Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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The Truth About Routines - “The bottom line is that the only way to an optimal routine is through astute self-awareness—not mimicking what other people do—and experimentation. The more you can match your activities to your energy levels, the better. The more you can figure out which types of environments stimulate your best work, the better.”
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How to Do Nothing - This book was more of a philosophical one about abstract ideas than self-help book. One thing that stood out to me was the idea that the attention economy is taking so much of our time and creating a fractured society that we are unable to focus sustained attention together on common goals, making us unable to create real change.
- “When overstimulation has become a fact of life, I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out, or if that bothers you, #NOSMO, the necessity of sometimes missing out.”
- “Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of ‘arms race’ of urgency that abuses out attention and leaves us no time to think.”
- “Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for use, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since that drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.”
- “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.”
- “There is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that’s part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it’s even more important for anyone who does have a margin - even the tiniest one - to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line… If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should.”
- “I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed”