“Instead of wishing you could ‘Be like Mike,’ you need to focus on and enjoy the small everyday tasks in order to accomplish those long-standing stubborn goals such as ‘I need to exercise more.’ In short, you need to become an amateur. An amateur is a consistent practitioner of a healthful habit.”
“Our tendency to procrastinate is exactly how we’ll see how our minds work, and learn to be better at all the difficulties of life. Because life will always have these difficulties, no matter how much we’d prefer to avoid them, and how we respond to them will determine everything.”
“Being close to someone who is consistently all over the place requires a tremendous amount of emotional labor — reminding them to please take care of that task; making adjustments to your own schedule to accommodate their last-minute changes; worrying that you’re nagging them; having to say ‘it’s fine’ and ‘no worries’ every time they drop the ball, because god forbid you are anything other than a chill girl with no feelings.”
“Nasty behavior spreads much faster than nice behavior, unfortunately. Research shows that even a single exposure to negative behavior, like receipt of an insulting email, can turn a person into a ‘carrier.’ Literally like a common cold.”
“The discipline of design will be forced to think about the outcomes of our work in a much more long-term context — literally what future do we want to create and more importantly try to avoid.”
“Information is not knowledge.” — Albert Einstein
“You will be told your whole life that you need to learn to listen. I would say you need to learn to be the last to speak.”
“If you are relying on social newsfeeds to be updated, you are shutting yourself out from a wealth of information that makes you much more objectively informed, smarter, and productive.”
“The habit you should initially focus on is the first habit in your day with a lot of potential to go sideways. It’s usually easy to identify if you just think about your usual progression of mornings for a few minutes. The habit you’re looking for marks a turning point in your day.”
“Louie manages to write to his fans in a way that seems far more personal than the marketing messages that promote other entertainers in his class. The genius of his approach is that he’s using email the way a politician does — a mock-personalized approach to reach and influence a huge mass audience — only he does it with a level of credibility and authenticity that politicians never quite capture.”