It is #mentalhealthawarenessweek. A big problem of mine was/is being extremely anxious in decisions. I was often neurotically overthinking to the point of doing and achieving nothing which is very bad for mental health. If this is you, then I would recommend five books:
1/ Meditations (Aurelius) – how to act well in an ideal way, and how thinking makes things as they are. This is good for changing your perspective of events
2/ Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (Manson) – how to act well in a realistic way. Also what things we should focus on + how life is a constant battle
3/ Seeking Wisdom (Bevelin) – understanding the mechanics of what you are working with, how your brain works, how humans deal with fears and what we behaviours we should be careful of
4/ Antifragile (Taleb) – a better understanding of risk, which ones you should and shouldn’t take. A big problem of mine is perfectionism (trying to eliminate all risk) however Antifragile disproves that no risk is good, learn to use good risk. That acute stress>>> chronic stress
5/ Principles (Dalio) – helps in developing systems to deal with problematic behaviours, also helps to see your current problems in a macro context to make them seem less scary.
This list isn't exhaustive, however after having read lots of books these are the best. Also remember everyone has problems, I used to have some weird idea that I was the only person who worried about things, which isn’t true! Hope this may be of some use, it definitely helped me
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A thread on some highlights/notes I took from the book "The Tyranny of Metrics" by @jerryzmuller (~60 things)
1) Gaming the metrics occurs in every realm. Gaming is only one class of problems that inevitably arise when using performance metrics as the basis of reward or sanction. There are things that can be measured and there are things that are worth measuring.
2) What can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know.
I was on the Glasgow-Las Vegas flight, it's 10 hours long. The benefit of this route is convenience and it's very cheap. It's normally rowdy however this flight was another level.
There was eight troublemakers today. The plane has a 2-4-2 seating arrangement, they took the entire row.
I was the row behind them. They managed to drink three 1L bottles of vodka + one bottle of champagne between 8 + had £400 of on plane drinks before things went downhill...
This video from a guy who went to prison from 19 to 24 for making a threat online to bomb someone on runescape (a video game) while drunk is fascinating
It seems pretty obvious he would never actually do it however Feds sent him to prison for 5 years
In prison he wrote 166 songs, read 1000 books, was inspired by Malcolm X. Said that prison is the most soul destroying environment with zero attempt at rehabilitation. Took him two years to stop hating himself however after that tried to use the time for self improvement
He found that over time very few people apart from his closest family still contacted him however once he was out everyone was interested in seeing him again. Surprisingly raw interview
Technically I have been in five countries in the last two weeks, however in each for less than a couple of days. Is this more "well travelled" than someone who spent two weeks in one place?
I think the Instagram tourist spot checklisting has distorted the point of travelling. Obviously it's cool to see the Eiffel Tower however spending all your travels getting as many good backgrounds for Instagram photos isn't sustainably interesting
1/ Reading books is a form of procrastinating for me
2/ Books are a tool; they aren't something to obsess over. You can learn a lot, however unless you directly apply that to you and your goals/problems, they are pretty useless.