Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport)

 

I loved his points about the need to have walking time/quiet time where we don't have a radio or audio book or podcast or something like that in our ears. Our brains need quiet time. 

I also loved his point about the importance of scheduling in high quality leisure. It is too easy to fill out time with mindless social media scrolling. I need to schedule in the time for high quality leisure and NOT fall prey to what's easier. 

Goodreads says:

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world.

In this timely and enlightening book, the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives.

Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can get lost in a good book, a woodworking project, or a leisurely morning run. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. They stay informed about the news of the day, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. They don't experience "fear of missing out" because they already know which activities provide them meaning and satisfaction.

Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Common sense tips, like turning off notifications, or occasional rituals like observing a digital sabbath, don't go far enough in helping us take back control of our technological lives, and attempts to unplug completely are complicated by the demands of family, friends and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions.

Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them. He shows how digital minimalists are rethinking their relationship to social media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with their inner selves through regular periods of solitude. He then shares strategies for integrating these practices into your life, starting with a thirty-day "digital declutter" process that has already helped thousands feel less overwhelmed and more in control.

Technology is intrinsically neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. This book shows the way.

Hidden Potential (Adam Grant)

 

How  did I not know about this guy? This book was great! He also has a podcast and has done a number of Ted Talks. This book was really fun and inspiring to read....really connected to the Carol Dweck idea of possibility thinking. I'm singing up for his podcast and will also put this on my list of books to re-read regularly.

p. 10   Amazing: 

In the late 1980s, around the same time that the Raging Rooks were learning chess in Harlem, the state of Tennessee launched a bold experiment. At 79 schools - many of which were low income - they randomly assigned over 11,000 students to different classrooms in kindergarten through third grade. The original goal was to test whether smaller classes were better for learning. But an economist named Raj Chetty realized that since both students and teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms, he could go back to the data to analyze whether other features of classrooms made a difference. 

Chetty is one of the world's most influential economists. He's the winner of the MacArthur genius grant. And his research suggests that excellence depends less on our natural talents than we might expect. 

The Tennessee experiment contained a starling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers. 

Chetty and his colleagues calculated that moving from an inexperienced kindergarten teacher to an experienced one would add over $1000 to each student's annual income in their twenties. For a class of 20 students, an above-average kindergarten teacher could be worth additional lifetime income of $321,000.

Kindergarten matters in many ways, but I never would have expected teachers to leave such a visible mark on their students' salaries two decades later. Most adults hardly even remember being five years old. Why did kindergarten teachers end up casting such a long shadow?

The intuitive answer is that effective teachers help students develop cognitive skills. Early education builds a solid foundation for understanding numbers and words. Sure enough, students with more experienced teachers scored higher on math and reading tests at the end of kindergarten. But over the next few years, their peers caught up. 

To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty's team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here's a sample:

• Proactive: how often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books and engage the teacher to learn outside class?
• Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers?
  
• Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention - and resist the impulse to disrupt the class?
  
• Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles?

When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth-grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. So did their eighth-grade teachers. The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stay with the students longer - and ultimately proved more powerful - than early math and reading skills. When Chetty and his colleagues predicted adult incomes from fourth-grade scores, the ratings on these behaviors matter 2.4 times as much as math and reading performance on standardized tests.

Think about how surprising that is. If you want to forecast the earning potential of fourth graders, you should pay less attention to their objective math and verbal scores than to their teachers' subjective views of their behavior patterns. And although many people see those behaviors as innate, they were taught in kindergarten. Regardless of where students started, there was something about learning these behaviors that set the students up for success decades later. 

p.29 On writing:

If writing isn't your preferred mode of learning, the greatest discomfort of putting your thoughts on a page is probably writer's block. As Steve Martin joked, "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol." There's a reason we don't talk about dancer's block or carpenter's block. Writer's block is actually a thinking block: you're stuck because you haven't figured out what to say. Some novelists get in the groove by typing sentences from fiction they've loved. I get my ideas churning by answering a few emails: it's like a warm-up to give me momentum. If writing becomes a regular routine, eventually words start to flow as fluidly on the page as they do out of your mouth. Psychologists have found that when people were randomly assigned to scheduled daily writing sessions, their output quadrupled - and even scheduling 15 minutes a day was enough to make progress. And now we have artificial intelligence (AI) chat bots to help. In preliminary experiments, randomly assigning professionals to use tools like ChatGPT and Bing boosts both the quality and quantity of their writing - especially for poor writers-by shifting effort from rough drafting to idea generating and editing. For the record, I didn't write a word of this book using AI. Though that's probably what an AI would tell you. 

re: taking breaks

p. 102 Taking breaks has at least three benefits. First, time away from practice helps to sustain harmonious passion. Research indicates that even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy. It's not just about preventing burnout: research reveals that when we work nights and weekends, our interest and enjoyment in our tasks drop...

Second, breaks unlock fresh ideas. 

Third, breaks deepen learning....it's well established that we can avoid that forgetting curve with spaced repetition - interspersing breaks into practice. 

p. 103 Relaxing is not a waste of time - it's an investment in well-being. Breaks are not a distraction - they're a chance to reset attention and incubate ideas. Play is not a frivolous activity - it's a source of joy and a path to mastery.

p. 104 Worthwhile practice is where progress is made. It's about quality, not quantity. You need to feel there's a shift - something is different when you walk out of the room.

re; deliberate play

The real outcome is her enjoyment. Without enjoyment, potential stays hidden.

On reading:
p. 172

If we want our kids to enjoy reading, we need to make books part of their lives. That involves talking about books during meals and car rides, visiting libraries or bookstores, giving books as gifts, and letting them see us read. Children pay attention to our attention: Where we focus tells them what we prize. 

p. 174

One of the great failings of English and literature classes is forcing students to slog through the "classics" rather than giving them the opportunity to choose books that pique their interest. Research reveals that when students get to pick their own books and read in class, they become more passionate about reading. It's a virtuous cycle: the more they read for fun, the better they get and the more they like it. And they more they like it, the more they learn-and the better they perform on exams. A teacher's task is not to ensure that students have read the literary canons. It is the kindle excitement about reading. 

...to make it engaging and interactive, whenever students were passionate about a book, the floor was theirs to tell their classmates about it. 

Goodreads says:

“This brilliant book will shatter your assumptions about what it takes to improve and succeed. I wish I could go back in time and gift it to my younger self. It would’ve helped me find a more joyful path to progress.”
—Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles tennis champion

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again illuminates how we can elevate ourselves and others to unexpected heights.

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

Time For Bed's Story (Monica Arnold0)

 

Monica Arnoldo's story are a little bit crazy! This one wasn't that crazy to my class though. It was logical. Of course a bed has feelings! Of course it feels unappreciated and used. Some funny things to talk about! They especially loved the stinky stuff under the bed. 

Goodreads says:

In this engaging, laugh-out-loud funny picture book, a child's bed tells it like it is.

Bed has something to say.
Bed knows you do not like bedtime.
And Bed gets it. But look ...
YOU are not so great, either ...

Bed is fed up. Bed's patience is wearing thin. For years, Bed has put up with the kicking at night, the jumping during the day, not to mention the storing of all manner of stinky items. But enough is enough. Now it's time to consider Bed's feelings ...

In a story that's never been told before, Monica Arnaldo's hilarious picture book explores the point of view of an unusual narrator: a child's bed. Irreverent and full of personality, Arnaldo's Bed is also full of love and compassion, making for a relatable and, ultimately, endearing story. This playful and highly original book offers a lighthearted way to approach discussions on communication, perspective and viewpoint. It can be used to promote critical thinking in young children and an understanding that there are at least two sides to every story. It also contains character education lessons on compassion, respect and empathy.

Deep Work (Cal Newport)

This is seriously good stuff. I totally buy in. The trick for me is how do I find the time to really get into deep work? #momtroubles #RCsolutions

I'm going to start by tracking my time and perhaps seriously slashing social media time as he suggests (well, he suggests to quit it, but I'm not quite ready for that). 

This book is going to go on my list of books to re-read regularly.

Goodreads says:

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.

In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.

A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Worktakes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.