Language: English

In a study, commuters in Chicago were asked to either talk with a stranger on a train, or sit quietly alone, or just do whatever they’d normally do on their commute. Then, they responded to a survey about how they felt.

Turns out those who engaged with strangers had the most pleasurable experience and those who remained solitary had the least enjoyable experience. These answers were compared with another group that did not participate but instead had to predict how they might feel in each situation. This group thought talking with strangers would be the least enjoyable, by far. The study is the journal of Experimental Psychology. [Nicholas Epley & Juliana Schroeder: Mistakenly Seeking Solitude]

Talking to Strangers Makes You Happy | Scientific American

via Andreea Roșca

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Steve Jobs on why thinking without doing is incomplete: “My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, you know, did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result. And there is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”- Loyal to Distractions

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„Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbirdand A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had. And that is herself, her own personality, her own voice.” – Anna Quindlen • Anna Quindlen’s Commencement Address at Villanova

 

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“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” ― George Bernard Shaw

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“There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing. This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have an infinite attention span if you are entertaining them.” — Jerry Seinfeld

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“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” – Mike Tyson

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There’s a famous murphysm:

If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get sewage. (Wisdom and Humor: The Suslick Research Group)

This happens with food a lot: if you put something of poor quality (even a small quantity) in a big bowl of food, you ruin the food.

But if you try to do the reverse, to put something of good quality in a large bowl of low-quality food, the food is still low quality.

Don’t try to fix what’s unfixable.

Murphy was right all along.

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