If every time you spend time with your partner, she only talks about depressing stuff, constantly bums you out and makes you feel bad, would you stay in that relationship? Or say you have a friend that you only see for about half an hour a day, but every time you do, every single day, he tells you these things, in this exact order:…
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The words ‘I’m’ and ‘bored’, when put together in that exact order, make up my most hated expression in the English language. (Sidenote: This is what it translates to, in case you’re wondering.) Any library has thousands of books (e.g. my local one has 88,000), each with thousands of words, about thousands of things we know little or nothing about. But I get that…
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Occasionally I’ve done things which could be seen as cool. And other times I do things which are nerdy. I care less about that now though, than I used to in my mid-20s (but maybe more than I will in my mid-40s). Those tags of being “cool” or a “nerd” aren’t important to me anymore, because everyone is a combination…
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Every writer who’s afraid to be honest, holds back or tries to sound smarter or wiser than they actually are is shit. The author of Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, has a bunch of voices in her head when she writes. One voice says, ‘Well that’s not very interesting, is it?’, another persecutes her for her crazy thoughts, another is her parents…
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I’ve done this exercise with my students 3 different times now… ‘Get your books out and in groups, write down the biggest news events of the past 20 years. You have 10 minutes… Go.’ After the ten minutes, I ask them, ‘Okay, how many of those are good news?’ They all smile or laugh, which means pretty much zero. The…
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Today I finished David Deutsch’s incredible book, The Beginning of Infinity, and went straight on to the next one I’ve got that I’ve been hanging to get stuck into, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I’ve heard different people say it’s the book about how to be a good writer. The problem is I shouldn’t have it. It’s a library rental, and it’s overdue. Damn.…
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How do you decide when to give up on a movie or book? Last year I watched 7 movies. And I read 15 books. So based on last year, if I live to 75, I have 294 more movies that I’ll watch, and 630 more books that I’ll read. That’s not really that many. And an even better way to really…
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On a sunny Saturday afternoon back in spring 2004, I went to an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (Pretty sure it was the Edvard Munch one), and looking around the gift shop magazine rack afterwards, just as they were about to close, I noticed something unlike any of the other books or publications there. It was called Dumbo…
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I am officially into David Deutsch’s book. Bigtime. And loving it. So the chapter I am reading right now… Chapter 10 – ‘A Dream of Socrates’…turns out it was actually a dream Socrates was having (I didn’t want to assume). If we are told something in our dreams, or in reality, it doesn’t matter. We process things the same way.…
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I’m reading this book. I don’t understand some of it, and my interest in it comes and goes depending on what David Deutsch talks about, but it’s amazing. And I’ve got right back into it today, after starting chapter 10 – A Dream of Socrates. The chapter recounts a dialogue between Socrates and Hermes (from what I’m guessing, based on the chapter…