A deep dive into Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday.

Ego, in the sense that matters, is an unhealthy belief in one's own importance: arrogance, self-centered ambition, the precise point where confidence tips into complacency and assurance hardens into stubbornness. It differs from confidence in its origin: ego is stolen, confidence is earned, and that is the whole difference between what is powerful and what is toxic. Lucretius described the sick man who does not know the cause of his illness; ego is that illness, all the more dangerous because it disguises itself as a virtue. Every ambitious life passes through three phases, aspiration, success…

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A deep dive into Ultralearning by Scott Young.

Nine weeks were all it took Nigel Richards, a New Zealander born in Christchurch, to learn the French Scrabble dictionary and win the French-language World Scrabble Championship in Louvain in July 2015 without speaking a word of French: he took up the dictionary in May, beat a Gabonese player two games to nil in the final, and knows every French word from two to ten letters without knowing what any of them mean. This way of acquiring a skill has a name, ultralearning: a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge that is both self-directed and intense. A strategy, so a deliberate choice about…

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A deep dive into The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday.

What blocks the path becomes the path. The line is written at night, in a tent, on the Germanic front, in the year 170, by an emperor writing for himself alone. It starts from the divide between what can be reached and what cannot: our actions can be obstructed, our intentions and dispositions cannot, because we know how to accommodate and adapt. Then comes the conclusion: "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." Almost nothing in it is new: Zeno, Epictetus, Seneca had said it before. What gives it weight is the situation of the man writing it: ninete…

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A deep dive into The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday.

Stoicism came down to us through texts that were never meant as treatises: Marcus Aurelius kept notes for himself alone, Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius, Epictetus spoke to students, one of whom, Arrian, wrote the lessons down. What they teach rests on four cardinal virtues, temperance, courage, justice and wisdom, held to be the source of inner stability. These virtues are exercised through three disciplines that Epictetus distinguished, desire, action and assent, and that Pierre Hadot reread as perception, action and will: how we see the world, what we decide to do, how we receive what w…

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A deep dive into Make It Stick by Peter Brown.

A young cargo pilot is flying at night, eleven thousand feet above Texas, when the oil pressure in his right engine collapses. He shuts the engine down, feathers the propeller to cut drag, pushes the left engine, compensates with the rudder and lands ten miles farther on, turning left because that is the only side where he still has lift. He had no time to think: he ran through a checklist he had recalled from memory so many times that it had become reflex. Everything about durable learning is contained in that gesture. Three facts underpin it. Learning requires memory, otherwise what has been…

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A deep dive into Limitless by Jim Kwik.

Faced with a block, the useful question is not "am I capable of this?" but "where is the limit?". It sits in one of three places. Mindset is the what: the beliefs, attitudes and assumptions about what is possible. Motivation is the why: the reason to act and the energy available. Method is the how: the ordered process that leads to the result. Becoming limitless is an act, not a state: setting aside inaccurate and restrictive perceptions of one's own potential. The reverse mechanism is just as clear: putting a label on someone creates a limit, and the label becomes the limitation. "That's the…

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A deep dive into Too Sensitive by Sasha Hamdani.

Too dramatic. Irrational. Too sensitive. These labels stick to people who feel everything quickly, intensely, and for a long time. A reply that comes late, an invitation sent at the last minute, a shift in tone in an ordinary sentence: each of these trifles sets off an inner storm that nobody around them can see. A simple text saying "no worries" is enough to start the spiral: is she angry with me, is she disappointed, does she still want me around? The brain attaches to those two words a level of uncertainty that nothing in the message justifies, and the day tips over. This experience unfolds…

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A deep dive into Going Further by Ted Cruz.

Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, a hamlet in Georgia, in a house without plumbing where the family spoke Gullah, a creole of the Southern coast: English was not his first language. At seven, his mother sent him and his brother to live with their grandparents in Savannah. His grandfather, Myers Anderson, would remain in his eyes "the greatest man I have ever known." He was a man of dry discipline, who refused to let the children wear gloves in bitter cold ("Gloves are for the weak") and whose motto summed up an entire pedagogy: "Old Man Can't is dead, I helped bury him." That sayi…

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A deep dive into Everyday Eats by Alex Snodgrass.

Three constraints govern every recipe: a short ingredient list, pantry staples rather than specialty purchases, and as few dishes as possible, summed up in the phrase "less stress, less mess." Cooking happens on a single sheet pan, in a single pot, or in a single oven-safe skillet. Time follows the same rule: the wonton soup takes twenty minutes, the French onion chicken thirty-five, the chicken orzo and the peach crumble forty; the peanut butter bites, the baklava-inspired bites and the almond coconut bites need no cooking at all; the Mediterranean breakfast sandwiches and the burritos are as…

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A deep dive into The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman.

An apartment fitted out on the University of Washington campus, three cameras, microphones clipped to collars, Holter monitors recording heart rhythms: this is the Love Lab. One hundred and thirty newlywed couples have been followed there from their wedding day onward, and fifty couples have spent twenty-four hours in the apartment. Mark and Janice Gordon eat their French toast breakfast there with the Sunday paper, he in front of the football, she on the phone with her mother in St. Louis, while the sensors pick up everything their bodies say. Across more than six hundred and fifty couples fo…

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