What I learned last week (#12)

A different perspective on answering the question “what you are passionate about?”: With the upcoming move, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and thinking about what I want to do next for work. As part of that, I’ve been thinking a lot about, and answering, similar questions to this. The postWork before passion by Seth Godin, and related TEDx talk from Terri Trespicio, resonates with me here. Instead of trying to articulate what I’m passionate about, I choose to be attentive to the fact that I’m constantly discovering things I’m interested in, that there are so many interesting and worthy problems out there to solve, and that I want to do work that matters.

A service so useful I can’t believe Amazon doesn’t own them: I recently started using Readwise.io. They send you 5 highlights from your e-book library at random each day and you can tag and organize them. It’s been surprisingly good for me. I’m a big Kindle reader and highlighter/note taker, and although I export my notes into OneNote, having them sent to me inevitably puts things in front of me I wouldn’t of revisited. It makes me want to read even more.

A thought-provoking essay on reading: Sticking with the theme this week of reading, Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction made me ponder what I love about reading (and how I feel when I go for extended periods without it).

Continuing to work on mindfulness and came across this (a highlight from my Readwise digest): From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig: “The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.”

Get On With It