Too much choice is bad. Limits are good.

My New Bedroom (Limited to 3 Colours)

“Instead of composing freely, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints. But that’s precisely the point. Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and conventions, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this is why poetic forms are so important. When a poet needs to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process.”

Excerpt from Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

Undeveloped Potential. Unrealised Dreams.

“Many aspiring artists, for example, have at some stage to deal with the harsh truth that they are merely quite good and do not have what it takes to be truly exceptional. Potential that appears unlimited to youth may look more finite when seen through more experienced eyes.

Jean-Paul Sartre denounced potential for the false comfort it gives us through thoughts of what we could have been if things had been different. For him, a person is ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is’. It’s a false comfort to tell ourselves we could have done more, if circumstances had favoured us.

Sartre insists that ‘reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled’. To dwell on potential is to define ourselves negatively, in terms of what we are not, rather than positively, for what we are.

Potential left undeveloped is nothing more than a hypothetical ability that belongs in our dreams, not as a ghostly presence in our actual lives.“

Excerpt from The Shrink and the Sage by Julian Baggini and Antonia Macaro

Photo by Lisa Elmaleh, LisaElmaleh.com

Freak Coincidence

Year 1981:

Prince Charles got married .

Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe.

Australia lost the Ashes tournament.

The Pope died.

Year 2005:

Prince Charles got married .

Liverpool crowned Champions of Europe.

Australia lost the Ashes tournament.

The Pope died.

Lesson learned: The next time Prince Charles gets married, would someone warn the Pope!

Excerpt from The Little Blue Reasoning Book by Brandon Royal

Ability Does Not Guarantee Achievement

The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in any field as somehow lacking. It is easy to believe that ideas that worked were good ideas, that plans that succeeded were well designed, and that ideas and plans that did not were ill conceived. And it is easy to make heroes out of the most successful and to glance with disdain at the least. But ability does not guarantee achievement, nor is achievement proportional to ability. And so it is important to always keep in mind the other term in the equation – the role of chance.

Excerpt from The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

How to Outrun a Bear

Two friends are hiking in the woods and come to a river. They take off their shoes and clothes and go for a swim. As they come out of the water, they spot a hungry bear that immediately starts to run toward them. One of the men flees immediately, but the other pauses to put on his shoes. The first man screams at the second, “Why are you putting on your shoes? They won’t help you outrun the bear!” To which the second man calmly responds: “I don’t need to outrun the bear; I just need to outrun you.”

Excerpt from Connected by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

Future Blindness

This prediction error works as follows. You are about to buy a new car. It is going to change your life, elevate your status, and make your commute a vacation. It is so quiet that you can hardly tell if the engine is on, so you can listen to Rachmaninoff’s nocturnes on the highway. This new car will bring you to a permanently elevated plateau of contentment. People will think, Hey, he has a great car, every time they see you. Yet you forget that the last time you bought a car, you also had the same expectations. You do not anticipate that the effect of the new car will eventually wane and that you will revert to the initial condition, as you did last time. A few weeks after you drive your new car out of the showroom, it will become dull. If you had expected this, you probably would not have bought it.

Excerpt from The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

When Talent Isn’t Enough

Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can freely write novels no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Occasionally you’ll find someone like that, but unfortunately, that category wouldn’t include me. I haven’t spotted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein. So as soon as I notice one water source drying up, I can move on right away to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble.

Excerpt from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.

Photo credit: familymwr.

A Culture of Rat Racers

The reason why we see so many rat racers around is that our culture reinforces this belief. If we get an A at the end of the semester, we get a gift from our parents; if we meet certain quotas on the job, we get a bonus at the end of the year. We learn to focus on the next goal rather than on our present experience and chase the ever-elusive future our entire lives. We are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey. Society rewards results, not processes; arrivals, not journeys.

Once we arrive at our destination, once we attain our goal, we mistake the relief that we feel for happiness. The weightier the burden we carried on our journey, the more powerful and pleasant is our experience of relief. When we mistake these moments of relief for happiness, we reinforce the illusion that simply reaching goals will make us happy. While there certainly is value in relief—it is a pleasant experience and it is real—it should not be mistaken for happiness.

Excerpt from Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar.

Photo credit: James Clar.

Select Your Niche

Select your niche. It is very difficult to succeed in a crowded field. I have found that you can move more rapidly if you select a segment of that crowded field and become an expert in it. For example, the field of law is very crowded. A new attorney entering as a general business attorney will find slow growth. But a new attorney selecting a niche such as sports law will have the opportunity for rapid growth.

Search out that special growth segment in your field and become an expert. You will grow more quickly than you can imagine.

Excerpt from If I Knew Then What I know Now by Richard Edler.

The 7UP Story

My father used to tell us this story about a guy who loved soda, so he went into the soda business, with a product called 3UP. It failed. So he started again with a soda called 4UP. It failed, too. So he decided to name his product 5UP and worked just as hard to make it work, but sure enough, it failed again. He realized that he still loved soda, so he tried again with a product named 6UP. It failed, and he gave up completely.

Then, a few years later, someone else came up with a soda product and named it 7UP, which became a huge success. When I was young, I couldn’t understand why my father kept telling us this story. He told it many times. Later, I realized he was telling us to never give up.

Excerpt from Why We Want You to Be Rich by Donald Trump.