absorbed about an RAK that thrills the giver while confusing the receiver, and simultaneously triggering their inbuilt propensity to feel indebted. Here’s to non-random, thought-through, rationally targeted kindness"
Or the contagion and importance of embarrasment:
"The discovery of ‘empathic embarrassment’ caused a stir, but to us acute sufferers, it’s old news."
"In the moment you realise you’ve come to the restaurant without your wallet, your eyes shoot down, your head tilts, a smile flickers. These are ‘the most potent nonverbal clues we have to an individual’s commitment to the moral order,’ Keltner explains. It’s little solace, but your blushes keep society functioning."
And there's tons of interesting stuff about attention about what's likely to actually make us a bit happier:
"But his central idea echoes down the decades: cultivate your capacity to pay attention – to not let life go by in a distracted blur – and time expands. His book is full of techniques for finding a few hours a week to study music, history, public-transport systems. His point isn’t what you pay attention to; it’s that you pay attention. ‘The mental faculties … do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change – not rest, except in sleep.’
"Our happiest times are those when we stop thinking about the passage of time altogether – but that we later remember as having lasted a deliciously long time. Extreme sports, meditation or any high-concentration activity will induce this effect."
"… You point to something as having Quality, and the Quality tends to go away.’"
"People who go on adventurous trips, Taylor writes, report longer-seeming holidays than those who choose the regularity and inactivity of a week on a beach"
"Our happiest times are those when we stop thinking about the passage of time altogether – but that we later remember as having lasted a deliciously long time. Extreme sports, meditation or any high-concentration activity will induce this effect"
Why commuting annoys us:
"The former kind of commuter won’t be remotely surprised to learn that it often doesn’t: numerous studies have shown commuting to be among the most misery-inducing of daily activities, highly correlated with stress and social isolation, often far outweighing the benefits.101 The Swiss economists Alois Stutzer and Bruno Frey call this the ‘commuter’s paradox’, though really it’s less of a paradox than a cognitive mistake: people chronically underestimate the downsides of a long commute, while overestimating the upsides of (say) a bigger house."
"The neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer suggests that this may be partly because commuting, especially in car traffic, is unpredictable, so we never get used to it. The brain’s capacity for adapting to the predictable usually seems like a disadvantage: it explains the ‘hedonic treadmill’, whereby the thrill of a new car, or some other longed-for benefit, soon fades. But it also means that if you must have aggravations, it’s best if they’re as regular as clockwork. We imagine a long commute will be a slightly tiresome ritual. Instead, it’s a fresh challenge every day."
Things that are wrong with work:
There are several reasons why meetings don’t work. They move, in the words of the career coach Dale Dauten, ‘at the pace of the slowest mind in the room’, so that ‘all but one participant will be bored, all but one mind underused’
This has come to be known as the Colour of the Bike Shed Phenomenon: the time spent on any item will be in inverse proportion to its cost and importance. Relentlessly, the trivial squeezes out the non-trivial.
‘One key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the United States is that they do not even succeed in controlling their own corporations … when implied organisational skill and power are deployed and the desired effect follows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought.’
Make the most suggestions in a group context, one research team found, and you’re likely to be seen as the most competent, even if the suggestions are among the worst.
Voice an opinion three times over, another study suggests, and fellow group members are almost as likely to conclude it’s the group’s prevailing view as if three different people had voiced it.66 (‘Quantity,’ Stalin supposedly said, ‘has a quality all its own.’)
Interesting things about fonts:
" ‘cognitive fluency’: the idea that if something is easy to think about, we’re far more likely to think it preferable, more important or true. One study suggests that people think of recipes, or lists of tasks, as easier if they’re printed in a clearer font."
font researchers found that printing something in a difficult typeface caused people really to engage with the content; far more gave the correct answer to the question ‘How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?’ (Answer: none.) The novelist Colum McCann prints off his drafts in eight-point Times New Roman, in order to peer at his words with fresh eyes and a more rigorous mind.
The best way to decline something, simply, without ornament:
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible’ – remains the gold standard. Excuses merely invite negotiation. The comic retort has its place (Peter Cook: ‘Oh dear, I find I’m watching television that night’)
Our bias for the familiar:
A fondness for the familiar, similarly, is eminently understandable. As the late psychologist Robert Zajonc liked to say, ‘If it’s familiar, it hasn’t eaten you yet.’
Why self-control and habit-changing is hard and how to trick yourself:
"Exerting self-control, in other words, uses up real energy, much as lifting a heavy object does.94 Another surprising moral would seem to be: drink a sugary drink before starting work."
"The first problem with this is dispiritingly simple: changing habits is hard. We’re all ‘cognitive misers’, our brains designed to take short cuts, rendering as many behaviours as possible automatic. ‘Really,’ asks the psychologist Ian Newby-Clark, on the website of Psychology Today, ‘what would be the point of having a habit that didn’t free up your mind to crunch on more pressing matters?’ Habits are meant to be difficult to change."
"Most of us live up to our means; tricking your brain into believing your means are smaller than they are is the least painful way to save."
"Welch’s ‘10–10–10’ method for taking decisions is genuinely wise. When faced with any dilemma, she advises, ask yourself: what will the consequences be in ten minutes, ten months and ten years?"
Why not to gossip, or how to do it:
"phenomenon of ‘trait transfer’ has found that if you gossip about someone for having an affair, for example, your listeners are more likely subconsciously to think of you as untrustworthy. If you praise someone as talented and generous, those qualities attach themselves to you"
And then there's an alarming bit, called How To Be Interesting, where he mentions this bit I wrote. I wasn't expecting that, had to throw the book on the bed and run out of the bedroom in terror that he might slag me off. Anne had to pre-read it for me to make sure it was alright. Fortunately it was OK. He accused me of veering close to circular-reasoning, but that was entirely fair.